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Paving the Path of the Quetzals

By Jeff Hull


Panama, conservation
Don't destroy the forests! (Ronni Flannery)
Ronni heard it first: the softly insistent, slightly descendant keloo-keloo of the quetzal, strobing from the cloud forest around us. We were hiking the five-mile Sendero de los Quetzales ("Path of the Quetzals"), a trail that winds through the 35,390 lush acres of Panama's Volcán Barú National Park in UNESCO's La Amistad Biosphere Reserve—one of the best places in the world to see the rare and visually spectacular bird.

As we stalked through the foliage the quetzal revealed itself: a male whose crimson breast radiated from a tuxedo of aquamarine, his brilliant viridian tail feathers draped two feet behind. Tilting his gold-crested head, the bird listened for a female response to his mating call—a call that, sadly, may prove to be his last if Panama's presidential administration has its way. Within months of our visit this very footpath would become an environmental battleground, with activists and campesinos marching against government-deployed bulldozers; each side determined to decide the fate of Volcán Barú and its quetzal population.

In December 2002, Panamanian president Mireya Moscoso announced plans to pave the Path of the Quetzals, which winds through Volcán Barú between the agricultural center of Cerro Punta and the mountain hamlet of Boquete. The new road would bring commerce and traffic to these isolated enclaves in Panama's Chiriqui Highlands, where an estimated 300 to 400 quetzal breeding pairs hold out against their chief enemy, forest fragmentation.

The quetzal has been called "the most spectacular bird in the New World" by renowned ornithologist Roger Peterson, yet today it's listed as Appendix I in the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES), meaning that the species is threatened with extinction. But the quetzal is not just a bird in danger; it's an esteemed animal with a past rooted in Mayan and Aztec culture.

Quetzalcoatl, a central figure in Mayan mythology, is depicted as a hybrid of a quetzal and a serpent. In ancient times, only royalty could wear quetzal feathers; possession of the shimmering plumage (valued as much as gold) by commoners was a crime punishable by death. More recently, indigenous peoples in Central America, believing the quetzal unable to survive in captivity, have interpreted it as a symbol of freedom.




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