A biologist from Oaxaca banding birds at Bandelier

Erwin Lopez Osorio is a biologist from Oaxaca City, Mexico, who has spent his career on birds. In 2022, on his first trip abroad, he spent five months at Bandelier National Monument in New Mexico catching, banding and releasing them — and went home to help start a banding station of his own at Monte Albán. He told his story on the Park Service podcast Conservation Diaries.

Erwin with a Cassin's finch on his first day. NPS photo

Who he is

Erwin earned a bachelor's degree in biology at the Technological Institute of the Valley of Oaxaca and a master's in conservation and management of natural resources at the National Polytechnic Institute's CIIDIR in Mexico. Both theses were on birds. Since 2016 he has promoted birdwatching and bird festivals in his state, taught people to identify birds and drawn them into monitoring projects, and volunteered on a bird-banding project and a birdwatching campaign in Mexico.

He came to Bandelier through the Park Service's International Volunteers-In-Parks programme (IVIP), with the partner Environment for the Americas and its Fish and Feathers internship. "Honestly, I didn't know that, as a foreigner, I could participate in the National Park Service," he said.

Banding birds at Bandelier

Bandelier sits among high mesas and a red-rock canyon where Ancestral Pueblo people carved dwellings into the cliffs 500 to 700 years ago. Most of it is wilderness, a refuge for birds that live there all year, visit for a season or pass through on migration. The park's natural resource staff run inventories and monitoring to understand its biodiversity and manage it well, and bird banding is a large part of that.

Erwin spent the season on the 2022 banding team, working for the Monitoring Avian Productivity and Survivorship (MAPS) programme at four stations in mixed-conifer forest, meadows and ponderosa pine. The work: set up mist nets, take the birds out gently, identify, age and sex them, band them, and let them go quickly and unharmed. They caught, he said, "different kind of warblers," some breeding and some on migration.

"Banding is a method for studying wild birds that provides valuable data for managing and conserving populations. With this data, it is possible to estimate resident and migratory bird population trends, monitor bird responses to climate change, analyze site loyalty, individual survival rates, and many other aspects." — Erwin Lopez Osorio

Erwin teaching students about bird banding. NPS photo

He also built a 45-minute presentation on bird banding — bird biology, migration and the effects of a warming climate — and gave it to 20 classes of fourth to sixth graders from under-served schools, about 300 children in all. The classes then visited the banding station to help capture, band and record birds. He also joined water-quality research in the park.

Water-quality fieldwork. NPS photo

Why it crosses a border

Many of Bandelier's birds winter in Latin America, so protecting them means working on both sides of the border. Training conservationists from those countries, and building ties between them and park scientists, strengthens that cooperation. The effect in Erwin's case was direct: with Bandelier's support he is helping set up a new banding station at Monte Albán in Oaxaca, and he plans to keep sharing data from his community monitoring with the park's biologists.

"It's always a pleasure to work with our International Interns," said Sarah Milligan, Bandelier's natural resource program manager. "We all learned a lot about Mexico from Erwin."

For Erwin, the internship improved his banding and his English, taught him methods he had not used, and left him with advice for others: "I would recommend that other young people with a similar ethnicity apply to this program. It's a great experience. It's not only a job."

Getting involved

The Park Service's Office of International Affairs coordinates programmes like IVIP, open to all ages. Volunteer openings in the parks are listed at Volunteer.gov and through the Volunteers-In-Parks program, and there are jobs, internships and volunteer roles for people aged 15 to 30, and veterans up to 35, through the Park Service's youth programmes.

Sources

Written from "Conservation Diaries: Erwin Lopez Osorio, International Volunteer," National Park Service, hosted by Celeste Morales, national leader of the Community Volunteer Ambassador Program, with IVIP coordinator Linda Bennett of the Office of International Affairs; a work of the United States government in the public domain.