“Puerto Ricans have a lot of resilience to tragedy,” says Ana Román. “Especially in a hurricane, because it’s something that we expect every year…It’s like we’re in a bowling alley, anticipating which one is going to hit us.”
Ana Román is the Deputy Project Leader at the Cabo Rojo National Wildlife Refuge in Boquerón, Puerto Rico. “We’ve been lucky,” she said, “until last year.” This refuge in the southwestern corner of Puerto Rico had been relatively spared in recent decades. Hurricane Georges hit Cabo Rojo hard in 1998, and several hurricanes since have brought storm surges and heavy rain, but nothing has been like Maria.
“People still trusted it was going to turn at the last minute, and hit somewhere else. But that didn’t happen.”
On September 20, 2017, Hurricane Maria swept across Puerto Rico at 155 miles per hour, leaving the island without electricity, clean water, or connection to any mode of communication.
For Román and the team at Cabo Rojo, the first priority was providing immediate support to our staff and their families and the community around the Refuge. Firefighters on staff at the Refuge worked to deliver potable water and any other services they could to neighboring families.
Cabo Rojo Salt Flats Visitors Center. Photo: José G. Martínez.
Next, “we needed to reopen access to the public, because this is the main service we provide,” explained Román. Huge trees had fallen everywhere, downing telephone poles and cables, scattering debris, and blocking access to the Refuge’s many public trails. Cabo Rojo’s small staff got to work clearing tree falls and repairing damaged infrastructure.
Luckily – for the site’s shorebirds, anyway – Maria didn’t take the “refuge” out of Cabo Rojo. Cabo Rojo Salt Flats has been a WHSRN site since 2010, when it became the first WHSRN site in the Caribbean. The area was designated as a Site of Regional Importance for hosting more than 5% of the world’s population of the tenuirostris subspecies of Snowy Plover (Charadrius nivosus), and 2.5% of the world’s population of Wilson’s Plover (Charadrius wilsonia). The WHSRN site is within the United States Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) Cabo Rojo National Wildlife Refuge, and encompasses 1,249 acres (505 hectares) of saline lagoons, mangrove swamps, and, of course, salt flats – providing valuable and diverse shorebird habitats.
From left to right: Snowy Plover (Charadrius nivosus), Least Sandpiper (Calidris minutilla) and Semipalmated Sandpiper (Calidris pusilla) at Cabo Rojo Salt Flats. Photos: Elba G. Benabe Carlo, Graduate student at University of Puerto Rico at Mayagüez and current Student Conservation Association Intern at Cabo Rojo.
Water levels were higher than normal after Maria, but the season had been relatively dry before the hurricane hit. The salt flats are a series of solar evaporation ponds for salt extraction. They depend on tides and rain water to be filled, and by holding the water, these ponds may have played a role in buffering the refuge from severe flooding.
Cabo Rojo’s symbiosis with salt production goes back far beyond Hurricane Maria. Salt has been produced at the site for more than 500 years. The Cabo Rojo salt flats were purchased from a private land owner in 1999, with funding from the NRCS Wetland Reserve Program in 1999. To be added to the Cabo Rojo National Wildlife Refuge managed by the USFWS, an assessment was conducted to decide whether salt production would continue. Because it is a commercial enterprise, it would need to be proven beneficial to the species and habitat in order to continue operating within the Refuge. Sure enough, it was shown that prime habitat for shorebirds was created as a by-product of salt production at the site. The salt company, Empresas Padilla, Inc., is granted a special use permit because of this benefit.
Empresas Padilla pays to operate within Cabo Rojo, but it’s not their rent that supports the refuge. Although their fees go to the USFWS, they do not come to the Cabo Rojo NWR. Nevertheless, the company plays a key role in managing water levels at the site, assisting in maintaining this shorebird hotspot.
Cabo Rojo currently has five people on staff. Without the collaboration with Empresas Padilla, the refuge would need a much larger workforce with the skills and equipment to operate the salt flats.
Salt Ponds at Cabo Rojo. Photos: USFWS.
“We can inundate a salt flat and then leave it to dry,” says Román, because the salt operation is completely within Refuge land, and the Refuge owns their water control structures. “But we cannot remove the salt. We don’t have the equipment, the staff, and can’t sell the [final product].” Cabo Rojo’s partnership with this private salt production company maintains the habitat and enables them to focus their limited capacity on connecting their community to nature.
On Saturday, October 13, Cabo Rojo hosted an open house to kick off National Wildlife Refuge Week, and to celebrate World Migratory Bird Day. Many of their partners were there to help with the festivities, including the Puerto Rican Ornithological Society (SOPI by its Spanish acronym). Looking to the future, Roman says, “I think we need more assistance to document what we have here. If we could increase surveys, bird banding, and assessments of species’ specific habitat needs, we could improve habitat for our bird populations.” Refuge Staff and SOPI led bird walks at this month’s open house, and Ana hopes outreach programs like this get young Caborojeños excited to participate in monitoring efforts at the site.
Visitors to the second Cabo Rojo National Wildlife Refuge Shorebird Festival. Photos: Americorps VISTA Angel Padilla.
To help tackle these goals, Manomet’s Habitats for Shorebirds Project, BirdsCaribbean, SOPI, and USFWS will host a collaborative workshop at the Cabo Rojo National Wildlife Refuge in February 2019. The workshop will focus on shorebird ecology and conservation needs as well as waterbird monitoring. Participants will flock to Puerto Rico from across the Caribbean to share and learn effective tools for shorebird management, conservation, and monitoring.
Birders visiting Cabo Rojo. Photo: Sociedad Ornitológica Puertorriqueña, Inc. (SOPI).
Today, just over one year since Hurricane Maria devastated Puerto Rico, Cabo Rojo is proud to be open to the public. The team continues to tackle leftover debris, replace educational signage, and repair fencing to protect bird habitat. “We are trying to get outreach activities back up and running,” says Román, “to say, ‘we’re here, we’re ready to receive you, and this is what we’re doing for you, the birds, and the habitat. Mostly, our mission is to conserve the habitat and species for others – for the community.”
For more information about the Cabo Rojo National Wildlife Refuge, please write to Ana Román, Deputy Project Leader of the Caribbean Islands National Wildlife Refuges Complex and the Acting Refuge Manager of the Cabo Rojo National Wildlife Refuge (NWR), at ana_roman@fws.gov.
