It was a tourist who first found the nest. It was March 2020, and the visitor was walking through the Lacandon Jungle in southern Mexico. When he reached the highest point, he looked up and pointed to a shelter made of long, thin branches on top of a tree. Fiorella Ortiz, the biologist in charge of the sightseeing tours at the Tamandua ecotourism camp, got out her binoculars to verify the finding. The bird she saw looked odd, so she took a picture of it and sent it to her colleagues. “We said, ‘It’s the black-and-white hawk-eagle. Stop everything, we need to be there now!’ It’s the first known nest in Mexico,” says Alan Monroy-Ojeda, a tropical ecologist. Monroy-Ojeda is the scientist responsible for the Mexican Harpy Eagle Initiative, a project led by the organizations Dimensión Natural and Natura Mexicana to study priority raptor species, protect the ecosystems in which they live, and empower the surrounding communities. The breeding pair of black-and-white hawk-eagles carry dry, green branches to the nest platform. According to researchers, the birds may do this to have a fresh nest or even because the branches have insect-repelling properties. Image courtesy of Santiago Gibert Isern. The black-and-white hawk-eagle (Spizaetus melanoleucus) is one of six neotropical birds of prey that the initiative studies. The others are the harpy eagle (Harpia harpyja), the ornate hawk-eagle (Spizaetus ornatus), the black hawk-eagle (Spizaetus tyrannus), the crested eagle (Morphnus guianensis) and the king vulture (Sarcoramphus papa). All are considered endangered by Mexican…This article was originally published on Mongabay
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