Each morning, as Luis Arrieta heads out to begin work on his shade-grown coffee farm, vindication comes in the form of birdsong gushing from the trees, a cacophony of trills and warbles of passerines punctuated by the croaks of the groove-billed toucanet (Aulacorhynchus sulcatus). “It’s one of the rewards of my job,” he says. An agronomist hailing from a family that has grown coffee in Venezuela’s Cordillera de la Costa for generations, Arrieta always had a keen interest in animals, particularly birds. During a stint as the director of the Pinar Zoo, he became involved in a captive breeding program for the endangered red siskin (Spinus cucullatus). After his return to agronomy, the little vermillion red finch would be the muse that inspired the Cafe y Aves program or Coffee and Birds. “I realized there could be a way to combine my two passions to conserve our threatened biodiversity and coffee culture, which were both disappearing,” he says. “And that was through shade coffee.” In the 2010s, Arrieta co-founded the Cafe y Aves program in northern Venezuela, promoting community-based conservation through agroforestry. Since then, the program has pioneered the reforestation of 415 hectares (1,025 acres) and secured the protection of one of the region’s last remaining corridors of threatened tropical dry forest It also revived a dying tradition of shade coffee cultivation, all while improving livelihoods. Shade coffee is a kind of agroforestry, an agroecology technique that grows coffee shrubs under native trees, allowing for the persistence of forest trees…This article was originally published on Mongabay
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