As our Cessna Grand Caravan turboprop dipped over the shimmering waters of Costa Rica’s Golfo Dulce in the rainy season of 2022, I couldn’t wait to get back into the forests of the Osa Peninsula. More than twenty years earlier, this spit of land in the country’s southwest was the place where I had first experienced a tropical rainforest. I could still remember the jitters I’d felt, a mix of excitement, nerves, and motion sickness, as the little plane made a U-turn in the sky before touching down on the airstrip beside the cemetery in Puerto Jiménez. Back in 2000, Costa Rica was becoming an increasingly popular tourist destination, but most of its eco-lodges were still fairly rustic affairs, particularly on the Osa.
Shortly before that trip, I’d left an editing job to become a freelance writer. I had no cash to spare, but I’d secured an assignment to write about an upscale eco-resort for a new online travel publication. It wasn’t exactly a daring adventure, but it was my first real nature-based assignment, and I was thrilled that my dream of visiting a rainforest was about to come true. By the time I went to bed that first day, I had seen three species of monkeys, scarlet macaws and toucans and trogons, iguanas, coatis, blue morpho butterflies, and a host of other tropical creatures that filled me with awe and a strange emotional mix of joy and despair.
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Most people who have visited a tropical forest will recognize this churning ball of feelings. One part is gratitude for a world in which such beauty exists in so many countless forms—a mated-for-life pair of macaws swooping across a valley; a line of leafcutter ants lugging their carefully sliced morsels of vegetation across the forest floor to their underground gardens; an algae-coated sloth hanging by her toes, a baby tucked to her belly and a village of bugs and fungi frolicking in her fur; a tree covered in spikes that may have once protected it from the sloth’s giant predecessors, or might be an adaptation for fending off strangler fig vines. The other part of the feeling is an excruciating understanding of loss—of creatures and their habitats, of the boundless natural systems where they once thrived, of the world they inhabited before colonialism and rampant extraction upended everything.
A couple of years after my first trip, I returned to the Osa with a group of ecologists; it was where I first witnessed the slow pace of fieldwork, and where I learned just how patient and persistent researchers need to be. From sunup until sundown, I trailed the scientists across a hillside as they studied the flow of minerals, nutrients, and gases through the forest. We collected leaf litter—the leaves and twigs and other bits of forest detritus lining the ground. We installed gas-exchange chambers in the soil, DIY contraptions we’d built out of sawed-off Tupperware.. We wore heavy snake chaps and tall rubber boots, and we wiped our sweat with increasingly soggy bandanas and swore at the biting ants.
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Now I had come back because the Osa turns out to be a perfect place to think about wildlife, interconnected systems, and how we can ameliorate the matrix—a term ecologists use to refer to the mix of landscape types that animals must navigate outside of protected habitat (farms, towns, backyards, freeways, strip malls). It’s home base for an international team of researchers who are thinking about the future of Central America’s wildlife through the lens of “climate corridors,” pathways that animals can use to access new habitat as the climate shifts. Before I could get back into the forest, though, I was headed to the highlands. I remained on the propellor plane as it landed by the little cemetery, deposited a few passengers, and took off again, headed for the other side of the Golfo Dulce, where a lanky, bearded ecologist from the north of England was waiting for me.
Andy Whitworth has a dry sense of humor, a laid-back vibe that sometimes masks the urgency he feels about his work, and a soft spot for dogs. As executive director of Osa Conservation, a local nonprofit with an increasingly large mission, he does everything from climbing fifteen stories up in a tree to courting donors to capturing peccaries and fitting them with radio collars.
Whitworth grew up near Manchester, where his father, a former taxi driver, ran a pet store. “In this really industrial city life, with no wilderness, I was always around these exotic animals, like parrots,” he recalled. The shop was mostly birds and fish, but one day his dad took him along to a friend’s pet shop in a nearby town. While the two men were having tea, the seven-year-old Whitworth stuck his hand in a tank and grabbed a bunch of corn snakes. He was captivated (and thankfully not constricted). His dad let him begin keeping some snakes, and before long he was breeding snakes and frogs from around the world, a hobby he continued until college. But while he loved being around all the animals, he was aware from an early age that “there was something not quite right. I remember things coming in, new shipments. I didn’t like the idea of things coming in from the wild in crates.” That feeling prompted Whitworth to study zoology in college, and then to work for several years in a zoo, where he first learned about wildlife conservation.
In his early twenties, Whitworth told his father he did not want to take over the family business. His dad sold the shop. “It’s still there,” Whitworth said. “I think they mostly do birds and fish. I would imagine a lot of fish probably still come from the wild. Which is why I have to suffer in the tropics for the rest of my life and do penance.”
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He was only partly joking about the suffering. For tropical biologists, parasites are par for the course. Whitworth has had four bouts of leishmaniasis—a potentially fatal parasitic infection that can result in skin sores and spleen damage—as well as botflies (fun little maggots that burrow under your skin) and other setbacks caused by creepy crawlies. But none of it has dimmed his love for the rainforest and just about all of its inhabitants. Over dinner one evening at the field station, when a large black beetle landed on our table, Whitworth eagerly picked it up. “You have to listen to it,” he said, and began holding the beetle up to our dinner companions’ ears. It emitted a ghostly noise, somewhere between singing and screaming. Setting the insect back on the table, Whitworth turned it over, belly up. Its underside crawled with mites and teensy arachnids called pseudoscorpions. Watching him swoon over the beetle and its stowaways, it wasn’t hard to imagine the kid with his hand in the snake tank. I was glad we had already finished our meal.
Whitworth spent years working in the Peruvian Amazon, and when he first came to Costa Rica, he was struck by the difference in scale. The parks in Costa Rica, he said, “are too small to really hold healthy populations of the big stuff”—think jaguars and peccaries—”of the things that we need to keep that ecosystem healthy.” A study published in the journal Science just weeks earlier had reported that over the past 130,000 years, food webs for land mammals had collapsed. More than half the links in those webs have vanished. Food webs are an essential part of how ecosystems function, and without all the components, those systems could be in trouble.
Many protected areas around the world are simply too small to meet the needs of species living there. Corcovado National Park, which occupies about a third of the peninsula and extends out into a protected area in the sea, is a crown jewel of Costa Rican conservation. The park contains half of all species found in the country and 5 percent of the planet’s biodiversity, making it one of the most biologically diverse places left on Earth. Yet it occupies just 105,000 acres of land, plus 10,000 more in the ocean—tiny by global standards. (The threshold for qualifying globally as an “intact forest landscape” is 125,000 acres.) You could fit more than twenty Corcovados inside Yellowstone National Park.
To protect creatures crucial to food webs, you need safe pathways between patches of habitat. You also need to think about climate change and provide animals with routes to migrate to the habitat they will need. This often means moving up in elevation. As the planet heats up, the conditions once found at sea level may now exist 1,000 feet up. It’s not just about the actual temperature. The natural world is full of complex interactions, and as climate change alters ecosystems, even in seemingly tiny or imperceptible ways, animals’ existing home territories may no longer be adequate, and they will venture off in search of what they need. Whether they can reach those potential new habitats depends on the matrix—on what’s in between.
Whitworth wants to protect “this elevational shift.” The key is finding sizable protected areas at different elevations, and then working to build a corridor between those places. A study that had just been published showed that during extreme drought in 2015 in Papua New Guinea, forest birds had moved up in elevation; the number of birds in the lowlands had declined by 60 percent, while the number of birds above 1,700 meters (about 5,500 feet) had increased by 40 percent. Whitworth’s vision for the Osa Peninsula was something he called “ridge to reef,” a way to reconnect ecosystems so the local wildlife could roam, from the sea to the mountains.
After a quick breakfast of huevos rancheros, we were headed up to the town of San Vito, partway between Corcovado and La Amistad, another national park. La Amistad lies in the Talamanca Mountains, a vast wilderness area and United Nations World Heritage Site on the border with Panama. The mountains contain one of the largest remaining forested areas in Central America, home to 215 species of mammals, 600 species of birds, 250 species of reptiles and amphibians, 115 species of freshwater fishes, and 10,000 species of flowering plants.
The sweep of land from Corcovado to La Amistad spans roughly 200 kilometers and contains more than 1.3 million acres of land and sea. It contains a handful of designated biological corridors, and some animals already move through them, to varying degrees of success. In between the two parks, though, the matrix includes the Pan-American Highway and the Central Valley, a farming and ranching area containing cattle pastures, palm oil plantations, and pineapple farms, all privately owned by a mix of independent farmers and big conglomerates. Without a clear path uphill, the scores of species that call Corcovado home could be in trouble. Christopher Beirne, a data scientist who works with Whitworth, has built computer models to understand potential routes for animals needing to move between the two big protected areas. Using those as a guide, Osa has set out to plant trees across this landscape to build a wildlife corridor.
San Vito sits in the southern Pacific highlands, less than ten miles from Panama. The rugged landscape hosts 800 species of butterflies and 60 species of bats, among hundreds of other animals and thousands of plants. But the forests here are severely fragmented, with small remnant forest patches interspersed with farm fields and cattle pastures. If animals from the Osa are going to reach the Talamancas, they need to traverse this area. So Osa Conservation is working with local landowners to regrow forest corridors here.
Tree planting has become something of a cliché, maligned as a way for people in the US and Europe to assuage a seeping guilt around overconsumption and inaction while continuing to live a comfortable, carbon-intensive lifestyle. In fact, many efforts in reforestation have been huge failures, done without buy-in from local people or a sense of a landscape’s history, or an understanding of what species are important.
If reforestation isn’t done right, said Whitworth, then the land “becomes recleared very, very quickly.” Programs that offer people a chance to plant a tree for a dollar or so don’t account for the long-term maintenance or any cost to the landowners, so they often fail.
You can’t just stick seedlings in the ground and leave; ongoing maintenance is key. Whitworth’s team asks landowners what benefits they most want—some shade in a cattle pasture, improved soil productivity, or perhaps even a wholesale switch from agriculture to eco-tourism. Then they determine the right assortment of trees, starting with fast-growing types like balsa and legume species that help put nitrogen in the soil for other plants to use. They choose trees targeted toward specific animal species—like oak for agouti, or trees in the avocado family for birds. They also think about a mix that will help spark further regrowth. “We want natural regeneration,” said Rodrigo DeSousa, who oversees the reforestation project. “When trees grow, birds come in, and then they spread the seeds.” The team also plants trees that may be of particular interest to the farmer or landowner, because “it’s not just about biology, it’s about people and relationships.” And they plant rare trees, a few in each area.
To fuel this restoration, Osa Conservation runs five greenhouses, each located at a different elevation and tailored to the trees that live in specific types of forest. At any one time, as many as 125,000 seedlings are growing in the greenhouses. “There is no recipe for restoration,” Jose Rojas, the group’s lowlands restoration coordinator, told me. “In every forest, every country, it is different.”
Once you’ve convinced the owner and selected the trees, generally about 400 per acre, you have to transport them there, sometimes using a tractor or horses, place them lovingly in the ground, and tend to them. You have to prune back the grasses that might otherwise out-compete a little tree until a canopy establishes, and build fences to keep cattle out, and check on the trees to make sure they are safe from disease. Then you have to wait for the trees to mature enough to fruit, and for animals to come and distribute the seeds so more trees can grow, and then you have to wait several decades or more for the land to begin to approximate a forest again, though it may never again have the same assemblage of species it had to begin with.
Humans are great at building things—highways, tunnels, dams, skyscrapers, cities—and we can send spacecraft to other planets and the moon. It seems like it should be fairly easy to build some simple links between patches of forest. But it really isn’t. Regrowing a rainforest is something that requires no concrete, no engineering feats, no complicated machinery, no government permits. It requires, instead, ecological knowledge, local knowledge, passion, goodwill, and dedication, plus painstaking manual labor. These may all seem simple and relatively low-cost, but trying to reconnect broken landscapes is a daunting effort that also requires a great deal of time. Trees take years, decades, centuries to grow. On the other hand, given the right conditions, one person can burn down or bulldoze a chunk of rainforest in no time at all.
Hillary Rosner is an award-winning science journalist whose work has appeared in The New York Times, National Geographic, Wired, The Atlantic, High Country News, The Washington Post, bioGraphic, and dozens of other publications. She is the assistant director of the Center for Environmental Journalism at the University of Colorado Boulder. Rosner grew up in New York City but has called Colorado home for more than 20 years.
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