by Roberto Lovato
La Moskitia, Honduras—The DHC-6 Twin Otter from Tegucigalpa touched down on a 12,000-foot strip of dirt. There was no signage confirming that this was the Puerto Lempira airport in eastern Honduras. Most passengers carried suitcases and boxes brimming with food, clothing, medicine, and other materials. But I had traveled light, ready to cross more than a hundred miles of rough road to reach inland communities where I hoped to better understand the allure of one of the most beautiful—and most highly coveted—birds in the world: the scarlet macaw, known to the Afro-Indigenous Miskito majority as the apu pauni.
Puerto Lempira—the capital of Honduras’s easternmost state, Gracias a Dios—sits on the edge of La Moskitia, a 14,000-square-mile rainforest often called “the second Amazon” and “the lungs of Central America.” In English, it’s known by the exoticized misnomer The Mosquito Coast. (Oral tradition says La Moskitia is named for Miskut, a legendary Indigenous leader—not the blood-sucking insect.) Until 1957, Gracias a Dios—literally “Thank God”— remained largely unmapped and had no formal government presence. Its remoteness—pipantes (motorized canoes) and small planes are the main mode of transportation—has helped protect its scarlet macaw population, but it has also made it a haven for groups looking to avoid the law and whose activities now threaten the iridescent bird.
My mission in La Moskitia was a simple one: to see if and how it’s still possible for scarlet macaws to live in harmony with humans in a shared community. I had already visited several macaw conservation projects run by universities, nongovernmental organizations, and wealthy individuals across Central America and the Caribbean. But as important as these efforts are, few of these incorporate Indigenous people whose ways of living have sustained both the birds and the forests they’ve lived in for millennia.
