[obol] Buy shade-grown coffee--it works!

[SJJag at comcast.net]

I am pleased to hear this...have wondered, as I purchase shade grown coffee, if the effort was working, good to know it is!

Steve Jaggers

-------------- Original message -------------- 
From: "Moore, Randy" <Randy.Moore at oregonstate.edu> 

And as an addendum to Wink's comments, any birder who's ever seen a full sun coffee plantation will never consider buying anything but shade-grown ever again.  It's not so much the variety of birds in shade-grown- by tropical standards it certainly isn't the greatest 2nd growthy forest.  But in comparison to the absolute desolation of a full sun coffee plantation, shade-grown coffee is truly songbird nirvana.

  
Randy Moore 
104 Nash Hall 
Dept. of Fisheries and Wildlife 
Oregon State University 
Corvallis, OR  97331-3803 
ph.  541-760-5542
fax  541-737-3590 
E-mail  randy.moore at oregonstate.edu 



From: Wink Gross [mailto:winkg at hevanet.com]
Sent: Tue 3/4/2008 7:32 AM
To: obol at lists.oregonstate.edu
Subject: [obol] Buy shade-grown coffee--it works!


We just got back from our annual week in Oaxaca, MX.  This
year local guide Roque Antonio and I spent three days birding
the Pacific slope of the Sierra del Sur, including the region
around Pluma Hidalgo, a major coffee growing region of Mexico.

Much of the coffee there is shade-grown, so the understory of
the forest was pretty much all coffee plants.  However, the
canopy trees of cecropia, ficus, coral-bean, etc., were left
intact.

That canopy was full of birds: tanagers (Western, Flame-
colored, Summer), warblers (Nashville, Black-throated Green,
Townsend's, Wilson's, Blue-winged), flycatchers (many silent
empids), orioles (Audubon's, Bullock's, Baltimore, Streak-
backed, Orchard), just to list a few.

I have been buying shade-grown coffee for several years now.
Nice to finally see with my own eyes that shade-grown coffee
plantations really do provide habitat for many species of
birds.

And, oh yes, ¡El café fue maravilloso!

Wink Gross
Portland
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.oregonstate.edu/mailman/private/obol/attachments/20080305/0c4e8b1c/attachment.htm 
-------------- next part --------------
An embedded message was scrubbed...
From: "Moore, Randy" <Randy.Moore at oregonstate.edu>
Subject: Re: [obol] Buy shade-grown coffee--it works!
Date: Wed, 5 Mar 2008 03:42:00 +0000
Size: 769
Url: http://lists.oregonstate.edu/mailman/private/obol/attachments/20080305/0c4e8b1c/attachment.eml