LightHawk Flights Strengthen
Bi-national Park Protection Efforts

LightHawk flights often help to build the steady public support needed for legislation to be passed or protective efforts to be achieved, but sometimes our volunteer pilots conduct pivotal flights where a truth is unearthed that is so alarming it sets off a conservation chain reaction. On April 26, 2007, LightHawk carried out just such a mission. When a routine flight departed a small airport in Belize, carrying park managers from the Chiquibul National Park, no one anticipated the events about to unfold that eventually would bolster bi-national protection efforts for the country’s largest protected area.

Park staff from Friends for Conservation and Development (FCD) and the Forest Department hoped to document land conditions and illegal incursions or encroachments in the park. As the group over flew the area, they detected illegally set fires burning inside the park’s boundaries and the presence of illegal forest clearing. The extent of the damage and depth of penetration into the protected area was astonishing and disturbing.

The Chiquibul, located on Belize’s western border with Guatemala, is considered to be of significant biological and cultural importance, but it also is under constant threat. Large areas of deforestation and an advancing agricultural frontier are encroaching on the park. Illegal hunting, illegal agricultural development and xaté (an understory palm) extraction are nearly commonplace. And hundreds of Guatemalans cross the border annually to illegally extract these resources. To complicate matters further, the Belize-Guatemalan border has been under dispute for nearly 150 years. An “Adjacency Zone”, comprised of one kilometer on both sides of the disputed Guatemala- Belize border was created and is routinely monitored by the Organization of American States. The fires and logging detected on April 26, however, were located well beyond the adjacency zone.

LightHawk “eye-opening” flights prompted park administrators to engage in immediate remedial actions. Ground-based investigations were conducted with Forest Department and Belize Defense Force (BDF) personnel following the flights and the aerial observations were confirmed. More than 1,000 acres of pristine tropical rainforest had been destroyed (and more than 7,725 acres in the park have been cut illegally since the mid 1980s). Chiquibul Park Manager, Derric Chan commented that devastation such as this had never been seen before. Additional flights were immediately scheduled to continue documenting these activities and to bring media attention to the situation.

In the months that have passed following this critical series of flights, BDF personnel have been regularly deployed into the area and operations to destroy encroaching crops is ongoing. Discussions between Belize Ministry of Foreign Affairs and park personnel have taken place as well and the media attention remains focused on the issue. LightHawk will continue to assist our conservation partners in monitoring the situation as Belizeans consider this a case of national urgency and park officials do not have agency planes or pilots they can use for monitoring and survey work.