Ecuador, in search of natural balance.

• Author: Youth, Howard

On the world's waistline, the trees drip not only with rain but with treasures in feathered form. Like a kaleidoscopic plasma, a mixed feeding flock expands and contracts through the treetops--40 or so green gold, red, blue, purple, and yellow birds flipping, flitting, then doubling back through patches of dense foliage. Neither steady rain nor parasol-sized leaves slapping to the ground distract them from their quest for small fruits, insects, and nectar. Scanning steadily back and forth with his binoculars, Sam Woods sifts through the flock until he zeroes in on a busy, pencil-length bird that appears to have been dipped in tomato juice. "There it is! Get on this bird. That's the scarlet-breasted dacnis. It's found in few other places in the world," he quickly whispers, jabbing his finger toward a bustling tree crown.

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Then, as quickly as it appeared, the dacnis and its flock mates vanish down a slope. "They'll be back," Woods tells me. He knows the program: Throughout the day, the restless flock does laps around the 71-hectare Rio Silanche Bird Sanctuary in northwest Ecuador. This swatch of lowland rainforest protects not only birds but a wide variety of wildlife now crammed into a forested island surrounded by a spreading sea of pasture and oil palm plantations. The area was purchased in 2005 by the Mindo Cloudforest Foundation (MCF), an Ecuadorian nonprofit organization supported by both locally raised and foreign funds. In addition to purchasing more acreage, the foundation is working to reforest small patches of pasture cut out of the property and to cooperate with local landowners to create habitat links that may eventually join the sanctuary to two large conservation areas nearby.

Rio Silanche Bird Sanctuary sits within the Choco region, an area running from western Colombia into northwest Ecuador that is home to 87 bird species found nowhere else--the largest concentration of restricted-range endemics anywhere. The sanctuary is one of a growing constellation of small, threatened, and irreplaceable parcels packed into this United Kingdom-sized country. Saving such ecologically rich real estate comes at a price, but one that many conservationists now believe that Ecuador's wildlife will help pay. Conservation efforts such as those spearheaded by MCF aim not only to secure a future for Ecuador's biodiversity but also to capitalize on a rising tide of ecotourism that brings much-needed revenue to a country burdened with an oil-dependent economy, contentious politics, and high levels of poverty.

Carbon (Living and Dead) and Money

From its Pacific coast to its Andean spine and down into its steamy Amazonian lowlands, Ecuador is a microcosm of South American landscapes and cultures. Birds are but the most visible slice of its striking biodiversity, a resource that more than 200,000 foreign visitors flock to view every year. This natural bounty, however, is in decline in many parts of the country, leaving a generous portion of the world's biodiversity hanging in the balance. Ecuador is smaller than the state of Nevada, but it boasts plant diversity rivaling that of the entire United States. Some areas contain among the greatest recorded tree and insect diversity on the planet. It ranks third in amphibian diversity and fourth in birds, with around 1,600 species, or about 17 percent of the world's total. Ecuador also has the eighth-richest collection of reptile fauna in the world. And spectacled (Andean) bear, jaguar, Andean condor, and harpy eagle persevere in the country's lingering wilderness areas--species now vanishing from many parts of their once-extensive South American ranges.

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Since large oil companies struck black gold in Ecuador's Amazonian east in the 1960s, this once-agrarian nation has hopped on an unrelenting economic rollercoaster ride. In 1999, Ecuador faced its worst economic...