The Masked Antpitta: at the crossroads of the politics of land use, indigeneity and biodiversity conservation in Bolivia

Keywords: Bolivia, Amazon, Latin America, extractivism, biodiversity conservation, birds, indigeneity, multispecies
Abstract Type: Paper Abstract

Abstract

The Masked Antpitta (Hylopezus auricularis) is an endangered and endemic bird that lives only in the seasonally-flooded forests surrounding Riberalta, a frontier city in the Bolivian Amazon. I first encountered it in a degraded environment where it has managed to thrive, a forest trail strewn with piles of litter and even a discarded toilet bowl near its entrance. There, impoverished residents sought seclusion to sniff glue, and at its terminus, new migrants built homes and farmed agricultural plots to buttress their insecure incomes. The Masked Antpitta and its neighbors enact resilience at the precipice of a larger assemblage of insecurities: agricultural extractivism that converts forests to soy plantations, fires that encroach on more of the Bolivian Amazon each year, and ever-expanding agricultural plots. This has attracted the attention of international bird conservation NGOs. Additionally, although originally described as a new species in 1941, it was lost to science and officially rediscovered in 1998. Its rarity and endemism led the local municipal government to designate it a monument of natural patrimony in 2015. But whose heritage does it belong to, exactly? As the local population largely comprises generations of settler-colonists, I argue that this is a way for them to stake claims of indigenous belonging as it intersects with political, economic, and land transformations in a contested frontier region. This paper thus shows how sociopolitical visions and desires are mediated through endemic birds alongside larger discourses and economies of indigeneity, belonging, and conservation.