"Invaluable" new manual for bird guides
 Nature Canada
Participants on a bird guiding course in Sian Ka'an, Mexico
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Over the past few years Nature Canada, the joint BirdLife Partner in Canada, has been working with a local wildlife NGO in Mexico to promote community based nature tourism opportunities for communities living near sites of key conservation significance.
Amigos de Sian Ka’an has considerable experience in environmental education and bird guide training and has been working with local communities for many years. With the success of its bird guide training, there has been a realisation that the wealth of material and experiences gained should be brought together in a format that could be shared with others.
As a result Nature Canada and Amigos de Sian Ka’an have collaborated on a manual to assist organisers and instructors of bird identification workshops in Latin American rural communities. The material in the manual is based on the experiences of the author, Barbara MacKinnon de Montes, in conducting two and three-day "bird identification and guiding" workshops in rural communities, fishing villages and Mayan forest communities – all within protected natural areas on Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula.
"This manual is a fantastic resource which should prove extremely useful to other BirdLife Partners and conservation groups in the Americas and beyond," said Mara Kerry, Project Manager at Nature Canada. "Barbara MacKinnon de Montes has a wealth of experience which she's kindly chosen to share in this invaluable publication."
Hard copies of the manual are available in English and Spanish from Nature Canada, or it can be downloaded as PDF files (see below).
Additional funding for this project was provided by the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA).