Mexican Biologists Aim to Save Hummingbirds With Wildflowers Max De Haldevang - Bloomberg
go to original June 17, 2022

Urban Gardens Help At-Risk Hummingbirds in Mexico (NowThis)

With its temperate climate and rich diversity of wildflowers, Mexico is a haven for hummingbirds. It boasts 58 species, including all 19 types seen in the US and Canada. The tiny birds proved elusive, however, when Rocío Meneses tried to catalog each species, starting in 2013, while co-writing a book called Hummingbirds of Mexico.

Meneses found that the best way to glimpse their flitting wings was to wait by the native plants whose nectar they love to drink. “We became searchers of flowers rather than hummingbirds,” she says. Now Meneses travels at least twice a month to remote parts of central and northwestern Mexico to find flowers to reproduce for her company, Paraíso Colibrí (Hummingbird Paradise), which sells plants to gardeners and corporate clients.

The business is part of a movement aimed at stemming the birds’ population decline by creating gardens to feed them in Mexican cities. Battered by climate change, deforestation, and an underground trade selling dissected hummingbirds as love charms, 13 of Mexico’s species are considered at risk of extinction. About 60% of Mexican species are imperiled by climate change, and many are losing habitat to relentless urbanization, according to research by María del Coro Arizmendi, a professor and ornithologist at Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM). Arizmendi runs a hummingbird observation center and started a city garden project to provide sanctuaries for the birds in 2014. “This country is becoming urban, and it seems there’s no way back,” she says. “We need an alternative so that hummingbirds can be conserved in the cities we live in.”

It was Arizmendi who first encouraged Meneses - at the time her master’s student - to turn a flower-growing hobby into a business. When the urban gardening effort was getting going, about 90% of plants sold in Mexico City were non-native. Since launching Paraíso Colibrí in 2016, Meneses has populated the capital and cities in five other states with about 145 plant species, including Buchanan’s sage, blue passionflowers, and yellow oleander. Almost 500 wildflower gardens for hummingbirds have been registered across the country on Arizmendi’s website, and Meneses works with 29 corporate clients, including L’Oréal SA, plus seven schools. The business has 10 employees, and Meneses has helped six other nurseries start growing native plants. Beyond helping hummingbirds, they sell plants that attract such pollinators as bees, butterflies, and bats.

She and her domestic partner, Sergio Ramírez Martínez, used their savings to start the business and have had no outside investment. Meneses chooses to use only the most basic equipment and to work without electricity at the nursery to grow her wildflowers.

Reproducing the plants has been a giant undertaking - around 90 of the species Meneses sells weren’t commercially available before Paraíso Colibrí got started, she says. Scientists knew little more than the names of many of them, so Meneses and her team had to seek them out in the wild, visiting half a dozen states.

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