Coffee and birds are intertwined, and not just because you may enjoy your first cup of java in the morning while the dawn chorus is still going strong.

For years, ornithologists have recognized the importance of traditional coffee farms, where the crop is raised beneath a rich, structurally complex canopy, in preserving tropical biodiversity. Although nothing can replace a wild, untouched forest, in much of Latin America and the Caribbean, a quality shade-coffee farm is the next best thing.

That's especially true when the seasonal rush of migrants floods in, swelling the flocks of resident birds: Wood Thrushes and Swainson's Thrushes scuffing through thickets; Black-throated Green warblers, Wilson's Warblers, and Blue-gray Gnatcatchers joining honeycreepers, tropical tanagers, and euphonias to forage among the bromeliads; nectar-seeking Baltimore Orioles and Tennessee Warblers plunging their bills into the filamentous, starburst blossoms of Inga trees that rise above the coffee shrubs.

Birders, too, have long appreciated the way an old-fashioned shade-coffee farm can be a hot spot. "Birding a lot in Mexico when I was in my late teens and early twenties, I became accustomed to the idea that coffee plantations were great bird habitats," field guide author Kenn Kaufman recalls. "In some places we would even go out of our way to go to coffee plantations because the birding was so good." (Kaufman 2007)

But in the 1970s all that began to change. New varieties of coffee that grow in sun, not shade, began to overtake Latin America and the Caribbean. By the late 1990s, as much as 40 percent of the region's coffee had been converted to sun-grown, or "technified," farms, which are little more than agricultural deserts for birds and other species.

"I'll never forget the day that I found out about sun coffee—riding across Costa Rica early one morning, looking out the windows and idly wondering what crop I was seeing, these bushes growing in sterile rows across the hillside," Kenn said. "When it dawned on me that I was seeing coffee growing out in the sunlight, I was physically ill, because I saw a whole semi-natural ecosystem disappearing, a whole way of life crashing down." (Kaufman 2007)

It's hard to overstate the importance of coffee to Latin America, where it ranks second only to oil as the most important legal export. And it's equally hard to overstate the size of the American coffee market, which consumes roughly a third of the world's supply. That's why ornithologists have tried for twenty years to harness the American obsession with coffee to preserve bird habitat by encouraging Americans to drink shade-grown coffee from traditional farms.

As Paul Baicich has detailed in his 2007 article, buying shade-grown coffee allows you to enjoy a superb, artisanal beverage while at the same time preserving critical habitat for birds, especially many neotropical migrants.

  It's a win-win, but only if consumers are discerning enough to buy the right kind of coffee. Go into a coffee shop, and you'll find an increasing array of choices, organic, fair-trade, or shade-grown in varying combinations. Even among shade-grown coffees there are different cultivation approaches (some of which are only marginally better than sun plantation) and different certification programs. How do you know what to buy?

First, it helps to know a little about how different kinds of coffee are grown. Traditionally, the flavorful Arabica coffee of Latin America was raised in a system known as "rustic" farming, with the coffee shrubs sheltered beneath low-growing banana and fruit trees and above them a canopy of tall hardwoods and shade trees as high as 120 feet. 

Such a farm produces guavas, citrus, and other produce for the family; nearby beehives provide honey, and the canopy trees generate firewood and lumber. Nothing duplicates untouched forests—there are a few birds that simply cannot tolerate any habitat alteration, even the light touch of a traditional shade coffee plantation. But rustic coffee farming is one of the gentlest land uses in the Neotropics.

In the 1970s, however, with fears of an imported fungal disease known as coffee leaf rust sweeping Latin America, producers began to switch to Robusta coffee, a taller, hardier, higher-caffeine species that originated in Africa and is widely grown in Asia. Planted in the open sun, Robusta coffee can produce substantially higher yields than Arabica—but at a much greater cost, reckoned in lost habitat, eroded soils, and heavy fertilizer and pesticide use. Still, about forty percent of the nearly seven million acres under coffee production in Latin America has been converted to sun coffee, millions of acres of land supporting few if any birds. If you drink instant or canned supermarket coffee, chances are you're drinking Robusta coffee.

As early as the late 1980s, conservationists realized that the birders might reverse that sorry trend by changing their buying habits. If coffee drinkers in North America could be convinced to buy shade-grown, land still in traditional production could be preserved, and sun coffee plantations might be restored to more beneficial shade operations.

Unfortunately, it hasn't been that simple. For a long time, simply finding coffee that was sold as "shade grown" was a challenge, and birders often assumed that they were accomplishing the same goal by purchasing coffee sold as organic or fair-trade. 

But while many organic or fair-trade blends are grown in some form of shade cultivation, not all are, and, it turns out, not all shade coffee systems are equally beneficial for conservation. For example, the approach known as shaded monoculture grows coffee, not beneath a diverse, naturalistic forest, but an artificially planted canopy of a single, heavily pruned (and often nonnative) shade species.

"Both extremes qualify as 'shade coffee,' but their contributions to biodiversity are significantly different….For instance, coffee plantations with tall, multilayered overstories of native trees can have avian diversity comparable to that of native forest, whereas other types of shade coffee, dominated by single tree species…are little different from sun coffee in terms of avian diversity and species richness." (Rappole, King, and Vega Rivera 2003)

One way consumers can make an intelligent choice is through shade coffee certification programs, of which there are now several, including the Rainforest Alliance's sustainable coffee label, and UTZ, the latter an industry-led program that has been criticized for lax standards. The most rigorous, however, is the Bird Friendly (BF) certification program developed by scientists at the Smithsonian Migratory Bird Center (SMBC), which is widely viewed as the gold standard among shade-grown designations. "Of the two certification programs in the U.S. that currently require shade, Bird Friendly and Rainforest Alliance, Bird Friendly has the most rigorous requirements," (Consumer Reports April 2006)

To qualify as Bird Friendly, a farm must meet substantial benchmarks for canopy height, foliage cover, forest structure, composition and diversity of woody and herbaceous plants, presence of epiphytes like orchids and bromeliads, streamside buffers, and much more. The forest canopy must be comprised of native species, and the operation must be certified organic by an agency with USDA accreditation.

It's a high bar, and one that many coffee farms can't make—sometimes not even those with a long history of organic production. In all, almost 20,000 acres of coffee lands have been certified BF, producing more than eight million pounds of coffee every year. The high standards make a huge difference to birds and other tropical organisms. In 2004, researchers Alexandre Mas and Thomas Dietsch published a review in the journal Ecological Applications that examined bird and butterfly biodiversity on coffee plantations in the highlands of southern Mexico that ranged from traditional rustic farms to shaded monocultures.

Not surprisingly, the traditional rustic farms did best—even beating the oldest organic farm in Mexico, first certified in 1929. What's more, only the rustic farms met the SMBC's Bird Friendly criteria. "So, just as all shade is not created equal, all certified shade-grown coffee programs might not produce the same conservation benefits," the scientists conclude. (Mas and Dietsch 2004)

That's not to say that other certification programs have no value. Mas and Dietsch noted that the less stringent requirements of the Rainforest Alliance program, which has certified about 1.3 million acres in nineteen countries, may serve as an entry point for farmers who aspire to more strenuous certification in the future. But one drawback of the Rainforest Alliance program is that it permits coffee with as little as 30 percent certified content to carry its seal.

For birders who want to make the biggest impact on conservation, Smithsonian's BF coffee is clearly the best choice. It hasn't always been the easiest coffee to find (unless you happen to live in the Pacific Northwest or Alaska, where the omnipresent Fred Meyer supermarket chain sells BF coffee in its 130 stores). There's a source locator on the SMBC website at http://nationalzoo.si.edu/ConservationAndScience/MigratoryBirds/Coffee/lover.cfm#find.

What about buyers who are also concerned about social equality and improving the lives of coffee workers?  The real triple whammy would be BF coffee. In addition to good habitat and its USDA organic blessing, BF coffee is grown on farms with a reputable fair-trade certification. Consumers know that the farmers can make a decent living growing it on cooperatives that are operated in a socially responsible way.

A new brand, Birds & Beans, produced by a consortium of New England roasters beginning this winter, hits all three buttons. It's SMBC certified as Bird Friendly and thus organic, and it carries fair trade certification from TransFair USA. That why I, Kenn Kaufman, ornithologist Bridget Stutchbury, and others are advising and supporting the producers.  

But regardless of the source, the important thing is for conservation-minded birders—and that ought to mean all of us—to change our drinking habits. If you're using canned coffee, switch to one of the shade-certified brands; it'll cost a bit more, but if the taste alone isn't reward enough, do it for the birds. And when you're shopping, look for coffee with the SMBC Bird Friendly seal, which provides the greatest benefit for birds and other wildlife.

"In the steam that rises from your coffee cup," Bridget Stutchbury writes in Silence of the Songbirds, "could be the ghosts of warblers flitting among the orchids, orioles sipping nectar from spectacular bouquets in the treetops, and thrush flipping up leaves on the forest floor." Not a bad way to great the dawn chorus, mug in hand.

Sources:

Baicich, P.  2007.  Coffee Lessons for New England Birders. Bird Observer 35 (4) August: 224–229.
http://www.greenerchoices.org/products.cfm?product=coffee&pcat=food

Consumer Reports.  April 2006. Coffee with a Cause. 

Kaufman, K.  August 2007.  Personal communication.

Mas, A. H., and T. V. Dietsch.  2004. Linking Shade Coffee Certification to Biodiversity Conservation: Butterflies and Birds in Chiapas, Mexico. Ecological Applications 14 642–654.

Philpott, S. M., et al.  2007.   Field-testing Ecological and Economic Benefits of Coffee Certification Programs. Conservation Biology 21 975–85.

Rappole, J. H., D. I. King, and J. H. Vega Rivera.  2003.  Coffee and Conservation. Conservation Biology 17 334–336.

Rice, R.  2008.  Agricultural Intensification within Agroforestry: The Case of Coffee and Wood Products. Agriculture, Ecosystems and Environment 128 212–218.

_____ and J. Ward.  1997.  Coffee, Conservation and Commerce in the Western Hemisphere. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Migratory Bird Center and Natural Resources Defense Council.

Stutchbury, B.  2007.  Silence of the Songbirds. New York: Walker & Co.

Scott Weidensaul is the author of more than two dozen books on natural history, including the Pulitzer Prize-nominated Living on the Wind, and his latest book, Of a Feather: A Brief History of American Birding, now in paperback. He lives in the mountains of eastern Pennsylvania.

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