Tracking the Impact of Ecotourism

Ecotourism can bring great benefits to a struggling economy and conservation attention and investment to fragile biomes and struggling species. 

But is everything that glitters made of gold? This week, TWS’ associate editor Joshua Rapp Learn joins host Katie Perkins as they travel through South Texas to learn more about the positive and negative impacts of ecotourism on an otherwise struggling economy. 

In this episode—the companion piece to the cover feature in the latest issue of The Wildlife Society’s member magazine, The Wildlife Professional—Perkins and Learn follow tour guides in search of rare ferruginous pygmy owls, javelinas and other wildlife in South Texas. 

“Our Wild Lives” is The Wildlife Society’s biweekly podcast, sharing compelling stories from wildlife professionals doing critical work around the world. Your hosts, Katie Perkins and Ed Arnett, of The Wildlife Society, bring you thought-provoking conversations with leading experts and emerging voices. 

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Transcript

[00:00:01] Janice Travis:  I think if, if people want to see something and pay to come see something, it's more likely to be preserved. So I think ecotourism can be really impactful. 

But you know, and we have our national parks and our state parks, but also places like this. It's another benefit of keeping the land natural if, if there's people that want to come see it. 

[00:00:37] Josh Learn: So we're walking through like, I don't know how you would describe this. I think you would describe it as something like thick scrub vegetation or something like that. 

[00:00:44] Katie Perkins: Yeah. 

[00:00:45] Josh Learn: You've got like some palm trees that are sticking out.

Nothing is super tall. You've occasionally got like a tree that's like, I don't know, 15 feet high and you've got like sounds of birds everywhere. There's bits of green. You've got a few [00:01:00] lizards running around, but that's just because it's cold.

There's probably a lot more once it starts warming up. We've got hummingbirds, Orioles, red wing black birds, lots of doves. There's our cha. Oh yeah. Boom chaka.

[00:01:18] Katie Perkins: That's our associate editor, Joshua Learn, and me, Katie Perkins, walking through a prime birding area in the southernmost corner of Texas. Now, this area always seems to be in the news, whether it's for the building of the border wall that cuts through parts of Bentsen-Rio Grande Valley State Park, where we are right now. Or it's the SpaceX launch pad nearby and all of the controversy that surrounds it. But today, we're just here to watch birds, or more specifically, the people that watch birds.

We're on a trip to learn more about how ecotourism can impact the economy and environment of a place.

It's the companion piece to Josh's feature story in the most recent [00:02:00] issue of The Wildlife Professional. The magazine is a benefit of TWS membership, and you can access it online if it hasn't hit your mailbox yet. Here's Josh with more.

[00:02:10] Josh Learn: South Texas is considered a world-class birding area.

It sits right in the middle of the central flyway for migrating birds. Then you have coastal birds along the Gulf and resident birds who spend the whole year. The area is unique in that it's more like the environment south of the border in Mexico. This means that South Texas is one of the few places in the US that you can see wildlife such as the ferruginous pygmy owl, ocelot, or javelinas.

The latter is a medium-sized pig-like creature also known as the collared peccary. As a result, people come from all over the country and world to experience the wildlife here.

[00:02:46] Greg McGuire - Alaskan visitor: I'm Greg McGuire and, uh, yeah, live in Sitka, Alaska and came down just to see the birds. 

[00:02:52] Josh Learn: Greg is a fisherman who heard about the birding opportunities down here from a Netflix documentary.

You had much success so far. Are you seeing anything [00:03:00] cool? 

[00:03:00] Greg McGuire - Alaskan visitor: Well, the hummingbird that we just saw was, was awesome. Uh, but I haven't really had a chance to see much. I've just been kind of getting the lay of the land. You just get

[00:03:09] Josh Learn: here? 

And he's just one of a legion of tourists who flock to South Texas every year to experience its unique biodiversity. The World Bank estimates that nature-based tourism is the reason for some eight billion visits per year. Fortune Business Insights estimated the global ecotourism market size at around $296 billion in 2025.

In South Texas, state parks, national wildlife refuges, and private ranches attract everything from birders and wildlife photographers to hunters. These tourists stay at local hotels, eat at local restaurants, and boost a struggling local economy.

Here's John Martin, a local landowner who has organized wildlife photography contests on private land. We're speaking in a bird blind he maintains on his ranch. 

[00:03:58] John Martin: We bought this two hundred eighty [00:04:00] acres and I was doing some photography out there, uh, you know, sitting on the senderos. And a friend of mine invited me to go out to his ranch where he was a, a hunting guide, but he was also a professional photographer and a veterinarian. And so we went to this roughly made blind. We sat in that blind. I shot six rolls of film between three in the afternoon and seven, the most incredible experience. We talked just like you were just talking about, sitting in the blind talking, had a cooler full of beer between us, and I walked out. I said, Steve, this is marketable. And this was more fun than, than anything I've ever done.

[00:04:49] Josh Learn: What do you think South Texas has to offer for the birding community? 

[00:04:52] John Martin: We have the most diversity of habitat and wildlife south of San [00:05:00] Antonio. It is so diverse and and we have things that are found nowhere else in the United States like javelina. At our place, we had a lady, an 87-year-old pathologist come from England. And I said, what do you want to photograph? She said, I want to photograph Javelina. Right.

[00:05:17] Katie Perkins: And this isn't something that only John is benefiting from. Farmers and ranchers around the world are turning towards the opportunity that hosting ecotourists bring.

[00:05:27] John Martin: We have a ranch out here the Santa Clara ranch. It's 300 acres. It's not a big place. He called me the end of last year and he said, John, we had $172,000 income just from photographers. And the more I thought about it, the more I thought this, this is how you can have conservation and economics combined to help ranchers. 

[00:05:54] Katie Perkins: Every five years or so, the US Fish and Wildlife Service publishes a survey called the National Survey of Fishing, [00:06:00] Hunting, and Wildlife Associated Recreation. That's what John is referencing here.

[00:06:04] John Martin: There were 148 million people in 2022 who watched wildlife.

So extrapolating that number that makes about 25 million traveling wildlife photographers. And I'm not greedy, I only want 1 million of those to come to Texas ranches annually. And that takes a thousand to 5,000 ranches set up for photography to do that. That brings $1 billion to rural Texas.

[00:06:36] Josh Learn: It's not just the local economy that benefits either. Since unique experiences with wildlife attract so many tourist dollars, private landowners, businesses, and lawmakers are keenly aware that they need to protect these resources

At the King Ranch's Norias Division, Janice Travis guides tourists keen to catch a glimpse of the ferruginous pygmy owl.

It's a Coke can-sized bird only found in a couple [00:07:00] of places north of the Mexican border

[00:07:02] Janice Travis: I think if, if people want to see something and pay to come see something, it's more likely to be preserved. So I think ecotourism can be really impactful. I know in other countries it definitely is.

But you know, and we have our national parks and our state parks, but also places like this. It's another benefit of keeping the land natural if, if there's people that want to come see it, it's a nice buck straight out from us 

[00:07:33] Josh Learn: We didn't see a ferruginous pygmy owl on our own visit, but we did see plenty of other rare birds like the tropical parula.

We also saw roadrunners, lots of white-tailed deer, and bobwhite quail.

The King Ranch is a massive property with more square miles than the state of Rhode Island. It's the legacy of Captain Richard King, who began buying land in the mid-nineteenth century.

While King Ranch was initially [00:08:00] based on cattle, the operations took on an increasing focus towards environmental stewardship over the decades. Sustainable hunting has been a part of King Ranch's operation for years. More recently, bird watching tours have become more common in parts of the ranch.

[00:08:16] Janice Travis: The regular public tour is $170 per person. It includes lunch and it's a nine hour tour and that leaves from Kingsville and returns to Kingsville. But we do give guests the option to meet at the Norias gate like you did today, and then they just get offset by an hour on either side of drive time. 

[00:08:35] Josh Learn: In Texas, where 95% of the land is privately owned, wildlife conservation often falls to private hands.

King Ranch is just one of the many places that have turned, at least in part, towards eco-tourism. About an hour north of Kingsville, the Welder Wildlife Refuge resembles the King Ranch in some ways in its history

In 1954, the Weldon family established the Rob and Bessie Welder [00:09:00] Wildlife Foundation on nearly eight thousand acres of land along the Aransas River northwest of Corpus Christi. The foundation today funds fellowships for graduate university students in natural resources and holds a natural history collection.

Preserved birds, reptiles, mammals, and insects are displayed in a grand old Texan estate house.

They fill drawers upon drawers next to a library that contains dusty tombs of wildlife research from decades past. They even have a complete set of The Wildlife Society's Journal of Wildlife Management. 

The Welder Foundation also offers free tours to the public. Katie and I rumbled along in a large van on one such tour spotting birds. As we pass through savanna-like patches of trees, the foundation's CEO, Dale James, talked to us about balancing ecotourism with research and on-the-ground land management.

[00:09:51] Dale James: I know in the early days, Dr. Cottam, he led private tours, before they hired their first educator.

So, and I think they hired, Angie mentioned, uh, the first [00:10:00] educator came on board in the mid sixties, early to mid sixties. And at that point they started having more formalized, tours and things like that out here. A lot of the early tours though, were like small groups of birdwatching and things like that.

And then it didn't really grow until they hired Dr. Selma Glasscock in the eighties and that's when the education program really, she took it to the next level.

We've talked about kind of growing that down the road in terms of having more open access to the property. That's kind of a vision for the future. But right now, 'cause of the research and the conflicts of research and having more access, we're trying to keep from, you know, having too many people out here and it conflicting with the research that's on site. 

[00:10:39] Josh Learn: If there's one thing we've learned after three days of touring through South Texas, it's that ecotourism always requires a balance. Birdwatchers and hunters can bring much needed revenue to an underprivileged corner of Texas. But too much tourism or unethically conducted tours and hunting can harm the very resources that attract nature lovers in the first [00:11:00] place.

Places like Costa Rica have experienced some of these problems when ecotourism develops too quickly without good planning. 

[00:11:07] Joshua Learn: Keilor Cordero-Umaña is a PhD student in global change impacts at Menéndez Pelayo International University in Madrid. He studies the impact of ecotourism in his home country of Costa Rica. The leatherback sea turtles in Las Baulas National Marine Park on the Pacific coast have a raccoon problem.

Too many tourists and unchecked development next to the park have led to overflowing trash cans. Trash feeds raccoons, which have exploded into unsustainable numbers in the area. This is bad for leatherbacks, as raccoons also sometimes snack on turtle eggs.

[00:11:41] Keilor Cordero-Umana: I would say the, the main finding is that eight species were using garbage, so we can prove that wildlife is being affected by the urban growth over there.

But especially that raccoons are being subsidized with the garbage, which possibly, uh, influence the, the population growth [00:12:00] during the years of urban growth.

Nest predation has increased during the study period from 3% to almost 80% and 85% in some years.

And that nest predation may be associated with the subsidized raccoons from urban areas.

[00:12:16] Joshua Learn: Las Baulas means leatherbacks in Costa Rica. 

But this park, once a haven to its namesake species, now faces a problem related to fast urbanization near the borders of the protected area. The problem isn't unique to this park. 

Other national parks in Costa Rica face similar problems. Too much growth in the ecotourism industry has led to unchecked development which threatens the very resources that attracted tourists in the first place.

[00:12:41] Keilor Cordero-Umana: Ecotourism I would say it's the main economical engine of Costa Rica. And more or less 90% of people going to Costa Rica, or a big amount of people, between 70 and 90%, are going for ecotourism.

So this is a tip of the iceberg in the whole problem that ecotourism is bringing [00:13:00] to, to Costa Rica. As I told you before, Costa Rica sells the image of a green country and conservation and sustainability. But on the other hand there's no compliance, there's no supervision in, in many cases, and there's no enforcement of law.

And ecotourism has become a paradox for conservation. 

[00:13:20] Josh Learn: Places like the Welder Wildlife Foundation play things on the safe side. They only allow a few tours per day. 

[00:13:26] Dale James: In terms of not having a lot of, uh, disturbance on the landscape and, and things like that. Right. And, really want the, the ranch or the refuge to be primarily for the research, and them to have a safe environment to do that research, right? And so having open access would, uh, limit that. But that doesn't mean we're gonna stop doing tours and stop trying to have that education component as well. 

[00:13:49] Josh Learn: But the region has many options for wildlife tourism.

There are the photography-focused bird blinds on John Martin's Ranch, the state parks and wildlife refuges in the Rio Grande [00:14:00] Valley, or larger operations like the King Ranch that offer organized tours guided by graduate students like Janice Travis.

[00:14:07] Janice Travis: I think we're, we're somewhat already regulated, simply by what we can take. So by not having, you know, several guides, there's four of us that do bird tours, um, you know, we can't, we can't do it.

Every day you get exhausted and forget what birds you've showed people, and you know, what you've told people that day versus the day before. And we can't take, like, I can't take a motor coach out here. The trees prevent it. So when I take the Rio Grande Valley Birding Festival up here with a motor coach, we're limited to only a certain part of the ranch.

And because there's other operations going on, there's hunting, there's cattle operations and, you know, other things that the ranch is doing. I can't be everywhere every day and send, you know, a tour over here in a over there and another one over there.

They have [00:15:00] an area that they can be today, and so we can't put a gazillion people in it. 

[00:15:04] Josh Learn: Not all locals appreciate tourists flooding into their region, but Diego Gutierrez says he's flattered that so many people come down to visit his home. Gutierrez is a local engineering student we ran into birding at the Bentsen-Rio Grande Valley State Park. His family has lived in the area for generations, and he thinks ecotourism is good for the local economy. 

[00:15:27] Diego Gutierrez: It brings a focus into maintaining and protecting the ecosystem. 'Cause as long as there's people, you know, willing to spend money on it, that, that gives a good motivation for the city government to make sure that it's well maintained and protected against, you know, corporate interests.

[00:15:43] Josh Learn: Ecotourism can involve travelers moving across the country or just checking out your local nature reserve. These experiences can inspire the people that eventually take action to protect these landscapes.

[00:15:55] Diego Gutierrez: I think if people don't have the connection to the land that [00:16:00] they, they gain over the years, if they don't have an interest in it, they don't really understand what's being lost.

[00:16:05] Katie Perkins: Yeah. 

[00:16:06] Diego Gutierrez: For example, if people don't know what birds are disappearing, why would they care if they're gone? You know what I mean? Like, you know, people need to understand why these lands are important. 'cause if they don't, then, you know, when they see acres and acres being torn down, they might not understand why that's so, that's so, you know, important.

[00:16:32] Katie Perkins: Thanks for listening to the Our Wild Lives podcast, brought to you by The Wildlife Society. I'm your host, Katie Perkins, and special reporting for this episode by Josh Learn. You can learn more about The Wildlife Society at wildlife.org. If you wanna dive deeper into this issue, read the full story in The Wildlife Professional. You can access that in your member portal on wildlife.org.

We'll see you next time with more stories from the wild. [00:17:00]