Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
Wildlife noises
WHMSI was different than to any other international agreements that I was doing,
and that's why I was so interested about it.
Because WHMSI was so different because it is not a legally-binding,
traditional international convention. It was another thing.
People came from governments. People came from NGOs. People came from all other institutions.
And everybody sat at the same table with the same level, and I found that great.
I found that it was the space to work; people were together, and so on.
That's actually what I was trying to, and I'm still trying to do, in Colombia.
To get technical support from the people who are living the daily stuff, depending on the companies they are working with.
So if I'm working with marine mammals, I want the expert of marine
mammals over there just tellling me the things, and sometimes
those experts are in an NGO or a research institute or somewhere else.
I just want to take them here to advise government, to do some national decisions and so on.
And WHMSI was that. WHMSI was something like this thing.
And that's why I just like to get interested in WHMSI and try to develop and try to put a little bit more of myself on WHMSI.
At the very beginning, some of the NGOs working in Colombia started to work with WHMSI a lot.
Of course, WHMSI started with birds, and they will continue with birds,
of course. And many of the work with WHMSI was with birds.
Then we started to do a very nice work, which was the national plan of migratory species. It was a process; it was a long process
which we put a lot of NGOs working on it. We put also government institutions
and research institutions linked with the government
to work on the migratory species national plan.
And it was so good. I think one of the things that got into WHMSI also was this plan.
We decided that -- in the plan -- we decided to take any migratory species.
Not only the birds, not only the marine mammals, but we also get into jaguars. We also get into insects.
There is a lot of marine, not only marine, but a lot of migratory species, going through Colombia or staying in Colombia for a while
or going from Colombia to other countries as migratory species. And that was great.
That's why we just tried to develop it a little bit. And WHMSI is also a really nice tool to develop all this stuff as well.
We realize also -- The migratory species on the Orinoco and Amazon river basins
like river dolphins, catfishes, and a lot of stuff migrating from the rivers
from one side to another. And well, we have a lot of things. We developed also the national program for marine turtles.
And we are now getting that actualized because it's being 10 years already.
And we're working a lot on the sea turtles as well.
We're doing now national plan of action for aquatic mammals; not only
marine mammals, we just wanted to get into other aquatic mammals
like otters, like river dolphins, like manatees, and so on. I think we are really
pretty linked to WHMSI in many ways, and in many species as well.
I'm a specialist. I'm an expert in fish biology, and stock assessment. I was also interested to get into
WHMSI, not only the birds, but also all the marine stuff, all the aquatic migratory species.