© 1995 Carel P. Brest van Kempen .....Science Art-Birds

Title: Instant of Opportunity--Emerald Toucanets and Spiny-Headed Treefrog
Species: Emerald Toucanets (Aulacorhynchus prasinus) and Spiny-Headed Treefrog (Anotheca spinosa)
Artist: Carel P. Brest van Kempen (for further information, click on the artist's name)
Image size: 22" x 30"
Media: acrylic on illustration board
Date:1995
Location: Private Collection

The artist notes: "In the late 1980s, herpetologist J. Alan Pounds and his colleagues surveyed the herpetofauna of the Monteverde Cloud Forest Preserve, where weather patterns and topography create a practically permanent cloud that rests high on the mountainside. In their thirty square kilometer study area, 20 of the 50 resident frog species completely disappeared over a period of just a few years. Included in this list of twenty was the famous Golden Toad (Bufo periglenes), known only from Monteverde, and the Spiny-headed Treefrog, a tree cavity-nesting, montane species whose numbers have dramatically fallen throughout its Central-American range."

"Pounds noted that the crash in the frog populations at the site coincided with abnormally dry years. He posited that a warming trend was causing Monteverde's cloud to sit higher on the mountain, allowing the lower regions to dry out. Bird species such as the Emerald Toucanet moved uphill, but the frogs, which are not equipped to make such a transit, simply died. As the birds concentrated closer to the mountain's apex, they competed more intensely in a less diverse ecosystem, making them nearly as threatened by these changes as the amphibians."