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The Magazine of the Audubon Society has an article about Scarlet Six, and their efforts to protect the Scarlet Macaws throughout the Chiquibul. Great story, with vivid pictures.
"Meet the Brave Bodyguards Protecting Belize’s Scarlet Macaws From Poachers To keep macaw chicks safe, a team of rangers spends night and day watching over the birds’ nests and homes. The Scarlet Macaw’s last, best defense against wildlife poachers doesn’t look like much: just a ramshackle collection of tarps, makeshift tables, plastic five-gallon buckets, jungle hammocks, and a cook fire, hidden in the dense understory of a tropical hardwood forest near the fraught and uncomfortably porous border between Belize and Guatemala...
Scarlet Six Biomonitoring Team is a group of roughly a dozen conservation-minded Belizeans (and one American) who are bent on protecting Belize’s Scarlet Macaw from the illegal pet trade. To deter poachers—and monitor the nests for productivity data—the Scarlet Six rangers set up camps in the Chiquibul Forest, right under the trees where macaws nest. There they live for the five months of chick-rearing season, roughly late April through September. If it sounds slightly nuts, it’s because it is—one of the purest distillations of brute-force conservation imaginable. But apparently it’s also not nuts, because it works: Macaw nests are no longer being poached in the areas where the rangers roost."
