Scroll below the text for a gallery of Guatemalan Cloud Forest photos.

Professional Cloud catchers. Cloud forests exist in many places in the world, and they can vary dramatically in rainfall. But all Cloud Forests share one thing in common - their trees are skilled at catching clouds. When clouds are snagged, their moisture condenses on the vegetation and drips life-giving water to the forest floor. Tropical Cloud Forests, like the ones in the Guatemalan highlands, occupy mountainous regions relatively close to the ocean in relatively narrow bands of elevation - wherever the climatic conditions are just right for trees to apprehend passing blankets of clouds. When observing this phenomenon firsthand, as the clouds approach a forested mountainside the trees actually appear to breathe the clouds into the folds of their canopies. The mist that envelopes Cloud Forests is so dense that sunlight and temperature is dramatically reduced, while the humidity level soars. Decomposition is slowed by the low temperatures, and peat builds up in the dark organic soils. Cloud Forest’s signature plants include mosses, liverworts, ferns, lichens, and, in the New World, bromeliads - carpeting every horizontal and vertical surface available. Another common and striking inhabitant is the tree fern, an ancient plant growing to impressive heights.

Guatemala Cloud Forests. Spectacular cloud forests exist on the ridgetops of Central America, including the mountaintops of Guatemala, all of which are associated with high rainfall. The “bones” of the complex forest community are the trees. And the primary trees are none other than tropical species of Quercus, some of them bearing the same common names of their Appalachian kin, such as white oak and black oak. Even their bark looks the same as their northern ancestors. This should come as no surprise, given that the lineage of these oaks arose in North America, It is believed the genus pressed southward into Central America during the glacially-cold Pleistocene era and adapted to a subtropical high-elevation climate. Today these oaks tower above their dripping understories, their branches and trunks covered with aerial vegetation. If ever there existed an “Avatar” forest right here on planet Earth, it would have to be these oak-dominated Cloud Forests of Central America.

Catch-up Conservation. It is noteworthy that the forests of nearby Costa Rica and Belize are relatively well preserved. But due to Guatemala’s tragic history of instability, the country received little attention from conservation groups during the late decades of the 20th Century, when effective conservation was happening in so many other places across the world. Today Guatemala is trying to catch up, and some progress has been made in the Western Highlands and the Antiplano Highlands (also in the west). But most of the old-growth Cloud Forests in the Central Highlands, where Community Cloud Forest Conservation is located, are under the conservation radar and remain in peril.

The Appalachian Bird Connection. For those of us who love the Appalachian Forests of the Eastern United States, preserving Guatemala’s Cloud Forests is critically important because of the number of bird species we share in common. Ohio, for instance, sends 38 species of its breeding birds back to Guatemala each fall. Although Guatemala is not much larger than Ohio, it harbors a super-sized share of the population of many of our Eastern Forest’s neo-tropical birds.

Consider the wood thrush. The map shown below doesn’t just show the usual range map by country, but rather it shows the density of wood thrush populations in any one location by the intensity of the purple color. (Click here to see this map’s source - the North American Bird Conservation Initiative, NABCI) It’s hard to comprehend that all of the Wood Thrush scattered across the vast eastern third of our nation manage to compress their population into this relatively small geographic area highlighted in purple. Look for the purple band bank running east and west across the center of Guatamala. That’s the swath of mountains composing the Mayan Highlands, where tens of thousands of Wood Thrush spend autumn-spring every year, and where Community Cloud Forest Conservation is located.