Juan de Dios Morales

I am truly excited to be the Bird Cams Outreach Assistant at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. I work creating media content for the Panama Feeder Cam, and aim to ensure everybody enjoys tropical birds as much as I do. My biggest aspiration is to mainstream nature conservation and its direct contribution to humans through conservation photography, videography, science, and storytelling. I am honored to contribute to and help improve Cornell Lab’s worldwide biodiversity conservation efforts.

Since I was 15 years old, nature became my passion after watching outstanding media productions on Animal Planet, National Geographic, and Discovery Channel. The famous “Crocodile Hunter” Steve Irwin was the biggest influencer in my life. I double majored in applied and marine ecology at Universidad San Francisco de Quito (USFQ), Ecuador, where I had the opportunity to venture into wildlife photography in the outstanding and enchanted Ecuadorian Galapagos Islands.

Back in the day, I enjoyed assisting and working with different species, including the Nazca and Blue-footed Booby and Waved Albatross, which were my first ornithological banding experiences. I also assisted in a long-term Wire-tailed Manakin research project doing mist netting and blood-sampling in the Ecuadorian Amazon. After graduating, I became the “in situ” manager at the Tiputini Biodiversity Station, located in the Yasuni Biosphere Reserve in the same area.

For my masters degree I decided to explore a different area of the world, and headed to the University of Melbourne in Australia to study urban landscape ecology and management studies. Living on the other side of the world, I formed a connection with Australian cockatoos and Rainbow Lorikeets, and many other wonderful species of South East Asiam wildlife. I also wanted to experience other areas in the Southern Hemisphere, and visited many marvelous places such as the Danun Valley Field Center in Malaysian Borneo, the Komodo National Park in Indonesia, and other culturally rich places like Thailand, Burma, Laos, and Vietnam.

These wonderful experiences inspired me to refine my focus on environmental photography and media. I created the Wild GYE Initiative (WGI), an initiative promoting biodiversity conservation in one of the 33rd most biodiverse emerging cities on Earth, Guayaquil, Ecuador. This city has become a conservation, urban, biosphere laboratory where WGI focuses on the Tumbes Guayaquil Seasonal Dry Forest and the Guayaquil Swampy Mangrove Forests, two Critically Endangered ecosystems listed in the IUCN Red List of Ecosystems.

Developing WGI into an environmental conservation and education communication platform (@wildgyeinitiative) is a professional milestone, as is watching its outreach grow, such as being featured in Forbes (Global South Section). I am also proud of the publication of two educational books that cover the 40 birds and 25 mammals recorded by the camera trapping project, Camera for Conservation, Camera for Education Program. My next book is Untamed Guayaquil: The Truthful Right of City’s Nature, which gathers six years of photographic collection highlighting the area’s wildlife, and natural history, and examines future challenges to the natural world in this developing city.

Nowadays, WGI is working on the Return of The King Conservation Program in collaboration with the Fundación Cóndor Andino, Universidad San Francisco de Quito, Fundación Ceiba, Peregrine Fund, Osa Conservation and the Third Millennium Alliance. This program focuses on the conservation efforts of the King Vulture, which is found in Ecuador’s Coastal Region. Using camera traps and GPS trackers, the results showcase the importance of the tropical dry forest ecosystems for wildlife.

Education

M.Sc., Environment,University of Melbourne, Australia
B.Sc., Applied and Marine Ecology, Universidad San Francisco de Quito, Ecuador