Photo: Terra Leone | Pixabay
Brazil’s Golden Lion Tamarins were on the verge of extinction a few decades ago, with only 200 surviving by the 1970’s. Some committed individuals and organizations are reversing the trend. Brazilian Ayrton Violento’s family farm was home to some of the remaining tamarins, who were confined to a roughly 1,000 square mile zone of lowland Atlantic forest north of Rio de Janeiro. Violento noticed that the monkeys needed a way to get from the north to the south of his 500-hectare (or 202-acre) property due to a significant gap in the forest cover. He began working with the Golden Lion Tamarin Association in 2006 on a plan to create a conservation zone and bio corridor through his farmland. He now has 150 species of trees for the golden lion tamarins and other species to traverse. Additionally, as the government was planning an interstate highway expansion, conservationists successfully lobbied for the construction of Brazil’s first ever forest bridge. In 2021, the bridge was opened with overground and underground passages for the golden monkeys to travels – an organic-concrete-fused bio corridor.
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