{"id":429215,"date":"2026-05-01T12:30:17","date_gmt":"2026-05-01T11:30:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.iucn.nl\/?p=429215"},"modified":"2026-05-01T14:51:44","modified_gmt":"2026-05-01T13:51:44","slug":"fighting-for-bonaires-forests-one-goat-at-a-time","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.iucn.nl\/en\/story\/fighting-for-bonaires-forests-one-goat-at-a-time\/","title":{"rendered":"Fighting for Bonaire’s forests one goat at a time"},"content":{"rendered":"
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How the small, dedicated team of STINAPA is quietly restoring one of the Caribbean’s most threatened ecosystems by removing a centuries old invasive species.<\/h4>\n<\/div>\n\n
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Header photo: One goat of many \u00a9 STINAPA (2026)<\/mark><\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n

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Timely recognition<\/h2>\n<\/div>\n\n
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When Caren Eckrich, Ecology Advisor and team member at Stichting Nationale Parken Bonaire (STINAPA), gets disheartened by the sheer scale of the work ahead, her colleague Paulo Bertuol, Ecology Advisor and project lead, sends her something to hold onto: photos and videos of baby trees, hundreds of them, sprouting up across the forest floor. \u2018<\/strong>We did this,\u2019<\/strong> he tells her. And they did.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n

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STINAPA recently received a new grant through the BESTLIFE2030 programme, the EU-funded biodiversity initiative coordinated by IUCN Europe, with IUCN NL serving as the regional focal point for the Dutch Caribbean. For Caren and her small but tireless team, the timing is critical. The grant will directly support Proyekto Parke Bunita<\/em> or “Pretty Park Project” in Papiamentu.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n

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The project entails STINAPA’s multi-year effort to eradicate invasive feral grazers from the Washington Slagbaai Park, the vast protected wilderness that covers roughly 17% of the island of Bonaire. After a difficult stretch of reduced national government funding, the BESTLIFE2030 support gives the project the capacity it needs to keep moving forward.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

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A problem four centuries in the making<\/h2>\n<\/div>\n\n
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In 1969, Washington became the first nature sanctuary in the Netherlands Antilles. Slagbaai was added in 1979 to create the 4,286-hectare protected area in the northwest of Bonaire, as it exists today. It is home to flamingos, sea turtles, the endangered Yellow-shouldered Amazon parrot, as well as a remarkable dry tropical forest. But for most of its existence as a park, this forest has been under quiet, relentless assault from animals that arrived with European colonisers four centuries ago.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n

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\u2018When the Europeans came, they brought goats and pigs,\u2019 Caren explains. \u2018They released them because they wanted a food source when they kept coming back to the islands.\u2019 Bonaire was known as the farm island. Goats were raised as livestock and to sustain plantation economies. The park itself was once two working plantations; Washington and Slagbaai (formerly known as “America”), where goat herding was central to daily life. When those plantations ended and the land became protected territory, the goats remained – and went feral.

Currently, population studies estimated a goat density of 2.7 goats per hectare in the national park, corresponding to an abundance of around 11,000 animals. The ecological consequences have been severe.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n

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Overgrazing by feral goats causes a shift from diverse vegetation, including native trees, shrubs, orchids, and bromeliads – to a much less diverse landscape dominated by cactus and acacia thorn scrub. Overgrazing increases erosion and runoff, which delivers greater amounts of sediments and nutrients to the marine park, contributing to reduced water quality and threatening the health of the coral reefs.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n

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\u2018We’re living in like an ancient forest,\u2019 Caren says. \u2018The large trees are there, but they’re not being regenerated. The goats eat all the baby trees. They eat the grasses, so you get massive erosion during heavy rainfall, and that brings sediment and nutrients onto the reef. And reefs don’t like sediments and nutrients.\u2019 The damage is not just terrestrial. Every rainstorm that strips the denuded hillsides of Bonaire’s interior washes directly into one of the most celebrated coral reef systems in the Caribbean.

For decades, awareness of the problem grew slowly. \u2018It follows a classic case of shifting baselines, where each generation accepts a degraded landscape as the norm. I think unless you’re really monitoring it, you don’t realise,\u2019 Caren continues. It was only when fenced exclosure areas showed dramatic vegetation recovery, that the scale of what had been lost and what could be regained came into view. Policy followed: the Nature and Environment Policy Plan and the Coral Action Plan, developed around 2020, identified invasive grazer removal as a national priority, creating both the obligation and the mandate to act.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

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Rewilding The Washington Slagbaai National Park sign \u00a9 <\/mark><\/em>STINAPA (2026)<\/mark><\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n <\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

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\u2018People had to struggle so hard for food, and goats have always been their go-to in times of hardship.\u2019 <\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n

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