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Last Monday, February 5, it rained heavily again in Bogotá.
Professor Andrés Cuervo, curator of the Ornithology Collection of the Institute of Natural Sciences (ICN) of the National University of Colombia, was in his office when a student and her assistant arrived, alarmed.
On the cabinets that house the biological collection, the largest of birds in Colombia, the country that has the most species in the world, it was raining.
They weren't drops.
They were jugs of water.
They acted in emergency mode.
They put a plastic that the ICN has already had to use on several occasions to protect the cabinets, they grabbed buckets that seemed insufficient and they literally prayed that none of the 43,000 bird specimens they have would get water on them.
There, at risk, 1,650 species of birds were represented, almost 85% of those in Colombia.
“I suffered a lot,” says Cuervo a week later.
After going through drawer by drawer, they found no damage, just a few bird tags that were blurred by raindrops.
However, the chaos was warning enough of what might disappear.
“It is a very difficult topic emotionally.
But reason would also have told me: what did you do for all that to go to waste?
The feeling was as if, under one's care, the Mona Lisa had been graffitied.”
It is not the first time that researchers have experienced a scare like this.
Since 2010, it has been almost a constant.
The ICN building not only houses the Ornithological Collection but 12 other collections, including the National Herbarium, also the largest plant herbarium in Colombia, with more than 600,000 specimens.
And now it flirts with falling into ruins.
Although there, adding the 13 collections, a total of 3.5 million specimens are housed, the infrastructure is flooded, there are leaks and the building has a structural failure that has filled it with cracks.
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Colombia Biological Collection
Deterioration of the institute building.
Photo: Camila Acosta Alzate |
Video: EPV
“In reality, the ICN is two buildings attached to each other,” says Gonzalo Andrade, director of the institute.
The first was built in the 70s, and since it was built in a humid area, they designed it with technology so that it can move or tilt slightly, depending on the time of year.
The second, the annex, built in the 80s, was made fixed, without expansion.
“Then, when the original moves south, it collides with the new one, causing it to fracture.”
Around 2017, remembers Carlos Parra, who was director of the National Herbarium between 2010 and 2018, the University did a study to find out what was happening and what could be done.
“The conclusion was that it was more expensive to reinforce the building than to tear it down and rebuild it.
A mitigation was then proposed that included ten recommendations, such as putting mesh on the roofs.
That way, if it shook and something fell, it wouldn't hit us in the head, but that wasn't even done,” recalls Parra, who, during his administration, experienced three major floods.
The concern of scientists is enormous, and goes beyond the risk faced by the almost 30 researchers who work in the building.
The deepest fear is losing what those cabinets hold, which hold years of data, history and information.
The first specimen that entered the National Herbarium, for example, is an
Equisetum bogotense
collected by the famous botanist José Jerónimo Triana in 1853. In fact, from the Chorographic Commission, led by General Agustín Codazzi to carry out geographical and cartographic studies, and of which Triana was the main botanist, there are about 5,000 specimens collected between 1851 and 1857.
But the Herbarium has even older specimens.
With a plant on the table, dating from 1783, Julián Aguirre, professor and botanist at the INC, says that, through an exchange with the Royal Botanical Garden of Madrid (Spain), several specimens collected by the famous botanist and mathematician José Celestino Mutis during the Royal Botanical Expedition of the New Kingdom of Granada.
From that collection there are 598 specimens that were collected between 1783 and 1810.
Plant species preserved at the institute.
Camila Acosta Alzate
What the ICN building keeps is a treasure.
It is the nation's heritage, as Andrade says.
For non-expert eyes, it is evident that in these cabinets there is genetic potential, scientific resources that serve the world and reference points in the history of Colombia.
But Cuervo, who has been guarding the bird collection for five years, also sees thousands of stories.
In the flood—which was not that of Noah's Ark—specimens of the Andean Grebe could have been lost, a bird declared extinct in 1977;
of miniature hummingbirds, which only reach the size of a pinky;
and unique species that have only been found in areas such as the Serranía del Pinche, in Cauca.
“That was like experiencing a catastrophe.”
Saving the collections: a project that is still in suspense
The National University is no stranger to what is happening within the INC facilities.
In 2018, Andrade adds, the institute and the university's architects designed a project of four buildings to house the collections, those natural treasures, in a more secure way, under the parameters they deserve.
“We have not stayed still.
The buildings we propose, which according to the Territorial Planning Plan cannot be higher than five floors, would give us a storage capacity of between 8,000 and 10,000 square meters, when the current capacity is about 5,000."
However, the plans have been on paper for more than five years.
Not even the first brick has been laid, because no one has given the money for the construction to start.
“The value of this project, with funding included, is 93,000 million pesos (around 24 million dollars) and even if we get only a part of that money, we would be ready to start building, even if it is a building.”
According to Camilo Younes, vice chancellor of Research at the National University, a public institution, the investment budget they have – other than the money for their operation – is 300,000 million pesos for three years (a little less than 77 million dollars). .
“We cannot spend almost 100,000 million pesos on a single project, on a building, that is why with the current budget we cannot comply,” he says.
What they have done from the University and from the ICN itself is to call on the Government to, in some way, intervene and obtain that money.
“We believe that it is a responsibility of the ministries of Science, Environment and Education, but also of Culture, because the Constitution says that the flora and fauna of the nation are Colombian heritage,” considers Andrade.
But none of the ministries wanted to say much.
América Futura contacted them and the only one they received a response from was the Ministry of Culture, through the heritage area.
“Last Friday we visited the building.
The University is carrying out the technical study and will have to present the project for authorization because it is in the area of influence of the Campus' National Assets of Cultural Interest.
But the Ministry of Culture is not responsible for investing, that must be done by the owner, which is the National University,” they explained.
Researchers catalog birds at the institute.
Camila Acosta Alzate
Professor Cuervo now hopes that some small repairs that were made to the roof where the Ornithology Collection is located will resist future rains.
But what breaks his heart is that in Colombia, a country with such high and growing diversity, the infrastructure he has to protect it “does not do it justice.”