JulieCraves

Birds and other biodiversity / Know Your Coffee Birds series

Know your coffee birds: Wilson’s Warbler

The tiny, bright yellow bird that John  James Audubon called “Wilson’s Flycatching Warbler” breeds in a large swath all across northern North America. Wilson’s Warblers winter in much of Central America, and so pass through most of the continent at some point during the year. Molecular studies have shown that certain breeding populations winter in specific geographic areas. For instance, the most northerly-breeding birds of the western population winter the furthest south in Central America.

Females have duller caps.

One of the original names of Wilson’s Warbler was “Pileolated Warbler” after the male’s striking black skullcap, or pileum. As one of the warblers that has a flattish bill bordered by specialized feather “whiskers” to aid in the capture of small insects, the descriptor of “flycatching” or “flycatcher” was added to its name several times through history. Because he was the first to formally publish a description, ornithologist Alexander Wilson is now honored in the common name.

In the breeding season, the typical habitat of Wilson’s Warblers is dense thickets, especially moist ones in riparian areas. In the winter, however, it can be found in a much wider variety of habitats, which are often more open than nesting habitats. It is most abundant in tropical forests, cloud forest, pine-oak forest, and forest edge habitat, and is frequently found on coffee farms.

While many bird species tend to be somewhat set in their behavior at certain times of the year, wintering Wilson’s Warblers may be solitary, either roaming through a locality or forming a territory, or found in mixed flocks of other birds.  In addition to insects and some fruit, nectar is also consumed in winter. This flexibility in habitat requirements, behavior, and food resources has no doubt contributed to the success of Wilson’s Warblers, which remain one of our most common warblers. Yet recent population trends indicate numbers have declined 2% a year in the U.S., and over 4% a year in the eastern U.S. in recent decades. This is a well-studied species, but we need to know more to understand how to best conserve them. Unfortunately, we often neglect to take action with common species until serious problems are evident.

We have found Wilson’s Warblers common on coffee farms we visited in Panama and Nicaragua. We are about to travel once again to Nicaragua, where we will spend time at Finca El Jaguar in Jinotega, and once again visit to Finca Esperanza Verde in San Ramon, Matagalpa. You’ll be hearing more about our trip soon!

Top male Wilson’s Warbler photo by David Hofmann, female by Jean-Guy Dallaire, and bottom male by Pablo Leautaud, all under a Creative Commons license.

Corporate coffee / Jacobs Douwe Egberts/KraftHeinz

Sara Lee, Kraft: more baby steps

Sara Lee and Kraft both announce increases in purchase of certified coffees: what does this mean?

Sara Lee
Sara Lee (Senseo, Java Coast, Douwe Egberts, etc.) recently announced a five-year goal of tripling the amount of Utz Certified coffee it purchases. I love how this was spun: that in the past five years, Sara Lee had purchased 110 million kilos of Utz Certified coffee. That sounds like a huge amount, but 110 million kilos is 110,000 metric tons over five years. This is a little over 20,000 tons per year of the 450,000 tons that they purchase annually — less than 5% of their purchases. Indeed, this is right in line with what we learned in my previous post Certified coffee: current market share, part 2.

The article goes on to say that Sara Lee is “committed to more than triple that amount in the next five years and purchase at least 350 million kilos across all its markets and product segments.” My emphasis added.  All product segments, as the piece goes on to say, includes tea (e.g., Pickwick and Hornimans brands in Europe). Sara Lee purchased 2000 tons of Utz Certified tea in 2010, so a tripling of that amount has to be factored in to get to their goal of 350 million kilos. If met, this goal means that in 2015, certified coffee will still only be 15 to 20% of their total coffee purchases. And Utz currently does not have significant environmental standards.

Sara Lee also just revealed that due to rising coffee prices, it will be reformulating some of its coffee blends to include more cheap robusta beans. You know — the ones typically grown as sun coffee.

Kraft
Kraft (Yuban, Maxwell House, General Foods International Coffee, Gevalia, Kenco, Maxim, Tassimo, Nabob, and Sanka) has reported that they increased the amount of Rainforest Alliance certified coffee they purchased to 110 million pounds in 2010. If we drag out the calculator again (and round up for the sake of simplicity) we see that is 50,000 metric tons…out of the 740,000 tons they purchase each year, or less than 7% of their total purchases.

Coffee image by bitzcelt under a Creative Commons license.

Coffee reviews / Indo-Pacific

Review: Doi Chaang Civet coffee, revisited

Plainspoken Coffee. A Coffee Review for Ordinary People by Ordinary People, #46.

I’ve written about Doi Chaang Coffee, a unique Thai/Canadian partnership, before.  This is certified organic, certified Fair Trade (although the partnership goes well beyond), single-origin coffee grown in northern Thailand. There is plenty of background information on the company and the coffee in the review of their medium roast that we did in 2008. I won’t rehash everything here, but just provide the basics:

Doi Chaang coffee is grown on over 2400 ha in the vicinity of the village of Doi Chang (20.325, 99.839) in Chiang Rai province at around 1200 meters. It is 50% Caturra, 35% Catimor, and 15% Catuai. The coffee is grown under the shade of various fruit and nut trees, including macadamia, plum, pear, and peach. Reforestation efforts in the area strive for a 50/50 mix of native tree species and cash crop species (both marketable and consumable crops are necessary to replace the income formerly generated by poppy growing).

In 2009, we reviewed Doi Chaang’s civet-processed coffee. Unlike most other civet coffees (often known as “kopi luwak“), Doi Chaang does not farm or raise civets in captivity (see the third photo here for the tiny cages in which these animals are typically held). All beans are gathered from what is left behind by wild civets in the Doi Chaang coffee-growing areas. Two species of civets are found in the area, the Masked Palm Civet (Paguma larvata) and the Asian Palm Civet (Paradoxurus hermaphroditus). The related Binturong (Arctictis binturong) also occurs there and is known to eat coffee fruit as well.

Generally, civet coffees are made from beans that have passed through the digestive tracts of these animals: they eat the ripe coffee cherries, but do not digest the seeds, which are passed in the waste. For more on this, er, process, read our review of typical kopi luwak coffee, and the review of Doi Chaang’s wild civet coffee. As I mentioned in the latter post, Doi Chaang actually offers two types of wild civet coffee: passed and spat. It’s not unusual for animals to regurgitate large seeds from fruit they have just eaten rather than have all the bulk pass through their systems. Modest chemical changes in the coffee beans apparently do occur when they pass through the entire digestive systems of civets. I’m not sure they’d be exposed to digestive enzymes long enough to make a profound difference if they are just held in the mouth and then spit out. However, it’s conceivable that mammals may first swallow the fruit and shortly thereafter regurgitate the seeds, in which case they will have been exposed, at least for a short time, to some of the digestive processes that apparently give “passed” civet coffee its character.

Doi Chaang provided us with a tin of the “spat” wild civet coffee for us to try. Because these are wild civets, the coffee is very limited. This year it is available in 50-gram tins, so we were unable to have a lot of people taste the coffee, so we won’t provide a motmot rating as we usually do.  We prepared the civet coffee as a simple pour-over, side by side with their medium roast single estate variety. Later, we also made the medium roast peaberry variety as a drip, and compared notes with another round of the civet as a pourover. We were going to use the peaberry for the side-by-side comparison, but the standard bean version seemed closer in roast level to the civet variety. The latter was, visually, perhaps just a tad lighter.

Now we don’t consider ourselves as having an extremely sensitive palates — we are ordinary people, after all — and I was frankly skeptical that a “spat” coffee could have gone through any flavor-enhancing changes. So we didn’t expect to be able to tell the difference between the two. We were wrong. The civet coffee was markedly smoother, with an understated milk chocolate sweetness. In our previous review (the “passed” civet coffee), we didn’t detect the Sumatran-like profile of earth and leather that we did in the regular and peaberry varieties (which were muted in that crop year, but much sharper this year). This time, we did get a more Sumatran vibe from the wild civet coffee, although it was restrained and very mellow, especially as the cup cooled. Hands down, we liked this better than either the peaberry or the standard single origin.  Was it due to the extra care and sorting that might go into the preparation of the civet beans? More careful roasting of the precious beans? Can a civet discern some particular property in ripe coffee cherries, thus making these beans share some special characteristic? Or does even brief consumption by the mammal impart a distinct profile? I can’t say. But I will admit, it was markedly different, and clearly more enjoyable.

Here is a recent review of the Doi Chaang wild civet “spat” coffee by CoffeeReview.

Since we first started reviewing Doi Chaang’s coffees, they have become much more widely available in both retail outlets and online.

One of my absolute favorite things about Doi Chaang is a coffee is the nearly overwhelming amount of information the company freely provides about its history, growing, processing, and people. If people could have this kind of background on all the coffee they buy, nobody would be drinking mystery corporate coffee anymore. Here are a couple resources:

  • The Doi Chaang blog.
  • A 30-minute documentary produced by Global TV is available in segments on YouTube. Part 3 is a quickie, and deals with the civet coffee as well as other products being produced by Doi Chaang, including macadamia nuts, honey, and soap. I love hearing brother Wicha talk about poop!

The Doi Chaang story is really remarkable. I especially recommend the documentary. The success of Doi Chaang in North America is nothing compared to how successful its been in changing the lives of the hill tribe that produces it. If you feel an urge to drop some cash on an animal-processed coffee, go for the Doi Chaang version. Not only does it avoid exploiting animals, it generates income for a company doing truly good work.

Coffee and the environment

Short video on shade coffee and birds

The Colombian bird conservation organization FundaciÁ³n ProAves is now presenting a short video, “Shade-grown coffee and saving migratory birds of North and Latin America.”  A lot of the tropical footage was shot in their Cerulean Warbler Bird Reserve and the community of San Vicente de Chucuri in Santander Department. It also touches on the issues in the U.S. Appalachian region, where mountain-top removal coal mining is also destroying habitat.

The video is also available in Spanish.

Several partners funded and produced the film. I don’t like to nitpick, but I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention that there is a link at the end of the video that goes one of their sites where they are marketing a certified organic, Fair Trade, shade grown coffee.

There is no origin or shade certification indicated for this coffee.  Given that a major theme of the film is “Where does your coffee come from?” this seems ironic. After digging around a bit, I found a page that says the coffee is from Nicaragua; the roaster offers a Nicaraguan  — I presume that’s probably what they are using — but it’s not from the Smithsonian Bird-Friendly certified farm in that country. The cooperative the roaster sources from is 2300 members, and most grow under at least some shade. Still, it would have been appropriate to use Bird-Friendly certified coffee.