KSTR Update
By Jennifer Rice PhD, KSTR President
Kids Saving The Rainforest has been very busy with lots of great news that we want to share with you.
We now have our official Zoological Garden license. We use this license for our wildlife sanctuary to house any wildlife that can’t be released back into the rainforest, animals that would have to be euthanized if we did not care for them. Currently there are over 20 monkeys protected at the Sanctuary which is called the Kids Saving The Rainforest Educational Center.
Pia Martin DVM, our wildlife vet, offers private tours to those wishing to learn about the rainforest, it’s destruction, and how they can help to save it.
ICE has insulated the live electric wires near the corner of the Hotel Mono Azul and they will be insulating more in the future. They have also covered 40 transformers and placed dozens of physical barriers like “cones and little spiders” on the secondary wires to prevent the animals from jumping onto the wires, so that sloths and other animals cannot get electrocuted. This is wonderful news; we have been working to get this started for 11 years. KSTR meets with ICE on a monthly basis to report updates of the monkey bridges and any electrocutions. We also identify the risk areas for the wildlife, assess them and help ICE determine if it is best to trim the trees, insulate a transformer, put up a cone or another device to physically prevent the animal from jumping on the wire, or to put up a monkey bridge). ICE helps us when we need to install monkey bridges where there is danger due to live electrical wires, they send out their cherry picker with our monkey bridge team.
KSTR and Co-founder, Janine Licare, were in an incredible article called “Women of the Forest: Gisele Bundchen, Trudie Styler, Daryl Hannah and Janine Licare” in COCO ECO MAGAZINE. For those of you who don’t recognize the names, Gisele is the Brazilian Super Model who is a rainforest activist, Trudie Styler is Sting’s wife and among many other things is an environmentalist. Daryl Hannah is best known for her acting in Kill Bill, Blade Runner and Splash. She is also known for her activism in preserving Planet Earth. Janine Licare is co-founder of KSTR, and will be graduating from Stanford University in June. She will then be going to teach for the program “Teach for America”. (Teach For America is the USA National Corps of outstanding recent college graduates who commit two years to teach in urban and rural public schools and become leaders in the effort to expand educational opportunity.) Janine will be teaching in East Los Angeles.
The US Ambassador to Costa Rica came to our sanctuary and got a tour from Pia Martin DVM, Barbara Thompson, our wildlife rehabber, and some of the kids of Kids Saving The Rainforest. The Ambassador posted on Twitter “Impressed by success of Kids Saving the Rainforest. Outreach builds communities of interest across borders & preserves biodiversity in CR.” and posted 10 pictures of the event online!
An elementary school with 19 classrooms in the New Jersey is having their annual reading program, Reach for the Stars – READ. Students are challenged to reach a reading goal of 1000 minutes over 8 weeks. This year’s theme is the rainforest and they are learning a lot about the rainforest. KSTR is partnering with them and part of their reading will be the 4 books written by KSTR teaching about the rainforest. KSTR has donated our books to their library so that all the kids can read them.
Please help us to save the rainforest by shopping in our KSTR Souvenir Store, where 100% of the proceeds go to save the rainforest. See our Quepolandia ad for a 10% discount.