The Andean Tapir Fund

The Andean Tapir Fund promotes the preservation and restoration of the endangered mountain tapir together with its habitat. The latter consists of Andean forests, including cloud forests, and paramos, a treeless type of spongy moor- or grass land occurring above the forests between approximately 6000 and 16000 feet of elevation. The Mountain Tapir still survives in increasingly fragmented isolated populations between the Piuran Cordiller of Northern Peru through the Eastern Andean Cordillera of Ecuador and parts of the Western in North Ecuador and in both the Eastern and Central Andean Cordilleras of Colombia. Its former range has been overrun by forest destroying colonizers and its populations decimated by hunters. 

Craig Downer has captured, radio collared, released and tracked 7 wild mountain tapirs in the world heritage Sangay National Park of Ecuador as well as scouted out the wild populations or their possibility throughout Peru, Ecuador, Colombia and Venezuela, amassing a large volume of observations and factual information.  He wrote the Action Plan and Species Resume (1997) for the mountain tapir and is on the IUCN SSC Tapir Specialist Group.  The Andean Tapir Fund is dedicated to carrying out the goals outlined in the Action Plan and has made great headway in increasing public awareness and concern for this very endangered species, of which luckily perhaps only 2000 survive. The Mountain. Tapir is a great seed disperser and its feces also enrich soils. It is a trail opener and also an important prey species.  It is recognized as a keystone species of the northern Andes and as such a vital part of the eastern Andean hotspot of biodiversity, considered the mother of all the world's biodiversity hotspots.  Through activities of the ATF many additional areas have been preserved for the Mountain Tapir and the host of accompanying species. Currently the ATF needs additional funds to set up a sanctuary in Northern Peru and stave off open pit mining. Many grassroots communities and conservationists as well as the Catholic church are fighting to save these highland Andean forests and paramos, home to most of Peru’s remaining, ca. 200 Mountain Tapirs.