Volunteer Blog: Hazelle

As each bird leapt into flight, it became a challenge to determine which macaw was older and which was just released. Thankfully Duaro, the site manager, clipped a tiny amount off each tail feather so we could distinguish them at a reasonable distance, but the birds’ behavior was still the most reliable way to recognize the new releases: while the older birds could fly quite gracefully, even acrobatically at times, the new ones took a while to learn how to judge when and where was appropriate to land, which led to numerous sad but cute George-of-the-Jungle- style wipeouts.

And thus began six weeks of waking up to the yipping, bleating, and barking of 30+ wild and thriving Great Green macaws. Because I arrived during the only two-month period when both the mountain almond and the beach almond (the Great Greens’ favorite foods) were out of season, the principal tasks consisted mainly of doing the morning and afternoon feedings, maintaining the site’s roads and paths, and, of course, making bird cookies. Bird cookies are a lipid-dense snack made from a medley of different seeds and nuts, which are perfect for the great green macaws whose diets are uniquely specialized to process almonds and to a lesser extent fruit. This makes them more vulnerable than their distant cousins, the more generalist/fruitivore scarlet macaws, of which we had exactly one living in the lower aviary during my time at Ara Manzanillo.

Kuká or La Roja, as she was most commonly called, was a rare subspecies of scarlet macaw Ara Manzanillo received from the Ministry of the Environment (MINAE) who needed a lot of work. She was kept poorly as a pet, coming to us malnourished, underweight, and infected with lice. Before I arrived La Roja was medically checked, kept in quarantine and treated for parasites at the neighboring Jaguar Rescue Center. In my first few weeks, her feathers were raggedy and dull where left intact. We had to work extra hard to make sure her living enclosure was furnished with enough enrichment to facilitate her recovery, which was particularly challenging due to a persistent infestation of leafcutter ants who liked to make quick work of every new beach almond branch we installed in her aviary.