Free Small Wonder by Barbara Kingsolver Page B

their prehensile tails in a Yankee-go-home bungee-jumping display. Retreating toward our lodge, we heard a parrotish squawk in the treetops that we recognized from pet shops. Was it a macaw?
    â€œSí, guacamayos,” we were assured by a gardener whom we found shaking his head over the raided pineapple patch. Yes, he’d been seeing macaws lately, he said, usually in pairs, “practicando a casarse” —“practicing to be married.” This was April, the beginning of nesting season. Following their species’ courtship rituals, the macaw pairs would settle into tree cavities, always situated more than a hundred feet off the ground, to lay and hatch their two-egg clutches. The young stay with their parents for up to two years, during which time the adults do no more nesting until after these young have dispersed. This combination of specialized habitat and slow reproduction makes macaws especially vulnerable to an assembly of threats. The ravages of aerial pesticide spraying have lately diminished, as banana companies have left the country or switched to oil-palm production, but deforestation remains aphenomenal peril. Of the macaws’ original Costa Rican habitat, only 20 percent still stands, all of it now protected. In addition to the Osa population, there are some 330 birds in the Carara Biological Reserve to the north, and others survive in scattered pockets from southern Mexico into Amazonian Brazil.
    Dire habitat loss has become the norm for tropical species, but macaws and parrots are further doomed by their own charm. Such beauty doesn’t come cheap: A poacher who captures a young scarlet macaw can sell it into the pet trade for up to $400 U.S. (The fine for being caught is about $325.) Since 1990, when the nearby town of Golfito was allowed to reduce taxes on goods passing through its port, employment in the import trade has grown, and poaching has noticeably declined. Farther north, however, in the economically undeveloped Carara region, the activity is still ubiquitous. Many conservationists feel that their best hope is to introduce alternative sources of income for the poachers while educating their children about poaching’s long-term trade-offs—which could include the extinction of a national emblem before they’re old enough to become adept at climbing hundred-foot trees. During our trip we spoke with several educators whose programs in the schools are aimed specifically at developing a family conscience about stealing baby parrots and macaws from their nest holes. Reordering children’s attitudes toward threatened species may eventually influence their families, so the thinking goes, even within a culture that has traditionally allowed these birds to be harvested with no more moral qualms than a hungry coatimundi brings to a pineapple patch.
    An organization named Zoo Ave goes a step further, by rehabilitating birds recovered from poachers or from captivity and reintroducing them into the wild. So far the group has released nineteen birds into the forest on the eastern shore of Golfo Dulce, far enough from Corcovado that the populations should remaingenetically distinct. Of these birds, eleven are known to have survived. Zoo Ave’s goal is to establish a population of a dozen or so breeding pairs in the area near Rainbow Lodge, adjacent to the newly protected Piedras Blancas National Park. Given that the total number of breeding macaw pairs in Central America is probably less than a hundred, every new nest cavity lined and filled with two white eggs is cause for celebration.
    â€œEl que quiera azul celeste, que le cueste,” the Costa Ricans say—“If you want the blue sky, the price is high.” The mix of hope and fatalism in this dicho speaks perfectly of the macaw’s fierce love of freedom and its touching vulnerability. We stood on a cliff near our palapa above the ocean, scanning, hoping for a glimpse of scarlet that wasn’t