Fifty-Seven Returns at Villanueva

There was a little of everything that day: the scaled green of nine iguanas, the restless yellow of eleven canaries released in individual cages and then as a group, the red and blue of five guacamayas who had been waiting a long time for this moment. Among them, a red lora that had once belonged to a man from the Manga neighborhood in Cartagena — and that Tuesday, she left her life as a pet behind and vanished into the trees of Villanueva. The team from the Centro de Atención a la Vida Silvestre del EPA coordinated the entire operation with the methodical calm of people who have done this many times before and know that every release is different. Three hormigueros also returned to the wild that day, along with seven morrocoys moving at their slow, unhurried pace, eleven cotorras, and eleven pericos — three of the latter had arrived as chicks months earlier, rescued by Pájaro, and now they were leaving with full plumage and just the right size to face the undergrowth. Fifty-seven animals in all, each with its own story, released on the same day in the same place. That doesn't happen every day.