Mango Season in the Aviaries

There are months at Fundación Loros that are set apart by a particular kind of uproar: the mango months. Omar Enrique Berdugo was making his rounds through the aviaries, phone in hand, when he decided to capture what he describes as one of the most spirited times of year at the reserve — that season when the parrots seem to remember, with every bite into the yellow fruit, that the world can be a generous place. The videos Omar filmed that first of May show the colony in full celebration, absorbed in the happy, noisy work of eating mango. For the birds in the foundation's care, these fruits are no luxury — they are a cornerstone of their wellbeing: a source of nutrients, a spark for natural behaviors, and the reason the aviaries fill with that green and orange clamor that so gladdens anyone lucky enough to witness it. Omar puts it with the plainness of someone who tends to these creatures up close: the fruit trees surrounding the reserve must be protected, because much of what happens inside depends on them. Across the foundation's 520 hectares, near Cartagena, the trees are not merely scenery. They are larder, shelter, and memory — a living promise of what these birds will one day find again, in freedom.