Bryam David, the Visitor Who Brought Art

Sometimes visitors come to the reserve and leave carrying something away without meaning to; other times, it is they who leave something behind. Today was the second kind of visit. Bryam David wandered through Los Loros with his phone and an application that transforms photographs into colored-pencil illustrations. He captured the scarlet macaws at the release point — that place where the skies open wide and the birds return to the world that was always meant for them — and he found the cotton-top tamarins near the ceiba de los tití, where one of them was eating papaya while the other watched the world stick out its tongue. When Bryam shared the three images with the team, something stirred. The red, blue, and yellow of an Ara macao in full flight above the tropical canopy, sketched by hand like a drawing in a school notebook, was a reminder that the stories of rescue and release that play out across this land deserve a book. The idea of the stories already existed, but that afternoon it took on shape and urgency. Bryam came as a visitor and left without knowing that he had lit a fuse.