Hola! Hello!
First off, Mario Jiménez could not be with us today. As you read this, he could be 130 feet up a Mountain Almond tree checking on a macaw nest, or he may be carefully placing a chick into a padded bucket for a brief trip to the ground for blood samples …. Or maybe he is checking on the orphaned chick he placed in “foster care” with a macaw couple that already had two chicks of their own.
It’s breeding season, and Mario, three volunteers and University of Kent graduate student Salome Lopez have been busy in the field. Mario is field team leader at the Macaw Recovery Network’s Great Green Macaw research station in northern Costa Rica. His work year-round is vital to MRN’s mission to save these critically endangered birds from extinction. He knows macaw behavior and patterns. With muscle, harness and ropes, he navigates the Mountain Almonds where the birds nest. He checks the tree’s deep cavities without disturbing the parents or their eggs. He tracks the progress of their young without intruding on them and knows where to look for new nests and new macaw families.
Since the beginning of the breeding season in December, the team has found and kept tabs on 36 chicks among nests in 18 trees, including one that took the team an hour’s hike to get to. On their rounds, they also took care to avoid the occasional encounters with snakes, wasps or bees.
“Oh, and yes, of course, you can fall from a tree,” Mario says, although no one’s ever had a bad fall.
Now, nearing the season’s end in June, most of the chicks have fledged and Mario and Salome are finishing their work of taking blood samples on the remaining ones and fitting them with lightweight radio collars.
“No one has done that in the world with the Great Green Macaw,” Mario says, referring to the blood samples they’ve taken and the tracking collars they’ve put on the birds.
Now in these last days of the season, Mario doesn’t expect to find any more eggs. But on a recent day while out in the field, he heard the familiar sound of chicks squawking high up in a tree. He’d found a new nest! And while he couldn’t climb the tree that day because so many bees were buzzing close by, he will tend to the nest as he’s done all the others. And if he and Salome are able to put radio collars on the chicks, he’ll be able to track them once they’ve left home and flown into wild.
–Peggy Harris is a volunteer writer for the Macaw Recovery Network.
–Mario Jiménez, Field Leader, has worked with Great Green Macaws for almost six years.