A howler mother with two young on the path

Alberto set out that afternoon to bring food to the release site, walking the familiar stretch through the reserve's dense vegetation. But before he reached his destination, on the flattest part of the trail, some fifty meters short of the end, something stopped him in his tracks: a female howler monkey with two newborns clinging to her back. Two young at once — something that, in all the years of work at Fundación Loros, is rarely seen. Alberto managed to reach for his phone and start recording. Further along, at the release site, the day kept giving. Eighteen blue-and-yellow macaws — Ara ararauna — birds well into their reintegration process, wheeled between the enclosure and the open sky above the hillside. Two chejas rounded out the group. Alberto captured them in video and in photographs: some perched beside the fruit feeder, others in full flight above the green canopy under the clear afternoon sky. It was one of those walks where the path itself has more to offer than the destination.