Carlos and Alberto, the Fruit, and the Forest Calendar

That Monday in April, Carlos and Alberto set out into the sanctuary with empty baskets and returned with three distinct flavors of the season: mangoes with green and yellow skins, ciruelas costeñas — that Spondias purpurea that shifts from fierce green to blazing red in a matter of days — and carambolas, known around these parts as torombolo or fruta estrella. The trees were heavy with fruit, their branches loaded with every stage of ripeness all at once, as if the forest couldn't quite decide whether to hold on or let go. The harvest goes directly into the diet of the Fundación's parrots, but there is something more than fruit inside those plastic crates: there is information. Every photograph taken that day is a phenological data point, a notation in the invisible calendar that the sanctuary keeps on its own trees — when they flower, when they bear fruit, when there is abundance and when there is scarcity. To know that is, in the long run, to know when the parrots eat well.