Four Years Among the Same Bricks

In a corner of the reserve where the red brick walls never quite finished rising, life found its own rhythm. José Marín has spent four years noticing the same thing: when the season comes, the goleros return. Not to a towering tree or a distant cliff face, but to that quiet hollow among the rubble, where dry earth holds fallen leaves and wild branches grow as though no one ever thought to plant them. This time, as in the year before, there is only one chick. The fledgling — still dressed in black, without the sheen of the adult — was moving slowly across the bare ground when José photographed it, indifferent to the outside world, sheltered by those unfinished walls that to anyone else might seem like abandonment, but to it are simply home. Coragyps atratus, which people call golero or gallinazo, carries a reputation as a bird of ill omen; yet there is something stubborn and admirable in the way this family returns to the same spot, season after season, with a faithfulness that few creatures can claim. Four years is time enough to call it a habit. Or perhaps something more.