The Squirrel, the Dew, and the Parrot Learning to Be Silent

That morning, Omar Enrique Berdugo Cabeza walked the sanctuary with a group of visitors whose names slipped into forgetting but who carried something more lasting away with them: the image of green parrots sweeping over sectors B12, B11, and B07, settling nearby without fear, as though they had spent their whole lives waiting for company. It was somewhere between that flight and that wonder when she appeared — unhurried, almost secret — a wild squirrel drinking the dew that the early hours had left sleeping on the platano leaves. One of those moments the sanctuary offers without warning. Further along, in aviaries 1 and 4, the guacamayas were already deep in their morning ritual: pimentón, peanut, papaya, banana, and sunflower seed — the usual breakfast, savored with that colorful solemnity only they possess. But it was in aviary 3 where the morning held its quietest moment. The loro real was producing imitative sounds — that habit so deeply human, which in him sounds something like a trap — and the team, true to protocol, answered with silence. Because the goal here is not for the parrot to learn to speak the way we do, but to forget that he ever could, so that the day he crosses the fence into the forest, he flies unburdened by everything we taught him.