Two Nests Beneath the Macaw's Nest

Michel Salas was walking among the hills of the sanctuary when he looked up and found this image: two hanging nests of the crested oropendola (*Psarocolius decumanus*) swaying from the branches of a *Pseudoalbizia neopodoides* — a multi-trunked tree standing in sharp relief against the blue afternoon sky. Higher up, in the uppermost branches of that same tree, a macaw had claimed its own space. One tree, two species, two nesting stories layered one upon the other. Oropendola nests are unmistakable: long, woven from plant fibers, they hang like wind-filled pouches from the tips of branches. Michel recorded the discovery with two photographs and a video, documenting this uncommon neighborliness between the oropendola and the macaw — sharing, without apparent conflict, the same tree at coordinates 10.4398, -75.2573 within the reserve. This interspecific association in a single tree is precisely the kind of data that Fundación Loros' bird monitoring program seeks to gather: quiet proof that the forest is alive and intricate, and that every tree can be a world unto itself.