La Senda Verde: Miscellaneous Magic

We walked to La Senda Verde (which we had heard about from a guy called Zac in Samaipata) from Coroico, which took between an hour and a half and two hours, what with me stopping for the odd picture. When we got there we were shown around the pool area where most of the monkeys live by Rob, one of the volunteers, and the bird and other enclosures by Holly and Jessy.

We committed ourselves to two weeks of volunteering and came down 48 hours later. We were taken through the procedure with the birds – macaws, parrots and conures to name the most colourful – and it seemed very straightforward. Of note was a macaw called “Primavera”, who pulled out his own head feathers in some act of rebellion against conventional notions of beauty that he was not able fully to articulate. It was like punk all over again. All of the birds are fed fruit and vegetables for breakfast and dinner, with seed for lunch; dry pasta can be included in each of their meals. Most of them are free to fly anywhere but hang around for the food. Ducks, guinea fowl and a noble cock make a significant floor-dwelling feathered presence.

I spent most of the time after my first day with the monkeys (see previous blog entry) but Jun stayed with the birds and “miscellaneous” for her duration. The latter was everything which was not a monkey or a bird, so she fed the cats, dogs, rabbits, guinea pigs, turtles and tortoises and the bear as part of a team. (The coati – or snookum bears – were left to find their own food.) With the exception of the cats, each of these animals had a living space that needed cleaning daily too. In that way, Jun probably dealt with three to four times as many animals as I did, and all alone once Rob and Sarah, Holly and Jessy had left.

While the other volunteers were still there (they arrived a week before us so left a week earlier) we had a few quiz nights based on information from the QI Animal Ignorance book that I originally borrowed from a Brisbane library and then ordered on Amazon and asked Julie to bring out. Jessy was a big fan but it was Rob who shocked us all by guessing the animal correctly from only this information: “When George Shaw made the first written description of [this animal] in 1799...” Do you know the answer?

As well as caring for such a great variety of animals and playing silly guessing games on a few occasions, the La Senda Verde experience was bolstered by the opportunity to see a few of the local birds and butterflies in their natural settings. Vultures flew overhead but I had already captured them and the crested oropendola on my Nikon (though I only identified the latter in La Senda Verde`s owner`s animal encyclopedia). My holy grail was the very large blue butterly which was quite common to see but hard to photograph as it rarely seemed to settle within sight. I did capture an image on the last day but the animal itself was damaged and the pic not the best. A tiny blip that doesn`t register. Ah, good days.