Loreta (#14) Didn't Move Despite the Thunder

Omar Enrique Verdugo Cabeza arrived at the little forest that morning with a few spare perches tucked under his arm and set them up without much ceremony among the trees. He didn't have to wait long: Loreta number 14 discovered them almost immediately and chose one for herself. She settled there, still and resolute, as the day moved along and the other green parrots and a blue-and-yellow macaw (Ara ararauna) drifted back and forth between the branches and the feeding stations. The afternoon was clear, not a cloud in sight to suggest anything was coming, when suddenly a bolt of lightning cracked and rumbled through the whole of the little forest. The birds jolted with fright — parrots, macaw, all of them — and Omar instinctively pulled his phone away, thinking of the strike. But when he looked back up, Loreta 14 was exactly where she had been: on the perch he had put up that same morning. "That makes me happy," said Omar, and in those four words lives everything that it means to spend a day watching, tending, building perches one by one so that a bird might find them and call them her own. The thunder passed. Loreta 14 did not.