A Week at the Costa Rica Parrot Rescue Center
Miraculously retained my hearing after being surrounded by 70 parrots.
Best read on browser or Substack due to gifs!
Planning for Costa Rica
In mid-September, I noticed that I was a reasonable number of PQPs away from United Silver. I didn’t have any trips planned for the end of year at the time, but I was motivated by the thought of escaping travel peasantry and started researching destinations. My only two requirements were that I didn’t want to travel too far away, and I wanted to go somewhere new.
Several people had previously recommended Costa Rica. My research started around the beautiful national parks and beaches, but took a pivot when I excitedly remembered that Costa Rica was well known for its wildlife and environmental preservation, in particular of its colourful native birds. As most of my friends know, I have two budgies of my own and love all parrots - big, small, squawky, talky, intelligent (or not). I couldn’t think of a greater fit for my time than spending the holidays at a parrot rescue.
I think I literally Googled “parrot volunteer costa rica” and clicked on the first link that displayed. Lucky for me, it was the Parrot Rescue Center’s Volunteer World listing. I reached out to the owner, Valentina. Within the next month, I locked down my volunteer deposit and booked my flights.
Logistics and arriving at the Parrot Rescue Center
Because I was only spending 9 days in Costa Rica, with 7 of them being at the parrot sanctuary and the remaining 2 in transit, planning was easy. I always do all of my travel planning on Google Sheets, where I outline my transit reservations, accommodation bookings, and cost incurred. It also made it easy for me to share plans with David, who was traveling separately to Japan and anxiously screenshotted my location on Find My Friends.
All in all, I spent $1.9k USD on the trip, with 51% of it on transportation (flights, buses), 15% on volunteering costs, 12.5% on hotel accommodations, 11.5% on food and groceries, and 10% on discretionary spending. Since I wasn’t doing any solo exploring, I got away without exchanging Costa Rican colones. Most restaurants and stores, including the food stations at our bus stops, took credit cards. I only ever needed colones for a bus stop bathroom, which I got by asking a nice stall vendor to exchange my $1 USD bill for some local coin.
Flying to Costa Rica from San Francisco was long, but uneventful. There aren’t any nonstop flights to San Jose, the capital of Costa Rica, so I took a 7 hour leg to El Salvador and then a connecting 1 hour flight to San Jose. I arrived late at night to a hotel close to the Tracopa Bus Terminal and rolled out of bed to catch my 8:15AM bus the next morning.
As I walked on and looked for my seat, a woman waved to me and asked whether I was volunteering at the Parrot Sanctuary. Turns out it was Gloria, another volunteer, and she recognized me from the WhatsApp group that Valentina put together. Not only were we on the same bus, but we had booked seats right next to each other! Gloria is a vet who had just left her job in Belgium, and was traveling around Latin America for a couple of months before returning home to France. We spent our bus ride down Cerro de la Muerte alternating between conversation and comfortable silence.
It was 4PM by the time that we made it to San Vito. Valentina pulled up at the bus station with a car marked with a colourful Parrot Rescue Center decal on the doors. We squished in and met the other two volunteers: Elora, who had just graduated high school in France and was taking a gap year, and Lily, who’s in the middle of her second master’s degree at UPenn.
The sun had long set by the time we arrived at home for the next week. All of us retired early in anticipation for our first working day tomorrow.
The work at the Parrot Rescue Center
I heard the parrots before I saw them. It’s impossible not to when there’s 70+ parrots gathered in one place.
Every day started at 7AM. Our morning commute was a brisk 3-minute walk from the volunteer house to the sanctuary. The rescue center consisted of 5 aviaries and two outdoor perch sections. Two of the aviaries and one of the outdoor perches was dedicated to the sanctuary’s disabled macaws and Amazons, who had flight or neurological issues that prevented them from living in the larger aviaries. The remaining aviaries were large and well-kept flight cages that housed a myriad of parrots. We spent most of our time in and around these aviaries working with Jordan, the sanctuary’s main employee.
There were only four fixed tasks daily - the feedings at 7AM, 10AM, and 2PM, and the end-of-the-day dish wash and lock-up at 5:15PM. After the morning feeding, we prepared the fruit bonanza used in the later meals. We would then be released for breakfast, for which I usually made oatmeal topped with sliced bananas. Bananas were so plentiful in Costa Rica that Valentina said some years she would have to throw out harvests from around the property because they went bad sitting.
In between those times, activities varied from day to day. Because there were four of us (the maximum number of volunteers allowed at a time), Valentina took advantage of our large numbers to power wash the aviaries. Over the course of three days, we scrubbed each of the metal boards and stone ledges squeaky clean. When we washed the inside walls, we often had to take breaks as curious parrots came over to peck at our hoses and run over the pile of leaves that we raked. The monotonous scrubbing was made fun as we lathered up multiple boards and then watched in satisfaction as we hosed all the dirt off in one go. I felt like our hard work paid off when Valentina ran up to us after we cleaned the large macaw aviary and exclaimed “you guys! It looks like it’s brand new!”
On Wednesday, Jordan took us out on the property for “campo”, which meant “yard work”. He handed us each a machete and a pair of gardening gloves and we got to work on the overgrown hillside. Our job was to find the sapling growing at each wooden stake and clear out the knee-high weeds that had grown around it. We moved from row to row on the hillside, whacking and pulling out the weeds under the blazing hot sun. When we finally took a break in a shaded area, I squatted underneath a tree and zoned out in bliss. One of the free-flighted parrots of the sanctuary, Miramar, followed us and cocked her head curiously at all our slicing and dicing. “What are you doing?” she called to us from atop a telephone pole, startling me and Lily. Jordan laughed, and in Spanish, said “she speaks English!”
Other days, we stayed around the “kitchen”, which was the main food preparation and storage area in the sanctuary. We cut an indescribable amount of fruit and vegetables over the span of seven days. The diet of the sanctuary parrots featured tiquisque, a hairy taro-like root vegetable. We found ourselves squatting over a bucket filled with it, scrubbing it in dirt-water and picking off the soft rotten parts. No matter how many times we changed the water, it was always brown. One day, Jordan decided that we’d include two pumpkins in our veggie mix. We worked furiously at cubing the pumpkin slices, but Jordan worked harder than the four of us combined, replacing the slices we were chopping up at equal pace. Half an hour in, we broke down laughing, lamenting at the never-ending pile of pumpkin. Café and Miramar chose this opportune time to venture onto the cutting table for pumpkin seeds, which Valentina informed us was “like parrot crack”.
I would never bemoan the comfort of a desk job. Uber’s new Mission Bay campus is a tech fairyland, and I’m beyond lucky to be working in such amazing conditions, but once in a while it’s nice to take a break from staring at the computer monitor for hours on end and just think about the next metal board I needed to scrub. Among the parrots who depended on us daily for food and the routine work of the aviaries, I found a certain satisfaction in the manual work of my arms and legs.
The volunteer house and the girls
“This is so crazy,” Valentina told us in the car. “None of you girls know each other, but somehow all four of you decided separately to arrive on the same day.”
The internet was down the first two days that we were at the volunteer house, and cell service bars remained flat the entire time. We spent our first two days in nothing but each other’s company on the back patio. Gloria asked if it was alright with us that she smoked. After we gave our okay, she rolled her cigarettes with a careful but practiced hand. We lounged across the chairs and porch swings, sometimes learning more about each other, and other times sitting in silence, watching for the hummingbird that liked to visit our backyard flowers. The four of us hailed from different backgrounds, with a two decade gap between our youngest and oldest, but we easily clicked.
Thursday was our first day off, and Valentina drove us into town for girls day out. We stopped at a hilltop burger joint and relished in eating something that we didn’t have to cook. Over ice cream sundaes, Elora showed her BeReal to an interested Gloria and I, who were curious about the social media habits of a Gen Z’er. We burst out laughing when the first picture she tapped on was a foggy mirror pic of her freshly out of the shower. “You were very real,” Gloria chuckled.
Late afternoon on my last day at the Parrot Rescue Center, Valentina and Jordan took us on a walk around the property. We hiked through the lush growth as Valentina excitedly described some of her dreams to further expand the property and enable more care and space for the birds. Our path took us up the hillside where we had cleared away weeds a few days ago, and we emerged out to the top. From above, we could see the small town of Sabalito and some coffee farms in the distance.
The sanctuary’s three flighted parrots, Cafe, Rango, and Miramar, caught on to our voices and tracked us down among the trees. We watched in awe as the flock of three winged through the sky. They started the week wary of this group of four strangers, staying far away even when we filled their food tray, and ended it by choosing our heads as the best perch.
And really, I know it sounds dubious, but there’s nothing more tranquil and fulfilling than having a parrot trust you enough to land on your head.
Ending notes: The Parrot Rescue Center runs heavily on donations. I’m making a monthly donation through 2024 via their website, and you can too! Even a small donation means an extra enrichment toy :)