Costa Rica: Limon Province – Ara Manzanillo

🦜 Finding Ara Manzanillo — Or Rather, Trying To

Getting to the Ara Manzanillo sanctuary was, on paper, simple enough. It sits only a short distance south of Puerto Viejo de Talamanca, a laid-back Caribbean town on Costa Rica’s southern coast. In practice, however, we spent a fair amount of time driving around like a pair of confused tourists — which, to be fair, is exactly what we were. The signage was, to put it charitably, rubbish. Truly spectacular in its unhelpfulness. And the GPS, bless it, was doing that thing where it confidently guides you somewhere completely wrong. We soldiered on.

Eventually we peeled off the main coastal road and headed into the jungle along a narrow gravel track. It was bumpy, a little rough in places, but perfectly manageable — right up until the road suddenly reared up at what felt like a 45-degree incline. We sat at the bottom in our little Hyundai Accent, the two of us exchanging one of those looks that said everything without saying anything. Neither of us was entirely confident the car was going to make it. There was only one thing for it. We reversed back a bit, took a proper run at it, floored the accelerator, kept the revs up, and prayed. We made it. Barely. Phew.

A little further along we pulled into what generously might be described as a parking area — in reality, it was simply a gap in the jungle where the trees had the decency to step aside. Our young guide was waiting for us there, along with the rest of the tour group, about ten people in total. We’d made it.

🌿 What Is Ara Manzanillo?

As we stepped into the sanctuary, a series of display panels set the scene and explained what Ara Manzanillo was actually all about. The short version: it’s a conservation project dedicated to saving one of the most extraordinary birds on the planet — the Great Green Macaw, known in Spanish as the Lapa Verde or Ara ambiguus.

These are not small birds. The Great Green Macaw is the largest parrot species within its natural range, the second heaviest of all macaw species globally, and the third heaviest parrot species on earth. They’re genuinely enormous — big enough to make a proper impression when one lands near you, and loud enough to make sure you know about it. They inhabit the humid lowland deciduous forests and forest edges of Central America, stretching historically from Honduras down through Nicaragua, Costa Rica, and into Panama and Colombia. What makes them particularly dependent on their environment is their relationship with one specific tree: the Mountain Almond, or Dipteryx panamensis. These birds rely on Mountain Almonds almost entirely, both as their primary food source and as nesting sites, hollowing out the trunks to lay up to three eggs, typically in August.

The trouble is, there aren’t many of them left. Best current estimates put the total wild population of Great Green Macaws at fewer than 2,500 individuals worldwide. To put that in some context, that’s roughly the population of a small English village — and declining.

📉 A Story of Decline

The Great Green Macaw was once a common sight along the entire Costa Rican Caribbean coast. Flocks of them would have been a normal part of the landscape, filling the canopy with noise and colour. That began to change, and change badly, through the latter half of the twentieth century.

Two things drove the collapse. First, poaching. The birds were captured and traded illegally as exotic pets, a practice that gutted wild populations. Second, and more devastatingly, deforestation — specifically the large-scale logging of Mountain Almond trees, which began in earnest from the 1950s and accelerated through the following decades as agricultural and commercial land use expanded. Remove the Mountain Almond and you remove the bird’s food source and its nesting habitat in one stroke. BirdLife International, the global conservation authority on bird species, has recorded that over the past fifty years the Great Green Macaw’s worldwide population has been reduced by more than half. That’s a catastrophic decline in biological terms, and it happened remarkably quickly.

By the early 2000s, the species had essentially vanished from much of its former Costa Rican range.

🌱 How the Ara Project Began

The foundations of what would become Ara Manzanillo were laid more than 35 years ago, in the early 1990s, through the work of a couple named Margot and Richard Frisius. They established a parrot conservation centre in Rio Segundo de Alajuela, a small town in Costa Rica’s Central Valley, with the specific aim of breeding Great Green Macaws in captivity and halting their decline. It was quiet, unglamorous, long-term conservation work — exactly the sort of thing that rarely makes headlines but matters enormously.

When the Frisius founders passed away in the late 2000s, their life’s work didn’t end with them. The birds, along with the conservation mission, were transferred to the care of the Beruite family and a network of other collaborators, and out of that transition grew what is now known as The Ara Project — a broader umbrella organisation running multiple release sites across Costa Rica.

Ara Manzanillo, located in the lush Caribbean lowlands near Puerto Viejo, became one of the flagship sites of that effort.

🦜 Release, Recovery, and Real Progress

During the first phase of the project at Manzanillo, 45 captive-raised Great Green Macaws were transported to a large tropical rainforest aviary on site. These birds ranged in age from 18 months to 12 years — a deliberately mixed group, since younger birds could learn from older, more experienced individuals. Captive-raised animals being released into the wild face enormous challenges: they’ve had no opportunity to develop the instincts and survival skills their wild counterparts acquire naturally. Acclimating them slowly in an aviary environment, before gradually opening the doors to the forest, is the method The Ara Project has refined over years of practice.

Five of those initial 45 birds didn’t survive — a painful but, in conservation terms, not unexpected outcome. The remaining 40 have thrived, adapting to their forest environment and beginning to establish a functioning flock. To support natural breeding behaviour, 20 nesting boxes were installed high in the surrounding trees, mimicking the hollows that Mountain Almonds would naturally provide. Between 2016 and 2019, more than 30 chicks successfully fledged and are now flying free in the forest. In 2020 alone, a further 13 chicks were recorded growing strongly — a genuinely encouraging sign.

The long-term ambition of Ara Manzanillo is for this newly established flock to eventually connect with the closest remaining wild populations of Great Greens, located in the northern regions of Costa Rica and across the border into Panama. If that happens — if these birds successfully integrate, breed, and expand their range — it would represent a meaningful recovery for a species that was, not so long ago, heading quietly towards regional extinction.

We stood in the jungle watching them wheel overhead, impossibly green against the canopy, and thought: well, that’s actually rather wonderful.