In the trees round uni, everyone knows, are iguanas, bold enough for staring matches, spined and metre-long. Just as common are the parakeets, scarlet fronted or orange cheeked, and a great kiskadee marshals the pathside. Rufous-tailed hummingbirds joust round the feeders; ruddy ground-doves are vicious as well, bickering on the terraces and telegraph wires. Thumbish with curved beaks, bananaquits flock near that shrine to the Virgin, and woodpeckers tapping are as good as an alarm for the students.
The neighbours have planted a garden out front, you get bar-crested antshrike in the morning: birds with punk dos. And making the clientele fret, fruit bats as large as cats are common by the diners at teatime.
Colombia has more natural records than it bothers to count, including the most endemic species of any country, and a greater variety of birds than Europe and North America combined. You can still hear the sense that Spanish settlers tried to make of it, with many species bearing unrelated European names. Azulejos (“bluebirds”, blue-grey tanagers) and thick-billed euphonia hang about for seeds, elsewhere there are petirojos (“robins”, vermilion flycatchers).
In the drying river you get chulos (black vulture), but on the Magdalena are striated heron, great egret, bare-faced ibis. Where “chulo” comes from no-one’s sure, but tell anyone it means “cute” in Spain and they’ll look at you skewed. Most likely it’s a corruption of the “chulo” that means “pimp”, which, with the vulture’s coats, their bright bald heads and the smut they eat, you can see where the link might be made.
In a country so concerned for its reputation, Colombia is rightly proud of its wildlife, and keen to see more of it in town. The country’s recent craze for Magia Salvaje, a nature doc, is a hint of public interest in nature, as well as the drive to conserve it. The harpy eagle and the river dolphin will be as good ambassadors as President Santos can get, and in the movement from the famous caged jaguar of Neiva’s streets, property of a coke tycoon, to the image of a tigre on the bank of the Orinoco, Colombia could find an ally in something as small as the lizards in its universities.
