OUR TIME AT THE RAINSONG WILDLIFE SANCTUARY—IN THE SLEEPY Costa Rican town of Cabuya—is worth mentioning, if only to illustrate how misleading Internet-based research can be when you’re looking for volunteer opportunities. It’s like online dating in a way. With the right profile photo and a few well-chosen words, everyone can look like Mr. or Ms. Right. But once you meet them in person, in the harsh light of day, the truth can sometimes be a bit of a disappointment.
If you check out the Rainsong website, it might look as if you’ve found volunteer heaven. In addition to helping rescued and injured animals, the site suggests you will join in such activities as “tropical gardening, camping and trekking, identification and gathering of exotic fruits, guided nature tours on horseback,” and so on. They boast of butterfly gardens, a living insect museum, sloth search and rescue (whatever that means). And they have pictures showcasing private waterfalls and communal meals, even a group shot of a dozen happy young male and female volunteers in bathing suits, like a Survivor cast party photo.
“Ooooh. They have a hot tub,” Jackson said, checking out the cute guys, no doubt picturing herself in her bikini smiling back from some future photo gallery highlight.
At $40 a week per person, it seemed too good to be true—which, of course, it was. When we actually stepped inside the Rainsong gate, what we found instead of paradise was a small roadside zoo with animals in tiny cages, all of it badly in need of cleaning.
Rainsong was the brainchild of Mary Lynn Perry, a heavyset woman in her early fifties with long gray hair that was usually tucked under a baseball cap. Mary started the sanctuary in 2005 after poachers shot her favorite horse, a horse that had been grazing at the time … at night … in its own corral! I remember a similar story in Maine one deer-hunting season about a bulldog being shot in its backyard … on a leash … wearing a hunting vest … so I guess hunters’ stupidity is not confined to any one border. In any case, waking up to find her beloved stallion lying dead on the ground somehow inspired Mary to take action in behalf of all animals, and thus Rainsong was born.
I’m sure it was founded with the best of intentions, but when we arrived, there was definitely an air of neglect at the sanctuary. For one thing, we didn’t see Mary much over the course of our seven-day stay. After she took our money, she left to work on a turtle preservation project up the coast. As a result, Rainsong felt like a ship without a captain, with untrained volunteers like us basically running the show. On our first day, we worked alongside a cute twentysomething couple from Spain, two guys from England, a seventy-two-year-old retired schoolteacher, his sister-in-law from Virginia, and several college girls from all over the United States. Without supervision or specific standards to strive for, most volunteers stayed for a week or longer, paid their money for the privilege, then did what needed doing and tried to make life at the sanctuary a little nicer for everyone involved. Have an idea? Go for it. So that’s what we did.
As a first order of business, we raked. When we got there, the pathways between cages were completely obscured by a thick blanket of leaves, giving Rainsong an abandoned look. It took our family the better part of two days to get the place looking spiffy again. Then we focused on the anteater cage.
Back at the Osa, they had an anteater named Tank. The kids loved him. Tank was a vibrant, solid, playful animal who was constantly in motion. When Logan or Jackson entered his cage, Tank practically jumped into their arms, gripping them with his hooked claws. He loved to be held, hated to be put down. And though he wasn’t fast, he was hard to get away from. He was enthusiastic. He was also a voracious eater, drinking greedily from a bottle with his long thin whiplike tongue and ripping into termite nests like a child opening presents. Of all the animals we met on the Osa, Tank was one of our favorites.
But all anteaters are not created, or treated, equally.
At Rainsong, their anteater was named Anti. While she was roughly the same size as Tank, like a football with a thick bare tail, the two animals could not have been more different. Tank was vivacious and thriving, Anti listless and thin. She paced in her bare cage as if she realized how pointless her pacing was. She lapped reluctantly at the sickening gruel we were given to feed her. She had no spark, no pep. The first time I picked her up, she just hung limp, her rib cage fragile in my hands. When I took her out of her cage and set her down for a walk, she managed two tentative steps, then sprawled on the ground as if waiting for death.
“Anti needs enrichment!” Logan proclaimed, quoting one of Carol Crews’s favorite buzzwords.
So we gathered logs for Anti to climb on and built a section for dirt in her otherwise cement cage. Logan came up with the sandbox idea and took great pride in hammering and filling this stroke of brilliance into existence. On a roll, we cut up oranges and squeezed them in her new playpen to attract ants. Then Logan grabbed a machete and hacked down thick branches filled with green leaves to add a wilder feel to Anti’s sterile enclosure. We added a potted plant, cut down termite nests. We let her forage for longer periods in the open air. And we encouraged her. In every way we could think of, we loved her.
Traca also took a special interest in two sad birds: a beautiful male toucan and his next-door neighbor, an aracari. Aracaris are a type of toucan with black plumage and a black bill. And while they’re exotic birds compared with any bird back home, they seem almost common next to a full-blown Technicolor keel-billed toucan—the way Doug Pitt probably looks standing next to his famous brother, Brad.
As we learned from Earl back at the Osa, a toucan’s skin color is actually a brilliant lime green, though this is visible only around their eyes, and their feet are an equally brilliant baby blue, a color that makes no evolutionary sense in the lush green jungle where they live. Most spectacularly, a toucan’s bill is a rainbow of swirling color that looks more like an oversized tropical Popsicle than anything resembling a useful mouth.
“Did you know that a toucan’s nostrils are on the top of his beak?” Jackson asked me facetiously one day, back in tour guide mode.
“Oh, really? Did you know that in heavy rains they look up to keep from drowning?” I retorted, never tiring of this game.
At Rainsong, the aracari and the toucan were both cooped up in enclosures no bigger than broom closets, but Traca made a few home improvements just the same. She gathered fallen palm fronds and built simple roofs for the otherwise exposed cages, creating some much-needed shade in a land of almost constant sun. She also spent time lavishing the birds with hose baths, a ritual that both she and the birds seemed to thoroughly enjoy.
“Imagine being able to fly and ending up in there,” Traca said to me one afternoon, smiling as she watched the birds flapping in the falling water—beaks open, heads up, in no danger of drowning.
For the record, we found no tropical gardening at Rainsong. No gathering of exotic fruits or horseback tours. And unless you count the spiders that filled every corner of the place, there was no living insect museum, either, nor any butterfly gardens. No communal meals or sloth rescue work or private waterfalls that any of us could find. No hot tub, much to Jackson’s disappointment. But one final image does stand out in my mind, though it may never make the splashy photo gallery on the sanctuary website:
As our time at Rainsong was nearing an end, I checked in on Anti the anteater and found her asleep, in her little triangle of ground that Logan had built, under a hanging branch of green leaves, nose in the dirt, with ants crawling all over her fur. She looked happy. It wasn’t much, but it felt like something, having left a small corner of a life a little better than you found it. Maybe that’s all volunteering is.