Some days Sharon runs around the zoo dressed like a crazy person. She'll pair a green button-down shirt with snakeskin-patterned Lycra pants, the kind worn by heavy-metal guitarists in the eighties. Other times she'll come to work in camouflage pants and a purple tank top. Sometimes I think Sharon dresses this way to heighten her colorful profile. Other times I think she's truly blind to color and pattern in human attire....Sharon doesn't know what she was wearing when she first heard about the dam, but she knows it was a Monday, the zoo's slowest day. She was sipping coffee in her jungle bungalow, flipping through the newspaper. A back-page story caught her eye. cabinet re-thinks hydro site, it said. Belizean Prime Minister Said Musa had decided to construct a hydroelectric dam at a Macal River site called Chalillo.

BRUCE BARCOTT's The Last Flight of the Scarlet Macaw was published in February by Random House.