What do a marching band, a school newscast, homemade pasteles, and a sky full of kites have in common? This August, they all helped celebrate cotton-top tamarins! As I read the stories from our team in Colombia, I kept smiling at the imagination behind this year’s Month of the Cotton-Top Tamarin. Give students, teachers, and communities an opportunity to celebrate these remarkable monkeys, and they will find wonderfully creative ways to make conservation their own. This year, celebrations reached more than 12,000 students across 55 schools and early childhood education centers, with 22 new communities joining the activities. Participants filled August with art, music, storytelling, and learning. Those numbers are exciting, but the stories behind them are what I most want to share.
Let’s start with a parade! In Palmar de Candelaria, students took their celebration into the streets, accompanied by the community’s marching band. Although the band belongs to the community, all its members attend the school. What a wonderful connection! Children dressed as cotton-top tamarins, other forest animals, and even plants traveled approximately three kilometers to the community gathering center, carrying conservation messages for their neighbors to see. Among the parade’s highlights were the silletas. For readers unfamiliar with this Colombian tradition, silletas are wooden carrying frames worn on the back, famously associated with Medellín’s annual Flower Festival, the Feria de las Flores. During its celebrated Silleteros Parade, participants carry elaborate floral arrangements mounted on these frames, turning the streets into a moving exhibition of color and craftsmanship. This year the silletas depicted cotton-top tamarins and their forest homes and transformed a walk through town into a moving art exhibition. There were masks, drawings, performances, and dancing, too. I don’t think we have ever had a celebration quite like this one, complete with a marching band!
Meanwhile, in Los Límites and San Juan de Tocagua, conservation messages took to the skies. Families helped children create kites inspired by cotton-top tamarins, turning a creative activity at home into an outdoor celebration of freedom. As the kites soared overhead, they carried an important message: cotton-top tamarins belong wild and free in their forest homes. Just imagine looking up and seeing a sky filled with colorful reminders to protect their freedom!
In San Juan Nepomuceno, students found another place for cotton-tops to shine: social media. Seventh graders at the Normal Superior Montes de María created Instagram Reels sharing conservation messages. These short videos involved research, planning, and practice, with students deciding how to communicate what mattered most about the monkeys and their forest home. I love this idea. Young people know how to capture one another’s attention and putting that talent to work for cotton-tops opens another way to share their message. One winning video received 2,354 reactions! Behind every brief clip was a group of students learning enough about conservation to explain it in their own words. Younger students at the same school created “Noti Tití,” a school newscast featuring characters who explained threats facing cotton-tops and the forest. What a delightful way to learn! Preparing a news story asks children to understand an issue, choose what their audience needs to know, and deliver that information clearly. I would happily tune in for more cotton-top news.
The Tití Guardianas of Colosó brought their own special combination of resourcefulness and community pride. To help finance their celebration, they made pasteles, traditional savory food parcels. “Tití Pasteles” supporting a cotton-top celebration might be one of my favorite ideas of the month! These women put their time and skills into making something happen for their community. Their celebration included a parade with costumes and traditional music, followed by a cotton-top mural. Drums, gaitas, and young voices helped carry the conservation message. There was also a small puppet show at a school in Colosó, another reminder that even a modest stage can make room for big ideas about protecting wildlife.
Art appeared everywhere. In Santiago de Tolú, secondary students and teachers organized a painting competition celebrating the richness of the forest and the cotton-top’s place within it. Elsewhere, students turned plastic bottle caps and other recycled materials into pictures, displays, and costumes. Materials that might have been discarded became opportunities to talk about caring for the environment. Children wrote poems, short stories, acrostics, and traditional verses. They performed plays, danced, built habitat models, solved puzzles, and tested their knowledge in games. Reading clubs helped children explore cotton-top conservation through stories and poetry. Even the youngest participants joined in, decorating masks and dressing as monkeys and trees with help from their families. One classroom became a cotton-top museum, displaying work created throughout August. Children welcomed other classes and explained their creations, including the materials they used and why they made them. I especially love that detail: students became guides, sharing their knowledge with others. At another school, learning stations explored cotton-top biology, their Colombian identity, and actions people can take to protect them.
Community celebrations also connected learning with action. In Hobo, local entrepreneurs worked with teachers and students to create conservation posters and plant ceiba trees at the school and in the community. In Colorado, entrepreneurs saved part of their earnings to organize games, prizes, and refreshments for their neighbors. In Baranoa, cotton-top activities became part of a corn festival, bringing conservation into an existing local tradition.
Behind these celebrations were weeks of preparation. Teachers found time to plan, students rehearsed and researched, and parents helped create costumes, masks, and kites at home. That generosity matters deeply to me. Each person contributed something different, and together they gave thousands of children opportunities to learn, participate, and feel proud of cotton-top tamarins. What stays with me most is how personal these celebrations became. A school chose a newscast. A community chose kites. A group of women cooked to support a parade and mural. Each found a way to express the same conviction: cotton-tops belong in their forest, and protecting them matters.
To our team, teachers, families, students, and community partners: thank you for making August so memorable. You filled the month with creativity and gave conservation a place in classrooms, homes, streets, and celebrations. I’m already wondering what you will dream up next year!