A marching band leads a parade of children dressed as monkeys, trees, and other forest life. Families gather beneath colorful homemade kites. Students step in front of cameras to deliver conservation news. Throughout August, Colombia’s Month of the Cotton-Top Tamarin turned classrooms, streets, and community gathering places into settings for learning, laughter, and celebration. More than 12,000 students across 55 schools and early childhood education centers participated, with 22 new communities joining the activities. Together with teachers, families, and local leaders, they found imaginative ways to celebrate cotton-top tamarins and encourage their neighbors to protect these monkeys and their forest homes.
Taking the Message to the Streets—and Skies
One celebration featured a parade accompanied by a community marching band whose members all attend the local school. Children traveled approximately three kilometers in costumes, carrying conservation messages for neighbors along the route. Among the attractions were silletas, wooden frames worn on the back and traditionally used to display elaborate floral arrangements. For this celebration, they depicted cotton-top tamarins and their forest homes, creating a moving exhibition of art and conservation. Masks, dancing, and performances added to the excitement.
Elsewhere, families helped children make kites inspired by cotton-top tamarins. The project brought conservation conversations into homes before bringing everyone outdoors to watch their creations soar. Those colorful kites offered a memorable expression of the month’s central message: cotton-top tamarins should remain wild and free.
Young Voices, Big Ideas
Some students traded costumes for cameras. Seventh graders created Instagram Reels about cotton-top tamarin conservation, researching their subjects, planning their messages, and practicing how to capture an audience’s attention. One winning video received 2,354 reactions. The videos gave students a chance to use familiar technology for a meaningful purpose. Creating a short, engaging message required them to understand the subject well enough to explain it to others.
Younger students produced “Noti Tití,” a school newscast featuring characters who explained threats facing cotton-top tamarins and their habitat. With storytelling and performance, children became conservation communicators, helping their peers learn while having fun.
Community Spirit Makes It Possible
Creativity extended to organizing the festivities. The Tití Guardianas, a group of women in Colosó, made pasteles—traditional savory food parcels—to help finance their community’s celebration.
Their efforts supported a parade with costumes and traditional music, followed by a cotton-top tamarin mural. Drums, gaitas, and children’s voices helped carry the message through the community. A school puppet show offered another lively way to introduce wildlife protection to young audiences.
Other local entrepreneurs contributed savings to provide games, prizes, and refreshments. Some worked alongside teachers and students to make conservation posters and plant ceiba trees. Activities celebrating cotton-top tamarins even became part of a local corn festival, connecting wildlife conservation with an established community tradition.
A Forest of Creative Possibilities
Across the participating schools, students painted forest scenes, wrote poems and stories, performed plays, sang, and danced. Plastic bottle caps and other recycled materials became pictures, displays, and costumes. The youngest children decorated masks and dressed as monkeys and trees with help from their families. One classroom became a cotton-top tamarin museum filled with work created throughout August. Students welcomed visiting classes and explained their exhibits, sharing both their artistic choices and what they had learned. Elsewhere, games, puzzles, habitat models, and learning stations invited children to explore cotton-top tamarin biology and ways to help protect them.
Behind every activity were teachers who planned, students who rehearsed, and families who helped turn ideas into something others could enjoy. Together, these celebrations gave a serious conservation message a joyful, memorable form. Whether delivered through a puppet, a parade, or a student’s video, the lesson was clear: cotton-top tamarins are not pets, and their future belongs in the wild. By making that message part of everyday community life, participants helped more people understand it, remember it, and share it. August’s celebrations showed just how much imagination—and how much fun—can go into standing up for cotton-top tamarins.