Seventeen crocodiles go back to the Meta, after two years of waiting

At Bioparque Wisirare in Orocué, on the llanos of Casanare, keepers carried 17 young Orinoco crocodiles to the water's edge and let them go. The species exists nowhere on earth but the Orinoco basin, and fewer than 250 mature animals are thought to remain in the wild. For the Fundación Palmarito, it was the first release in two years.

The pause began in 2024, over which new sites in the Orinoquía could be designated for reintroduction — a question of paperwork between institutions, settled nowhere while the animals grew. Releases stopped. The breeding did not. By the time the Air Force helped move this batch to the water, another 85 juveniles at Wisirare had already grown past release size behind them.

Palmarito has been at this since 2015, when its founder Jorge Londoño oversaw Colombia's first release of the species. Under Olaya and scientific director Rafael Antelo, the programme has bred more than 400 crocodiles and returned 287 of them to the rivers and wetlands of the plains.

The collapse was a commercial one. From the 1930s into the 1960s hunters worked the exposed sandbanks at night, where the animals were easiest to find, and the hide trade emptied the river system. Colombia banned the hunting in 1968, Venezuela in 1972, and by then the species was a remnant. The IUCN has listed it as Critically Endangered since 1996, in the small company of the gharial and the Philippine crocodile.

Environment Minister Fabio Arjona Hincapié stood on the bank with representatives of the Humboldt Institute, the National University, WWF and others. What had been achieved, he said, was "not a circumstantial fact, but the result of many years of work by the Palmarito Foundation."

The animals now have to do the rest themselves: survive the fishing nets, avoid the fishers who count them as rivals for the catch, reach the size at which the females dig their nests in bare sand in the January dry season, and lay. Nobody at Wisirare can help with that part. The measure of this release will not be known for years.