The Man Who Taught Me to Hear the Forest
Some people arrive in your life at exactly the right moment, even if you don't know it yet.
It Started in Sint Maarten/Saint Martin
It was 2020. The world had just stopped. In the middle of the worst global crisis most of us had ever seen, I found myself in Sint Maarten, a small Dutch-French island in the Caribbean where, despite everything, life moved at a different pace. The open-air culture, the unhurried rhythm of island life, the conversations that stretched past sunset, that's where I met Binkie Van Es.
Binkie had been watching birds for years. What started as a hobby near retirement had quietly turned him into the most respected birder on the island. Any birder arriving on a cruise ship, looking for a guide who actually knew the land, found Binkie at the top of Sint Maarten's eBird rankings. He had earned that position the only way you earn it: by showing up, over and over, and paying attention.
I knew enough about birds, to know I didn't really know them. Years earlier I'd gone on a short birding outing and found it interesting, but not interesting enough to go back. Then one afternoon, Binkie said: "I'm taking you birding. There are spots on this island I'm certain you've never seen." I said yes, half-skeptical that an island you could drive across in 30 minutes had much to show me. Binkie has a rare gift: he makes the things you've been half-noticing suddenly impossible to ignore.
He taught me to stop. To listen before looking. To understand that the forest is never silent, it's just speaking at a frequency most of us were never taught to hear. And then he introduced me to eBird, explaining why logging observations matters for science. The moment he said science, I was in.
What the Forest Gave Back
When I returned to Colombia, I carried that new frequency with me. And here's the part that still surprises me: the forest I had spent years building in San Carlos with my sister, a former cattle farm we had spent years converting, one tree at a time, into a living Andean corridor, turned out to be exactly the kind of place a serious birder is always looking for.
We never planned it that way. It was the forest's gift to us, returned after two decades of patience, uncertainty, and the kind of stubborn faith that regenerative work demands. Today, that gift has a number: more than 140 recorded bird species.
The Morning Binkie Didn't See Coming
Not long ago, Binkie visited Silvery for the first time, his first time in Antioquia's Andean forest.
We left right at dawn. A thin layer of mist was forming over the canopy, promising a cool morning for birding among the 23,000 trees that had grown up around us over twenty years. But it wasn't just the two of us. Isaac came along, a ten-year-old who lives at Silvery and has been learning to bird since he was old enough to hold binoculars still. Isaac already knows most of the 140 species by ear: the exact corner of the trail where the tanager usually shows up, the call that means something rare is nearby. Binkie watched him move through the forest, listened to him name birds before they appeared, and that evening wrote on his Facebook page that the two of us had taken Isaac under our wings.
In the first hour alone, we logged more than twenty species. The outing turned out to be something Binkie hadn't anticipated. He had no idea what a twenty-year-old regenerated forest would feel like from the inside. Watching him work, stopping without warning, going completely still, then pressing the shutter at exactly the right moment, was its own kind of lesson for Isaac and for me. The quiet discipline of someone who has spent decades paying attention.
At one point on the trail, he stopped, turned to me, and said something I won't forget: "I am impressed with your forest. This is something big, and I will definitely come back. This has been the best part of my entire trip through Colombia." There are things only a regenerated forest can offer. Beyond the species count, there is the silence that isn't silence. A layered, living sound that rises from every part of the path at Silvery.
When an Expert Sees What You've Built
Binkie has spent decades taking people into the field to find birds. When someone with that kind of experience walks into your forest and says it out loud, you understand, maybe for the first time, that what you built has value beyond what you imagined. We didn't build Silvery to be a birding destination. The forest decided that on its own. We just learned to listen.
If you've been thinking about a serious birding trip to Colombia and haven't found the right place to start, Silvery is worth your attention. This isn't a mass tour or a generic nature walk. It's a private forest, open only to guests, with 140+ identified species, its own trail system, and the kind of quiet that only twenty years of growth can produce.
The question isn't whether Colombia deserves that trip. You already know it does. The question is how much longer you're going to put it off.
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By Edgar A. Martínez Londoño
Sanitary Engineer, MSc, PhD in Environmental Engineering
Co-founder, Silvery Refugio Natural
