Ibis under threat
May 8th, 2009As we were leaving the internet café yesterday, the proprietor showed us a newspaper with a cover headline “They’re killing the guarás” I hadn’t realised it, but the scarlet ibis is regarded as the symbol of the Parnaíba Delta, and is in danger of disappearing from the area.
'They’re killing the guarás,' says this headline in a Brazilian newspaper. 'Guará is the symbol of the delta and the poachers must be punished.'
Ingrid Clark, a tourism operator whose family has been living in the delta for 100 years, was quoted in the newpaper saying that poaching has reduced the numbers of scarlet ibis from several thousand last century to as few as 150 today. (No wonder it was hard for us to find them!) She said feather trafficking was the prime cause of the decline. Guará feathers are prized for use in the vibrant costumes people make for Carnival, Brazil’s equivalent of Mardi Gras.
I wrote in yesterday’s ibis post, “Take away the mangrove and where will the guará rest.” Today I’m thinking, “Take away the guará and how will the heart soar?”
NB Moments after I posted this, a man sitting a couple of metres away at the internet café told me that tourist boats are partly to blame for the disappearing guará. The boat skippers let off flares to scare the birds into flying up from the trees, so that photographers—nature papparazzi—can get a better picture! There’s no peace for a beautiful creature.
Wild ibis chase
May 7th, 2009
TIM LAMAN
Tim Laman's stunning picture of scarlet ibises in Trinidad ran in the National Geographic mangrove story in 2007.
Today we searched for a bird of the mangroves, the stunning scarlet ibis. Guará, as the Brazilians call it, is one of hundreds of bird species which use mangroves as nest-building sites, overnight roosts or migration stopovers. The Parnaiba Delta is one of the areas guará has found to its liking.
We hired a speedboat at Porto dos Tatus, Parnaíba’s fishing port, and set off downstream. As we idled past floating islands of tall freshwater lilies, Ronaldo, the boatman, explained the geography of the place. The delta is like a hand, he said. The five fingers are five major rivers; the palm is a 3100 sq km labyrinth of islands and mangrove-fringed channels.
Ronaldo has lived here since childhood, and knows this wetland the way a taxi driver knows a city—with an arcane knowledge of all its shortcuts and dead ends. We sped downriver, watching as the lilies and freshwater trees and palms on the banks slowly gave way to salt-loving mangroves as the river water began to mingle with the sea. I had the sense of being among old friends: red mangroves with their characteristic looping prop roots—“the walking tree”—and black mangroves, each with an army of breathing snorkels protruding up from their underground roots.
We stopped at a fishing village where men were working with shuttles and thread in the shade of cashew trees, repairing holes in their nets. Small fish lay drying in the sun. Ronaldo found a man who knew where the ibis prefer to roost, and he joined us on the search.
At an even more remote camp, where three fishermen were resting in hammocks while their evening stew bubbled in a blackened cooking pot and a scrawny cat mewed for attention, we asked if they had seen guará recently.
“Muitos. Demais!” one replied. (“Many. Too many!”)
This sounded promising. But where would the birds be roosting today? There may have been muitos birds, but they had muitos options on where to spend the night. Compounding the problem, poachers had been operating in the delta. Ibises had become unpredictable in their roosting habits.
We tied up to a mangrove branch in a channel between two islands, ate crackers, drank water and waited for dusk, when ibises return from sea. An hour later, with a nearly full moon on the rise, Ronaldo motored around a headland and cut the engine. In the mangrove foliage dozens of egrets and cormorants flapped, jostled and screeched. As we drifted past, Elaine shouted, “I see red!” I grabbed my binoculars and there, among the snowy white of egret wings and the jet black of the cormorants, was a bird so brilliantly, totally red it looked as if it had been coloured with lipstick.
We watched for more, motoring up and drifting down as skeins of cormorants crossed the moon and circled down to land among the branches, but no more guará arrived. Yet that solitary flash of scarlet—a rose among the commoner birds—was more than worth the effort of an afternoon’s search. Indeed, seeing it on its own underscored for me the fragile importance of mangroves for a whole array of species. The indigenous Maori of my home country have a saying: Take away the flax bush, and where will the bellbird sing?
Take away the mangrove and where will the guará rest?
A word from the cheap seats
May 7th, 2009We took the night bus from Fortaleza to Parnaiba—a nine-hour trip on a road whose ruinous potholes were made worse still by the flooding that has been continuous along this coast for weeks. Kennedy had been jet-lagged all the previous day after his arrival at 2 a.m. (Faithful son that I am, I waited the two hours between my arrival and his in the airport, dozing in an alcove among the silent tourist offices), and the jolting, stop-start bus ride did little to speed his recovery.
KENNEDY WARNE
KENNEDY WARNE
Top: Cyclist in flooded Parnaiba street. Above: Donkey cart passes outside our window.
But all of our spirits were revived when the sun rose, revealing a sky scrubbed a brilliant blue, and a land festooned with pools of water. On the way to our guest house we asked the taxi driver when the rain had stopped, and learned that it had been solid up until the previous night.
The river has overflowed its banks and filled many streets, including the one our pousada is on. To get to the main road we have to wade through knee-deep water for 50 metres. But life for our neighbours goes on. Outside our window, a girl manoeuvres her motorbike through the gate of her house and rides into the stream. Street vendors cycle past, calling out their wares. A donkey cart has just gone by, producing a bow wave that laps against the high kerbing. It could almost be Venice.
We’re finally getting some action, however. We’ve arranged our activities for the next couple of days, organizing boat rides and meetings with members of the local crab-collecting community. I’ve joined Kennedy and Elaine for a few days from where I’ve been staying, in Salvador, Bahia, training capoeira and coding websites. It’ll be interesting to see the forests whose presentation has been my focus for the past few weeks during the construction of this website. I may not be as capable as the old man of studding my trip updates with literary quotations, but if I can just get the font sizes to match up on all the different pages, I’ll feel like I’ve accomplished something.
Travels with Alex
May 6th, 2009On the flight to Brazil I’m taking an old friend. A very old friend. Alexander von Humboldt, who died 150 years ago. I’m somewhere over the Southern Ocean, midway through the diabolical 6415-mile Auckland-to-Buenos Aires leg of my trip, reading his Personal Narrative of a Journey to the Equinoctial Regions of the New Continent. It seems appropriate. Almost exactly 200 years ago, Humboldt explored Latin America and the Caribbean, which are my destinations, too.
Humboldt was the most famous naturalist of his day. He was a polymathic overachiever, the kind of person whose existence makes the rest of us question ours. Whereas I will spend a modest seven weeks among the mangroves, he spent five years in the field, and amassed so much scientific data on so many subjects—geology, botany, climate, astronomy, zoology, magnetism, electricity, not to mention human cultural diversity—that it took him 27 years to write it all up. No wonder he was one of Darwin’s heroes.
Humboldt was one of the first of a new breed of scientific explorers, pursuing knowledge with a heroic disregard for personal comfort and safety. What fascinates me about him is how modern he seems. He believed that to understand the world you had to look at all the individual phenomena the earth has to offer, and discover how they are connected. “I must find out about the unity of nature,” he wrote. That was his driving force, and for this reason he has been called the first ecologist. Anyone who studies ecosystems and how they fit together and function is walking in Humboldt’s footsteps.
What did he have to say about mangroves? I’ve skipped ahead to the last chapter, about Cuba, and found there a dramatic incident which occurs in the mangroves of Batabano Gulf Bay. The sailors on Humboldt’s ship, frustrated at not being able to find any lobsters, start slaughtering nesting seabirds. Blood streams from the trees, and the ground is littered with dying birds. But here’s the line that struck me like a thunderbolt: “When we arrived on the scene it was strangely silent, as if saying ‘Man has passed this way.’” Two hundred years on and the mangroves continue to fall silent—those that are left—for humankind still passes this way.
Tapioca and Antarctica
May 4th, 2009Tomorrow I will be in Fortaleza, state capital of Ceará, walking its sun-drenched beaches (or possibly just drenched beaches—see yesterday’s post), eating tapioca pancakes for breakfast and drinking Antarctica beer, which must, according to its advertising, be served “estupidamete fria”—stupidly cold.
I passed through Fortaleza on my 2005 National Geographic mangrove trip, en route to some mangrove settlements on the northeastern coast which had been affected by shrimp farms. Most of what I wrote about those places didn’t make the final edit of the story, but the experience of meeting the people of Curral Velho and Porto do Céu remains a vivid memory. Here’s what I wrote:
I traveled east of Fortaleza into the shrimp impact zone. With me were Jeovah Meireles, professor of physical geography at the Federal University of Ceará, and Elaine Corets, Latin American coordinator of the Mangrove Action Project, a global conservation network.
We set out before dawn, and by daybreak we were among the farms. Ponds the size of football fields crowded the landscape like rice paddies. Paddle-wheel aerators frothed the water and workers in kayaks filled feeding trays with fishmeal. The fishmeal, explained Elaine, comes from fish caught by commercial trawlers, which deprives local subsistence fishers of a food resource. It angered her that not only did the shrimp industry destroy the mangroves, but it robbed the sea as well.
Many ponds were not in production, whether due to the white-spot viral disease that was then sweeping Brazil’s shrimp farms or not, we couldn’t tell. Wastewater the color of antifreeze was pouring into a mangrove-flanked river. On the banks, fiddler crabs waved their oversized claws. I thought of them as shipwrecked sailors semaphoring “Rescue us.”
We stopped at a roadside cantina for coffee and tapioca pancakes—a favourite of Brazilians in the north. Jeovah spoke about the fragmentation of ecosystems and loss of biodiversity caused by shrimp farming. He studies the flow of energy between terrestrial and marine food webs, in which mangroves play a vital bridging role. “Shrimp farming sticks a dagger into that whole network,” he said.
ELAINE CORETS
Angry fisherman at Porto do Céu protests what shrimp farms have done to the "gates of paradise."Later that day a flat-bottomed punt with an ancient outboard motor ferried us across the river Jaguaribe to the settlement of Porto do Céu. Golden light gleamed on fishing boats catching the afternoon breeze in their sails. Laughing children dived like sprites in the river; a man fished for crabs from a rickety pier. A straggle of mangroves lined the river’s edge. With their loopy, spidery roots they looked as if they had strolled out of the tide, found the place to their liking, and settled in. Who could blame them? The name of the place means “gates of paradise.”
Two residents took us through the village to see Porto do Céu’s new neighbour: a shrimp farm. We climbed to the top of an embankment and looked across a patchwork of ponds to distant mangrove forests. An electrified fence stretched the length of the village and beyond. Skull-and-crossbones signs on the barbed wire announced a blunt message: access denied.
On the village side, goats milled about in grassless yards, cut off from grazing areas just as their owners have been shut out of their mangrove collecting grounds. But there was worse. The residents showed us abandoned bores that until recently had drawn sweet water from an aquifer beneath the sandy soil. The water had been “doce, doce” they told us, repeating the word as they savoured the memory. Now it was salgado, saline, undrinkable.
Brazil’s Federal Constitution declares that all its citizens “have the right to an ecologically balanced environment, for the common use of the people,” and that government is required to “defend it and preserve it for present and future generations.” Yet of 256 applications to build new ponds in the Jaguaribe area, not one had been turned down. “Este e incrîvel,” said Jeovah—this is incredible.
KENNEDY WARNE
Alouiso Rodrigues dos Santos stands in what was once his vegetable garden, now a saline wasteland.In the village of Curral Velho, which means “old corral,” I stood in the barren garden of Alouiso Rodrigues dos Santos. The 74-year-old told me he had grown vegetables on his plot of land since 1958: sweet potatoes, melons, cassavas, beans. The land was so productive he had to tie up his papaya trees with ropes to stop the weight of fruit from toppling them.
Five years ago a shrimp farmer built his ponds right up to the boundary, 30 metres from dos Santos’s back door. Now, with the seepage of salty water from the ponds, his land produces nothing but saltwort and weeds. Unable to grow food, dos Santos turned to the sea, borrowing money to build a fish trap. But heavy seas destroyed it.
“The land threw me out to sea, and the sea threw me back to land,” he said. “Where can I turn except to God?”
Where, indeed? The mangrove vs shrimp battle still rages along Brazil’s huge coastline. This trip, I will be looking at how people are standing up to protest the destruction of their mangrove resources. Perhaps I will find a more hopeful story this time.
Leave the suntan lotion, take the umbrella
May 4th, 2009The news out of northeastern Brazil, my first port of call, isn’t good. Floods and mudslides from heavy rains have killed at least 14 people and made more than 60,000 homeless. The Parnaiba Delta, where I’m heading on Wednesday, is on the border of the states of Maranhao and Piaui. In Maranhao, 40,000 people are living in shelters. And meteorologists predict two more weeks of downpours!
The heavy rains are probably good for the mangroves, which like a bit of fresh water with their salty diet, but will be challenging for the three of us who are visiting the area: myself, Elaine Corets, my translator and guide, and my son Jeremy, who is coding this site until his cyber-Neolithic father gets the hang of it.
Nothing daunted, we proceed.
Return to the mangroves
May 2nd, 2009
KENNEDY WARNE
Kayaking down Belize's Rio Grande—from the rainforests of the land to the rainforests of the sea.
A cold rain is drumming on my roof in Auckland as I write this first post to the Last Stands blog. In a few days I’ll be leaving the chilly temperatures of a New Zealand autumn for the sticky heat of tropical mangrove forests in Latin America and the Caribbean. It’s a journey that has been four years in the making, and I’m excited to be sharing it with you.
The idea kicked off in 2005, when I was researching mangroves for a story for National Geographic magazine. I spent six weeks wading, wallowing, boating and diving my way through mangrove forests in Belize, Bangladesh, Brazil, Tanzania, Zanzibar, Malaysia and Eritrea. I got to see some of the amazing creatures that live in mangroves (including deer and a tiger in Bangladesh – more about that in a later post). But even more importantly, I visited communities of people who rely on mangroves for their food and livelihood. Their world is disappearing. And that tragedy is the catalyst that made me want to write a book about mangroves. Now I am—and that’s what this Last Stands journey is all about.
It’s going to be an incredible trip. Here are just a few of the things I’m looking forward to:
MANGROVE GARDEN FOUNDATION
Giant mangroves of the Esmeraldas
- visiting the giant mangroves of the Esmeraldas, in Ecuador—some of the tallest mangroves in the world
- meeting the Ecuadorian concheras—the women and children who gather cockles from the mangroves, and whose livelihoods are taken from them by the encroachment of shrimp farms
- taking part in a shark-tagging survey in the mangroves of Bimini Island, in the Bahamas, where an environmental battle is raging between developers and mangrove conservationists
- discovering how the indigenous and Afro-Brazilian culture in Caravelas has incorporated mangroves into the art, dance and music of the region
- traveling to Florida’s Ten Thousand Islands wildlife refuge by airboat with an expert in mangrove mapping
- catching up with Candy Feller, a mangrove scientist who started her career drawing illustrations of marine life underwater—yes, underwater!—before falling in love with mangroves and going on to spend her life researching them
- seeing a very special species of mangrove in Panama which has flowers as big as magnolia blossoms that are pollinated by hummingbirds
