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A conchera speaks

May 16th, 2009

This morning the plan was to talk to the cockle collectors of Tambillo. In this community of 600, around three-quarters of the women work as concheras. I envisaged walking around the houses, knocking on doors and asking: “Buenos dias, señora, es conchera?” (Well, not exactly. Elaine does the heavy lifting, communication-wise. I just suggest questions and then scribble furiously while she translates back and forth.) Julio, head of the fishermen’s collective, didn’t think this was such a good idea. He thought it would be better if he approached some concheras and invited them to speak to us in his house.

And that was how we met Aracely Caicedo, 28, an Afro-Ecuadorian mother of four, a conchera, a confident and eloquent woman who turned out to be one of those people whose story makes a writer’s day.

KENNEDY WARNE
Aracely Caicedo describes her life as a conchera. Edgar Lemos listens.

To begin with, she spoke about the physical demands and dangers of the job: the chafed knuckles and broken nails, the wasp and mosquito bites, the snake whose local name means “rot maker” because its bite can lead to gangrene, the stinging nettle which once pricked her in the eye, making her blind in that eye for a month.

Then there is the dreaded pez sapo, the toad fish, which lives in pools in the mud. If you accidentally step on this creature it releases sticky eggs that cause a painful skin infection. The only remedy is to heat a knife and sear the affected flesh, or use gunpowder. Julio, who had been a conchero for four years as a child, demonstrated the gunpowder technique, producing a length of fuse and lighting it. I could just imagine how an attractive young woman like Aracely would feel about stabbing a burning fuse to her skin.

Julio gathered cockles between the ages of 9 and 13. He worked six days a week, he said, fitting the trips to the mangroves around school hours. He hated the enslaving work, and the fact that each day you could only make enough money for that day’s needs.

Aracely, too, spoke about the economic hardships of life as a conchera. There are regular fixed costs, such as rubber gloves (which last only about a week), boots, pants, smoke torches to keep insects at bay (one torch is needed per day), and the cost of the boat that takes concheras to the mangroves. If you want to eat or drink while you’re in the mangroves, that’s extra, too. The going rate is eight cockles for a cup of Coke.

Concheras rarely eat the cockles they collect. They can’t afford to. Cockles are their only source of income. “Sometimes we pick mangrove snails from the roots, or we catch crabs to keep,” she said. But most of the time they are focused on collecting as many cockles as they can for the limited time they have before the rising tide forces them off the beds.

They need to, because many have large families to support. “In this culture, women often have several partners through their lives.” Children from those relationships always stay with the woman, so she may have to provide for a large family. A lot of single women are thinking, ‘How will I get enough cockles to keep my children fed?’ Such is the economic pressure that pregnant women work right up to when the baby is due. One woman gave birth in the boat, she said.

The livelihood of a conchera, marginal at the best of times, has become even more difficult with an influx of men into what was once primarily the domain of women and children, placing even more pressure on a diminishing resource. Many men used to work in coconut and oil palm plantations, but when the plantations cut back production they turned to cockle collecting. The men work more destructively, said Aracely. “They break the roots and cause more damage to the cockle beds. Women work more delicately,” she said.

Out in the mangroves, there’s a balance between cooperation and competition among the concheras. “The women sing back and forth as they collect—‘one,’ ‘two,’ ‘three’ as they find cockles,” Aracely said. This enables the collectors to know which of them has found the most promising cockle bed. On the other hand, there’s a prayer the women make to the Virgen del Agarrarero, the Virgin of the Collectors, which basically says: “Let me get the cockles first, and don’t give any to the others.”

Was there anything about the job she enjoyed, I asked? She laughed and said: “The only good thing is a lot of money in your hand.”

Getting that fistful of dollars is increasingly difficult. The cockle stocks are in decline. A skilful conchera used to be able to collect 700–800 cockles a day, Aracely said. Now 100 is considered a good haul. Concheras receive less than 10 cents a cockle. They have to sell their catch to the boat operator who takes them to the cockle beds. One boatman may set the price at $8 a hundred, another $7.50, still another $7. The women can’t sell to the person offering the best price, because more often than not they will be in debt to one particular boat owner. Boat owners advance them money for shoes or gloves, or tide them over if they are sick. The boat owners become money lenders, and women find themselves drawn into a cycle of debt from which they cannot readily escape.

Knowing that at peak times such as Christmas, Easter and Carnival cockles may sell for up to $20 a hundred in the cities is bitterly frustrating for the concheras, who receive only a fixed low price. “The price goes up and down for the consumer, but never for the conchera,” Aracely said. “No one values our work.”

Edgar Lemos, who is travelling with us, wants to help create a community bank so that the women of Tambillo can begin to gain a measure of both respect and financial self-determination. Small loans are the key to creating alternative business ventures that will reduce the pressure on the cockle beds and help them recover. Aracely strongly supports this idea. In fact, she is running for office in the local council in the hope of improving the lot of the concheras. She doesn’t rate her chances of election, however. Candidates generally woo voters by extending various forms of largesse, and Aracely has nothing with which to buy votes. All she has are her dreams and her energy and desire to see a better future for the children of Tambillo.

“It is not good for them to start as a little girl and become an old lady and be a conchera all their life,” she said.

We fell silent, letting that reality, that sentence of inescapable destiny, sink in. In a few hours, when the tide was low enough, I would go out with the women and children to the cockle beds and see their work for myself.

Tags: cockles, Ecuador, Esmeraldas
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Happy hour in Tambillo

May 15th, 2009

After leaving Olmedo we retraced our steps to San Lorenzo, then took a boat through the mangroves to the fishing village of Tambillo. I had wanted to spend a night in a community of concheras, or cockle collectors. While we were buying waterproof boots in San Lorenzo we bumped into Alfredo, a schoolteacher from just such a community. With a phone call, he had organised it.

At Tambillo’s wharf we were met by health officials collecting visitor information in connection with swine flu. Ecuador had just had its first confirmed case, leading the more sensational newspapers to run melodramatic headlines such as “Pig disease has descended upon us,” as if it were one of the plagues of the apocalypse.

KENNEDY WARNE
Tambillo in the afternoon.

We walked into the village—a grid of mud-and-cockleshell alleys and shanties built on stilts. Julio Valasquez, the director of Tambillo’s fishermen’s cooperative, welcomed us into his home. As he talked I caught the words “manglares bonitos”—beautiful mangroves. There is no question in a place like this about the importance of mangroves: everyone in this community draws sustenance from the rainforests of the sea.

Day’s end is a languid time in the tropics. On a shady veranda women played bingo using dried kernels of corn for counters. Around the corner, men slapped domino tiles onto a weathered table. Children spun tops, flicking them down on the hardened mud of the alleys then scooping them up to spin on their palms.

KENNEDY WARNE
Elaine and entourage.

Is there anywhere in the world where digital cameras have not yet extended their reach? Whenever Elaine and I produced ours, it was moths to a flame. Little ones four and five years old thronged us, begging us to take their picture and then demanding we turn the cameras around so they could point at the images and shriek with laughter.

Seeking a cool breeze and respite from our young entourage, we walked to the end of the pier, where a man was teaching his four-year-old to swim, releasing him time and again to flail and laugh and swallow salt water for a few metres to the concrete steps, from where the boy would launch himself back into his father’s arms. Flocks of grackles streaked across the estuary, flying within splash distance of the water, making for their island roosts. A line of pelicans performed a slow Mexican wave.

KENNEDY WARNE
Tambillo happy hour—a game of dominoes in the shade.

After dark, I sat on a veranda listening to schmaltzy Ecuadorian bolero music pouring out of a nearby cantina, with the added percussion of a sheet of loose roofing iron rattling in the wind. The smell of frying fish and plantains drifted on the night air. Packs of scrawny dogs ranged through the streets and under the houses, occasionally erupting in a snarling scrap.

I have a special affection for places like Tambillo. They trigger nostalgia for a life less complex, with fewer demands and gentler rhythms. Reason can counter these sentiments a dozen times over, but I choose to ignore its cold calculus. Wasn’t it Pascal who said, “The heart has reasons that reason knows nothing about”? I’m with Blaise. And I’m loving Tambillo.

Tomorrow I go into the mangroves with the concheras.

Tags: Ecuador
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Among giants

May 14th, 2009

Today I walked among the giant mangroves of Majagual.

They are indeed remarkable trees. Though not especially broad—I could have wrapped my arms around the trunks of most of them—they soar to heights of 30 and 40 metres. Prop roots spring in every direction from the trunks, the largest forming massively thick buttresses that hold the trees aloft in the soft soil. From the canopy, long dangling tresses of lichen hang down, and the roots and trunks are studded with bromeliads. Some were in flower—a scarlet splash amidst the green and brown of the mangroves.

KENNEDY WARNE
Communing with the patriarchs.

Yet even in this cathedral of nature Big Shrimp casts a cold shadow. In 1993, a 600 ha shrimp farm was established nearby, with some of its ponds built right up to the boundary of the forest reserve. The dykes and channels of the farm have disrupted the hydrology of the area. The mangroves of Majagual may not survive the changes.

Florencio Nazareno, our guide, pointed at the mud beneath the boardwalk and said it should be sticky and wet; instead, it was dry enough to walk on without even sinking. Only the very highest tides now reach the roots of the trees. Because of the reduced salinity, alien species such as fern and strangler fig have invaded the forest. As we walked, Florencio slashed at head-high fern with a machete. In places, it had reached across the boardwalk and was blocking our path. More importantly, the aggressive fern chokes the ground and stops regeneration of the red mangrove seedlings that are the future of Majagual.

KENNEDY WARNE
Changes in water flow as a result of a nearby shrimp farm have allowed an aggressive fern to invade the forest. Florencio Nazareno can do little to counter the invader, except chop it back where it blocks the boardwalk.

When the shrimp farm went in, Florencio was one of those who resisted. Like others in the fishing village of Olmedo, which has custodianship of the mangroves, he understood the threat the farm posed. “For generation after generation it has been passed down that mangroves are our life,” he said. “If you kill the mangroves you kill us.”

He participated in protests against the shrimp farm, and for his efforts became a marked man. He fled inland to the Amazon, where he worked in an oil palm plantation. Six months later, when he felt it was safe to return, he took up a job as a ranger in the mangrove reserve, though his main livelihood is still fishing. He feels sure that if a mangrove reserve had not been formed in 1995 to preserve Majagual and other mangroves in the Esmeraldas, the forest where we were standing would now be a shrimp pond. (I’ll have more to say about the mangrove reserve in a future post.)

KENNEDY WARNE
Like an island of life, one of Majagual’s mighty mangroves supports an array of perching bromeliads.

Whether the Majagual mangroves are the tallest in the world I can’t be certain, though to my eye they seemed no taller than mangroves I have seen in other places. But the question of supremacy is surely irrelevant. To be in the presence of such remarkable trees is a gift to the spirit. And to learn that these forest patriarchs are under threat is a deep sadness.

Tags: Ecuador, Esmeraldas, shrimp farms
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Have a banana

May 13th, 2009

Two days ago I looked across a river and saw Peru. Today I was on an estuary near the border with Colombia. Between these two ends of Ecuador lay the delights of a 12-hour trip on the night bus from Huaquillas to Esmeraldas. I’m getting used to these interminable journeys. Freezing air conditioning or no air conditioning—those are the only options. Beverly Hills Ninja in Spanish, if you should be so lucky. A 4 a.m. stop at some soulless terminal where bleary-eyed passengers stagger past bleary-eyed vendors selling trinkets, fizzy drinks and coconut toffee.

From Esmeraldas (which means “emeralds”) we travelled the rest of the way to the border town of San Lorenzo with Edgar Lemos, who, like Pedro in the south, spends his life working for the protection of mangroves. Besides a love of mangroves, we found something else in common: we are fructophiles. We both have home orchards—though whereas mine is a quarter of a hectare in suburbia, he has a three-hectare spread on the banks of the Rio Esmeraldas, planted in citrus, coconut, banana, cacao, and many other fruits whose names defied easy translation.

KENNEDY WARNE
Statue in Esmeraldas celebrates the stevedores whose labour built the banana trade.

It turns out that Edgar can spot a rare variety of banana from 100 yards, so the journey was punctuated by stops at roadside fruit stalls. That Ecuador is the world’s largest exporter of bananas is well known—and confirmed by the fact that in the south of the country you can travel for tens of kilometres and see nothing but banana palms to left and right. “On either side the highway lie long fields of palms but not of rye,” to mangle Tennyson. Indeed, one region is called El Oro, the gold, named not for the metal but the fruit.

But Ecuador also has many artisanal bananas, varieties that never see the hold of a ship. Small, plump, thin-skinned and bursting with fragrance, these yellow bombshells are a revelation in flavour, showing up supermarket bananas for the taste-deprived specimens they are.

KENNEDY WARNE
Edgar Lemos (foreground) samples one of Ecuador’s non-export banana varieties.

Edgar has been involved in mangrove advocacy for eight years. The issues he deals with are the same as elsewhere in the country: illicit logging, shrimp-farm expansion, transfer of public land into private hands, overfishing, pollution from Ecuador’s new agricultural boom crop, the African oil palm. But here there is the added twist of Colombia’s narcotics war, which is being waged on the mangrove coast.

Edgar tells us stories of cocaine kitchens discovered in the depths of the mangroves, of drug shipments being moved across mangrove channels by fibreglass submarine, and of the refugee problem. When the fighting intensifies, up to 3000 men, women and children flee across the border and take refuge among the Ecuadorians. Some stay. Over lunch of fried plantains and cockle cerviche, I met UNHCR staff working to help integrate the Colombian refugees into the local economy.

Edgar thinks it would be unwise for us gringos to stay in San Lorenzo. The town has an itchy-trigger-finger feeling about it, and our presence will not go unnoticed, he says. San Lorenzo has muchos oidos, many ears. We retreat to Olmedo, a town which has a community tourism project. Why would tourists come to a 187-person community living in stilt houses among mangroves? Among other things, because the mangroves here are reputed to be the tallest in the world. Tomorrow I will visit these monsters.

Tags: Ecuador, Esmeraldas, food
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Life and death

May 12th, 2009

With Pedro Ordinola’s words about armed guards and attack dogs fresh in the memory, we set out this morning to look at the shrimp farms near Huaquillas, on Ecuador’s southern border. It was full tide at the port when we arrived. Shrimp-farm boats were heading out with loads of dried feed and molasses for their hungry charges. On the banks of the channel, great egrets, with necks so impossibly thin you could easily encircle them with just a thumb and forefinger, perched on low mangrove branches, their stark whiteness arresting against the muddy water. The channel is the border. With just a few flaps of its archangel wings, an egret can cross from Ecuador to Peru.

KENNEDY WARNE
Behind the mangrove beauty screen, a less than pretty reality.

On the topmost branch of a mangrove, two magnificent frigate birds preened. “Magnificent” is part of their name—and why not? With the male’s red chest pouch that it blows up like a party balloon to court its mate; with its jet black wings, all angular like a fighter plane; with the splayed tail that gives it its nickname “scissors of the sky,” it is nothing if not magnifico.

With a boatman and a few other members of Pedro’s crab-collectors association (see yesterday’s post) we motored through the network of islands that fill the estuary. The mangroves fringing the islands were thick with shorebirds roosting in the lush foliage, waiting for the falling tide to expose their feeding grounds. But all was not as it seemed. The mangroves here are a beauty screen—a curtain that is one tree thick. Pull back the curtain and you find shrimp farms stretching to the horizon.

We motored steadily. Every few hundred metres was a gap in the curtain and a shrimp farm hut. Sometimes a sign with skull and crossbones had been tacked to a mangrove trunk: Keep out. Armed guards. Sometimes a guard dog barked its head off.

KENNEDY WARNE
'Keep out. Armed guards.' A shrimp farm´s message on a mangrove.

We turned down a channel barely wide enough for the boat and followed along the exterior dyke of a shrimp pond. Pedro stood on the bow, watching for underwater snags and pushing away the mangrove branches that crowded overhead. Every now and then he ducked suddenly to avoid webs that industrious arachnids had spun across the channel. At the centre of each was a spider you would not want to tangle with—the body at least 5 cm long, the size of a large grasshopper.

We stopped at a scene of desolation. Black stumps and branches were strewn over an area several football fields in size. The area had been cut two years ago, Pedro said. His association had lodged a protest, and eventually development ground to a halt when the shrimp farm ran out of money—a rare success in Pedro’s struggle against the aquaculture juggernaut. But it’s a cat-and-mouse game, he explained, trying to stop the area being developed by some other farm. Pedro keeps an eye on this site and others, to be ready in case development starts up again.

KENNEDY WARNE
Among the ruins of a destroyed mangrove wetland, the seeds of tomorrow´s forest are planted.

While we talked, one of the men plucked a handful of ripe mangrove seeds from the intact trees at the edge of the site and without fuss starting planting them in the sludge. It was such a simple act, yet the bright green mangrove cigars seemed to glow with promise. One man sows destruction; another counters it with life.

So it went through the morning, stopping at sites where the long-term productivity of mangroves had been sacrificed for the short-term gain of shrimp. I was struck by the depth of knowledge that resides in the memories of fishermen who have worked all their lives in these places. Such and such a spot was known for its large mud crabs, somewhere else was a place where cockles were especially numerous or sweet. We came to a bay renowned as a nursery ground for sharks. “Now if you set a net all you catch here is mud,” José Ordinola, Pedro’s nephew, said.

There was a wistful look in their eyes as they spoke of mangrove stands they had worked 20 years ago, now either too dangerous to work, or long since bulldozed and torched. Or they remembered where land in the centre of islands had been watermelon gardens and fruit orchards—now, like the mangroves, converted into ponds. Walking around the perimeter of one shrimp farm, we found crab pincers and legs mixed up in the dried mud of the walls. José, Pedro’s nephew and a crab collector, couldn’t resist reaching his arm into the mud at the base of the wall to see if crabs still survived under there. He found one, a female, and beamed. Even in this alien place, traces of the old world remain.

The tide fell so far that our boat grounded. While we waited for it to float free we rested, drank warm Coke and watched the world of the mudflat—a world of crabs endlessly gesticulating to each other with their arcane semaphore, of egrets wading with silent predatory intent, of wimbrels, oystercatchers and ibises probing the sediment, of pelicans, pajarro viejo, “the old bird,” floating in the shallows and then taking to the sky with slow, grand wingbeats.

Parts of this world remain, but chunks of it are disappearing, preserved only in the memory of old fishermen. The Pedros and Josés, the crab collectors and concheros, are doing their best to resist the decline, and doing so in the face of far-from-idle threats. When I asked Pedro if he was worried about his personal safety, he said nature would protect him, just as he is protecting nature. I hope he’s right.

Tags: Ecuador, shrimp farms
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Pedro of the mangroves

May 11th, 2009

We are in the town of Huaquillas, near Ecuador’s southern border with Peru, after a sphincter-tightening four-hour minibus ride from Guayaquil on a highway where every driver seemed to think he was Ayrton Senna. We are sitting on the porch of a roadside cantina, eating plantain soup, smashing cooked mud crab with a wooden hammer and talking to the owner, Pedro Ordinola, defender of mangroves.

KENNEDY WARNE
Pedro Ordinola explains his role as a protector of mangroves in Ecuador's far south.

Pedro has a fight on his hands: a fight with Big Shrimp. Ecuador is one of the biggest exporters of farmed shrimp in the Americas. Within Ecuador, this southern region is seeing some of the most rapid expansion of shrimp farming, and an associated loss of mangrove forests. The law in Ecuador says that mangroves shall not be cut down, but, perhaps because this is a border town, the law seems to have a flexible interpretation here.

It is not just the physical removal of mangroves that is the problem, Pedro tells us. It is the transfer of title to private companies of public land. Every year, mangrove lands that have traditionally been used by crab and conch collectors are declared off limits by shrimp operators.

Barbed wire is strung through estuaries. Guard dogs roam the farm perimeters. Armed security guards fire at trespassers. “You can’t get within five metres of a shrimp farm before they start shooting,” Pedro said. He showed us a map of the islands and estuaries along the Pacific Coast. Where there was a carpet of green in 1969, 30 years later a red stain of shrimp ponds had spread across the area.

In 2002, Pedro formed an association of crab collectors to defend the disappearing mangroves. “I got tired of filing complaints,” he said. “A complaint is like putting money in a corrupt official’s pocket.” He would file a protest, an official would make a show of investigating it, money would change hands, the complaint would evaporate into the fog of officialdom.

In some ways, Pedro is an unlikely champion for the rainforests of the sea. He was born in Ecuador’s high sierra, far from the sea. A drought drove his family to the coast in 1978, when Pedro was 12. Even at that age, he says, he felt an affinity for trees, and understood that when you lose a forest you lose part of yourself.

It is common practice in Latin America to name things after important dates, so Pedro chose 15 de Enero, January 15, as the name of the group. January 15 is the start of the closed season for crabbing. The closed season ensures the survival of the crab fishery. Pedro’s association seeks the survival of the crabs’ home, the mangroves.

It has not been an easy road. He has had his share of threats, and a few carrots have been dangled in front of him, too. One time he was offered a second storey on his house if he would stop opposing shrimp farmers. Money talks, but it doesn’t drown out the voice of those who have been killed or maimed for their opposition to shrimp. Last year a conchero, a cockle collector, died from shots fired by a shrimp security guard. In another incident, in Peurto Bolivar, to the north, a perro asasino, an attack dog, was set on a cockle collector, and killed him.

I asked Pedro what keeps him going—what makes him get up in the morning and spend another day standing up to a concerted and powerful opposition. He shrugged and said he didn’t really know, but that, God willing, he would continue his work. I suspect the reason lies in one of the mottos of his group, which I saw on a placard: El manglar es nuestra casa. Protégelo y nos alimentará. The mangrove is our home. Protect it and it will feed us.

Tomorrow Pedro will take us into the mangroves that he and his association fight to protect.

Tags: Ecuador, shrimp farms
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A crab in the hand is worth two in the mud

May 10th, 2009

Rogerio de Sousa’s fish-processing plant was up to its gills in shrimp when we arrived next morning. The sweating crew of a shrimp boat, just in from nine days at sea, was unloading crate after crate of fat pink prawns. While these succulent-looking monsters up to 15 cm long were being stowed and iced, a dozen women and children at a table in the shade peeled a smaller variety of shrimp—known as “seven whiskers”—to be snap-frozen in the blast freezer.

ELAINE CORETS
Crossing the channel to the mangroves.

KENNEDY WARNE
Rogerio and his parrot.

Meanwhile, Rogerio was showing us his pet parrot, Pedro. It cackled in perfect imitation when anyone laughed, and spontaneously croaked various Portuguese words, which, of course, were lost on me.

Soon it was decreed that the tide had fallen sufficiently to go crabbing, and Rogerio introduced us to Seu Manuel, “Sir Manuel,” a small, whippet-thin old man with the leathery skin that comes from a lifetime on and about the sea. He had been collecting caranguejo for 30 years, he said—“so I am just a beginner.”

On his crab-catching arm he wore a denim gauntlet up to the shoulder. A string around his waste—his “tool belt”—held a dozen short cords for tying up the live crabs and a canister of mosquito repellent. He carried a hook for reaching into the deepest of burrows.

We took a rowboat across the channel and squelched and slithered through glutinous grey mud to the crab zone. Dense thickets of prop roots, head-high and more, formed a maze of interlocking arches through which Seu Manuel nimbly squeezed himself or clambered over, muttering to himself and stopping every few steps to plunge his arm down a burrow. He moved so spryly through the mangroves I thought of him as a Brazilian leprechaun.

KENNEDY WARNE
Seu Manuel gets down to business, reaching into the crab´s lair.

Sometimes he softened the mud a little by treading it with his feet, then lay down on the grey gloop to reach up to his shoulder into the crab’s lair. Sometimes it looked as if he were trying to insert his entire body down the hole. About half of the burrows he tested produced a crab. If it was feminino it was set free—no females are taken by the collectors. As well as being much smaller than the males, they represent, of course, the future of the stock. Masculino crabs were tied, four to a cord, which is the way they are sold in the markets. Seventy percent of the crabs caught in the Parnaíba Delta go to Fortaleza, the capital of Ceará, where crab feasts are standard fare at the beach.

JEREMY WARNE
Author with his prize catch.

After watching and photographing Seu Manuel work for a while, I announced that I would like to try. He glanced at me with wry amusement, then pointed to a wet patch of mud beside a prop root and went off to catch more of his own. I pushed my arm in, trying two or three routes past a tangle of mangrove feeding roots that blocked the way, then found the main hole, or toca, and reached the full length of my arm. Nothing. The hole seemed to go on forever.

I tried another spot. The burrow entrances are easy to recognise, once you have your eye in. They are covered with sloppy mud that looks like a small puddle. This time, again at the fullest extent of my arm, I felt something prickly and twiggy at the end of the tunnel. Surely the legs of a crab. I wriggled and twisted my hand until I had whatever it was in grasp and pulled it to the surface, hoping that the pincers weren’t in nipping range of my fingers. I had seen Seu Manuel bring one up with the pincer clamped on to his finger. When he shook the crab off, the pincer broke away from the crab before it let go of his hand.

I looked at the clump of black mud and crustacean I had in my nervous fingers. Bingo! A big male. I manoeuvred it so I had it pincer-side-out and held it up proudly. Surely it was a record. “Grande, no?” I said in my pidgin Portuguese. The old man grunted and nodded. Seen it all before.

I caught another one, but it was feminino so I released it with my best wishes for the next “Carnival of crabs.” May it produce muitíssimo offspring and keep alive this colourful traditional fishery—one more gift of the mangroves.

Tags: caranguejo, Parnaiba
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We meet the king

May 8th, 2009

Today started off more catastrophically than usual. We didn’t just have flooded streets to contend with, but the electricity was out, the water was off and the cellphone networks were down. We were desperate to find some crab catchers to go out into the mangroves with, but we had no way to communicate with anyone. Collecting mangrove mud crabs is a major part of the economy of the Parnaíba Delta, providing a livelihood for thousands of people. Getting the crab story was one of the reasons I had come to the delta, and I was running out of time.

KENNEDY WARNE
Walking to work Parnaíba-style. Jeremy and Elaine negotiate the floodwaters outside our pousada.

We tossed a coin and decided to take a taxi to the town of Luis Correia, where Elaine had earlier made contact with a journalist who had offered to help us. But her cellphone was down, and we didn’t know where she lived. We made inquiries at the mayor’s office, and in an instant our luck took a giant swing to the positive side. It turned out that the mayor himself was in the crab business. In fact, he told us he was the “rei do caranguejo”—king of crab. If this man couldn’t fix us up with a crab collector, no one could.

He ushered us into his office, swept aside the needs of a town without electricity, and started talking about what was clearly his favourite subject, the mangrove mud crab. He had been a crab boat captain for 15 years, then had set himself up as a crab distributor and now operates two seafood restaurants as well. He spoke of the life cycle of the crab, about the three months they spend in their burrows waiting for their old shell to fall off, and how when they finally emerge their shells are as soft as jelly. Within two tides the shell hardens into the solid body armour a crab needs to protect itself from predators.

KENNEDY WARNE
The mayor of Luis Carreia, Francisco Araújo Galeno, 'king of crab'

While we talked, the mayor’s secretary brought in trays of iced water and cups of hot sweet cafezinho, the strong black coffee Brazilians favour. Fanning himself vigorously with a piece of paper, Francisco Araújo Galeno told us about the closed season during summer when the crabs are mating. “This is the Carnival for crabs,” he said, “when the males and females are checking each other out—just like we do.”

I liked the mayor. He spoke passionately about the crucial part crab collecting played in the economic life of the delta. He scribbled notes on a pad as he talked and gesticulated with his hands. Glancing on the wall behind him, I noticed he was flanked by a painting of Christ and a crustacean montage, featuring a huge stuffed lobster and a mud crab. I asked him if he planned to run for president. He laughed and threw his hands up in the air. “Deus sabe!” he said—God knows.

I asked about shrimp farming in the area. Readers of this blog will know that shrimp farming is a major threat to mangroves. I wanted to know if the mayor ever found himself in difficult administrative position, on the one hand protecting the mangroves where the crabs live (the source of his own livelihood), and on the other encouraging new business activity such as aquaculture in the area.

He told me that with the slump in the shrimp export market, aquaculture expansion into mangrove areas wasn’t a problem at the moment. But he said he thought there needed to be a comprehensive study of the costs and benefits of farmed shrimp, to establish once and for all if the economic benefits of aquaculture was outweighed by the damage done to the mangrove environment and to economic activities such as crab collecting and ecotourism.

His own position was plain. “Our survival depends on mangroves,” he said.

KENNEDY WARNE
From mud to menu, a mangrove crab undergoes a final clean before its appointment with the pot.

Towards the end of the conversation, the secretary of fisheries, a young man named Luis ‘Rogerio’ de Sousa Filho, joined us and offered to take us to lunch at one of the dozens of beach restaurants where Brazilians go for a seafood feast.

He drove us to the place, and I visited the kitchen to watch fresh mud crabs being prepared. It’s nothing fancy. The kitchenhand kills them with the stab of a knife, washes them and cooks them in a pot of water. They are served au naturel, accompanied with crisp fried manioc flour and a vinegar salsa of tomato and coriander. Most diners sit at rough tables under thatched sun shelters on the sand, where you smash the crab legs and pincers on the tabletop with a wooden beater and extract the sweet white flesh with your teeth. The sweetest flesh of all is inside the body of the crab, where with each crunch you get a mouthful of some sort of interior shell structure (I’m not an expert on crustacean anatomy). The fiddliness of eating them is more than compensated by the taste.

Rogerio runs a wild shrimp-fishing business near the port. Across the river from his operation is a mangrove forest where crab collectors go. I asked if it would be possible to go out that afternoon, but he said the tide was too high. It would not be low enough until nightfall. But tomorrow, he promised, I could try my hand at catching the caranguejo.

Tags: Brazil, caranguejo, conservation, food, interview, Parnaiba, shrimp farms
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Ibis under threat

May 8th, 2009

As 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.

Tags: birds, conservation, fauna
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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?

Tags: birds, fauna, guara, mangroves
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