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.

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

This entry was posted on Friday, May 8th, 2009 at 4:20 pm and is filed under Trip update. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.