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.

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.

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.

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

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 12th, 2009 at 5:11 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.