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?