Word: caroni
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Afternoon in Caroni Swamp finds fanny-pack-clad, zoom-lens-toting tourists squeezed into pirogues motoring through the wetlands to catch a glimpse of the scarlet ibis, Trinidad's national bird. At sundown, some 10,000 of the vermillion-feathered, migratory waterfowl return from days spent in Venezuela, just nine miles away, to roost in the mangrove swamp south of Port of Spain. The window is brief, as a tropical sundown can seem as swift as a blanket thrown over a birdcage, but the ibis do not disappoint. In the day's last light, pack after pack of ibis...
...expanding in the direction of the swamp. The highway on the swamp's eastern side chokes off the fresh water supply, changing the ecosystem of the swamp, which is also bounded by a sewage treatment plant and a garbage dump. That there are still plenty of birds in Caroni is "an illusion," Agard warns. "The local colony is not doing so well," he says, and when their habitat is gone, the colony from the Venezuelan coast, which is rimmed by miles of unmolested mangroves, will bypass Trinidad, roosting elsewhere in the Caribbean. (Warden Ramnarine says he has not seen...
...problem conservationists claim is hampering their effort to protect the ibis is insufficient legal protection for the birds. There is no law prohibiting access to the swamp, says Agard, and though Caroni is listed as a protected under the Ramsar Convention, an international intergovernmental wetlands treaty, adequate local legislation has not been enacted. Diminishing the urgency, conservationists say, is the fact that the scarlet ibis is not an endangered species; it's just endangered on the island of Trinidad. When the Venezuelan colony abandons Trinidad, a smaller flock resident on the island, which needs the interlopers to keep their gene...