Word: swamp
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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...
...thanks to rampant poaching to satisfy the unsavory hunger for the bird that shares the country's national crest with the cocrico, claimed as Tobago's bird, conservationists fear that the ibis will forsake Trinidad. "We'd hunt them in the early morning," says Seth, a 21-year-old swamp tour guide and reformed poacher who asked that his real name not be used for fear of jeopardizing the future career he hopes to have with the forest service. "We would leave a piece of red cloth near the roots of the mangroves," he said, where the ibis feeds...
...birds per hunt, each one - barely meaty enough for a single serving - netting him about $30. But the birds are not poached to feed people who would otherwise go hungry, he says. "It's more of a vice, not for the people who live near the swamp, but the bigger people," restaurant owners in the rural south that serve it illegally and wealthy connoisseurs who have come to view eating scarlet ibis as a status symbol. (In 2001 the chairman of the country's airports authority was arrested for poaching scarlet ibis...
...BofA agreed on Jan. 11 to buy Countrywide for about $4 billion in stock, acquiring Countrywide's $1.5 trillion loan portfolio along with its battered reputation and a swamp of lawsuits. You could almost hear the sighs of relief coming from Wall Street - not to mention the Treasury Department and Federal Reserve - that someone had swooped in to prevent the collapse of the nation's largest mortgage lender and whatever else it might pull down in its wake. CreditSights analyst David Hendler called the deal a "rescue bid" that would give the markets some much needed stability. The irresistible headline...
Flash floods swamp the Pacific Northwest...