The flaming trees of Trinidad

Tourists watch with awe as brilliant red birds come to roost

By David Mangurian

Our tour boat quietly pulls up to a clump of mangrove trees along the edge of a lagoon in Trinidad’s Caroni Lagoon National Park and Bird Sanctuary. The sun has just set. Next to us is another boatload of tourists and birdwatchers.

“What you are going to see are living Christmas trees,” says our guide, self-taught ornithologist Winston Nanan, pointing toward a small tree-covered island some 200 meters away.

Overhead fly three scarlet ibises, Trinidad’s spectacular, long-necked, long-beaked flaming-red national bird. Then two more, five more to the left, a dozen to the right, stragglers from all directions, sometimes groups of 25 or more, all landing on the island’s trees to roost for the night. The show goes on for 30 minutes until, despite the fall of darkness, the island’s trees literally sparkle red with ibises. How many? “About 5,000,” says Nanan.

“Oh my God,” says Olivia Williams of New York City, who has brought her two children. “This is amazing!”

“I have seen this thousands of times,” says Nanan, who has been conducting nature tours in the Caroni Swamp since 1948, “and every time it is a new experience for me. It is awesome to see thousands of birds transforming these beautiful green mangroves into live Christmas trees. I never get tired of it.”

It’s a birdwatcher’s dream come true—and an opportunity for Trinidad to develop an ecotourism niche in the Caribbean’s multibillion-dollar-a-year tourism business. Visitors to Caroni Park numbered 16,000 last year, thanks in large part to tours from cruise ships that stop in the nearby capital of Port of Spain.

The park will probably become an even more popular destination in the future as a result of a conservation program financed with the help of a $1.2 million IDB loan. A new tourist center that opened in early 2000 includes a 50-seat auditorium, an observation tower that rises five meters above the swamp’s canopy of trees, a boardwalk trail into the mangroves, and an ibis viewing platform near a roosting area.

“This project should win the favor of the most passionate of our environmentalists,” Trinidad and Tobago’s then prime minister, Basdeo Panday, said at the ceremony dedicating the new visitor center. “It is our duty to uncover to the world the marvels of this nature sanctuary.”

Boatloads of tourists ply Caroni’s Mangrove channels.

Accessible wilderness. The 5,611-hectare park is just a 30-minute drive south of downtown Port of Spain. It is considered one of the hemisphere’s best examples of a complex mangrove swamp ecosystem of fresh and brackish water and marsh-tidal lagoons. In addition to more than 160 species of birds, the park is also home to otters, marine opossums, mongoose, tree boas, caimans, crab-eating raccoons, and anteaters.

Park forester Dave Samayah calls a boat trip through Caroni Swamp’s network of channels “as relaxing as coming out of the hot sun and eating an ice cream.”

It has been a long struggle to protect wildlife in the swamp. Nanan’s father, Simon, originally guided hunting and fishing parties into the swamp before he started his tour boat business in the early 1930s. In 1948, Simon Nanan and 200 hunting friends finally got the government to declare the Caroni Swamp a bird sanctuary with 136 hectares of ibis nesting grounds designated as “protected area.”

But hunting the scarlet ibis, whose bright feathers were prized for hats and carnival costumes, was still permitted outside the protected nesting grounds until Trinidad and Tobago became independent in 1962 and the government declared the scarlet ibis its national bird. Even then, illegal poaching continued despite the best efforts of unarmed government game wardens that worked part time. By the mid-1970s, Trinidad’s beautiful national bird had stopped nesting in Caroni Swamp.

Simon Nanan’s son Winston, who has contributed wildlife articles to National Geographic and Smithsonian magazines, began to publicly criticize the lack of wildlife protection in the swamp and became a hero to birdwatchers worldwide.

At the inauguration of the visitor center, Basdeo Panday honored Nanan for his “labor of love…in the protection and promotion of the unique treasures in the Caroni Lagoon.” Nanan was appointed to the park’s 10-member oversight management committee that includes representatives from the government, nongovernmental organizations, and the private sector. In 1999, he created the Caroni Wetlands Scientific Trust to establish flora, fauna and water quality databases to monitor conditions in the swamp.

In the mid-1990s, scarlet ibises began to return to Caroni Swamp to nest. About 2,500 nest and bring up their young in the park today. But although firearms are banned in the swamp, poaching persists, says Nadra Gyan, head of the Ministry of Environment’s Wildlife Section. The government’s $160 fine for poaching does not appear to be effective.

Efforts are now being made to increase protection. The IDB-financed conservation program included the purchase of two custom-designed patrol boats, and game wardens have been increased from just two to five. The wardens now patrol 13 hours a day, seven days a week.

Says Nanan: “If you save your own backyard, then you start to save the world.”

Date posted: January 2002