A TRINIDAD SANCTUARY

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A TRINIDAD SANCTUARY

The Caroni Bird Sanctuary comprises forty square miles, a depression in the terrain just south of Trinidad's northern range of mountains. We broach it in a soft-engine boat, along waterways bounded by mangrove trees sporting prodigious roots, some red, some white, all above the earth. The murky water, still and silty, bears oysters, and is inhabited by four-eyed fishes and miniature crabs.

Barely a quarter mile in, two boa constrictor snakes catch our attention, intertwined among the leaves and low lying branches close overhead. Our escort calls them "tree boas"; they live in trees and feast on birds in the evening; but they are mercifully asleep above us in daytime as we anxiously paddle by.

This is the nesting season for the bird colonies that inhabit these parts and we spend peaceful time watching them sortie-in, formation after graceful formation, in search of fresh food tids and small sprig material to repair the nests of their young and their mates, who remain sequestered at home deep in the woodlands.

Standing still in the flat hull of our hand hewn craft, silent, swaying gently, softly, we gaze in near disbelief as the sky is alive with moving, feathered waves of winged flight in sweeping spread and full flex, all the while, emitting a joyous cackle, sustained, in unison, orchestrated to the limit of a pleasing crescendo, before fading, rainbow like in coyness and in colour, into the distance of nothing.

Then, we are on our way out of this peaceful sanctuary, in awestruck sight of shimmering white egrets, graceful blue herons and blazing scarlet ibises, limbering by in moving coteries, intermingling in-attentively, ingesting crabs and fish on the edges of a gleaming lagoon, darkly reflecting huge shadows from mountainous hands extended by the ever present northern range.

And the peaks of the range, they too cast shadows as grand fingers across the deep green mangrove forest, spreading itself out like a stunning sheet beneath the lightly clouded early evening sky. Now, the sun, its work done, blinks into the dusk, a solemn rite, its final fading gesture of the day, low, over the Gulf of Paria, its waters rippling toward the north-eastern shores of South America.

Soothingly, darkness falls, as we drift toward river side, paddles up.

Vernon
21.04.09

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