Green Season in Trinidad and Tobago

From back home in Ohio, Kenn writes: Most birding tours to Trinidad and Tobago (T & T) are planned for winter or early spring. That’s the season when you can expect the highest total number of species, because the local resident birds are joined by migrants from the north -- padding the list with birds that you could have seen back in Ohio or New Jersey during the summer. People who judge the success of a birding trip by the sheer number of species seen (we’re not among them) might see that as reason enough to go to Trinidad in winter.

Winter and early spring are the seasons when most other tourists go to T & T also. Partly they go in winter to escape the cold weather up north. But another factor is that the other half of the year, June through November, is what used to be referred to as Trinidad’s rainy season.

I say "used to be" because we’ve changed it. That half of the year is now known as the "Green Season."

Yeah, there’s some rain. But we just spent eight very full days in T & T at the peak of the Green Season, and rain was never an inconvenience for us. We carried rain jackets, we carried plastic bags for the cameras and binoculars, and we used common sense about watching the sky. Showers came a couple of times a day but they were brief, and then the skies cleared again. We didn’t lose more than a few minutes to rain, and in between, the birding was fantastic.

I’ve already written about our extraordinary night with the leatherback sea turtles. That’s an experience you won’t have in winter, because the turtles aren’t breeding then. In a more directly bird-related vein, the Green Season also has a lot of breeding bird activity. The total number of species present may be lower than in mid-winter, but the resident tropical birds are highly active and visible. We saw plenty of evidence of that during our visit.

Palm Tanagers were everywhere in T & T, including in the towns. At the Asa Wright Nature Centre, a pair was nesting inside the living room of the main house, and the adults were coming and going without any regard for all the humans on the verandah. We decided that this could be called "Palm Tanager" because it might easily land on the palm of your hand.

This Barred Antshrike nest at the Grafton Estate on Tobago was just one of many nests we found during our trip.

These male Golden-headed Manakins (and 7 or 8 of their buddies) were displaying like mad at a "lek," or communal dancing ground, down one of the trails at Asa Wright. The gaudy males perform little moonwalks and other dances while making buzzing and trilling notes, all to attract females. Which suggests to me that those female manakins must have really weird tastes!

Over on the Main Ridge on Tobago, the male Blue-backed Manakins were similarly preoccupied with doing freaky dances and making strange noises.

Some of the most interesting breeding behavior that we saw involved Common Potoos on the grounds of the Asa Wright Nature Centre. Potoos are genuinely bizarre creatures. Distantly related to nighthawks and Whip-poor-wills, but classified in a different family, potoos spend the day perched bolt upright on high tree branches, looking for all the world like dead stubs. At night, they fly around catching large insects in flight. The naturalists at Asa Wright had located a potoo nest, which really just consisted of a depression on a high branch where the female would have laid her single egg a few weeks earlier. The poor blurry photo above shows an adult potoo brooding the young bird. If it's hard to see what's going on, the next couple of photos should help. Here's a photo taken a couple of days later, when the adult was roosting atop a different perch. Even here, it doesn't really look like a bird. It's facing toward us, and its very short, broad bill is pointing up toward the left.

And here's the young Common Potoo by itself, still perched on the spot where it had hatched. Its bill is pointing up toward the right, and its eyes are closed. Good camouflage, isn't it? It doesn't really look like a dead stub of a branch -- it looks more like a discarded pale teddy bear, plucked from the trash can and tossed up into the tree -- but it doesn't look very edible. Predators aren't likely to go for it.

Here the young potoo has lowered its head a little, its bill is pointing toward the right, and its eye is slightly open. See the eye? (It's under that impressive bushy eyebrow.) Does the shape of the bird make sense now?

Here the little tyke is more thoroughly hunched down. Possibly because it senses that it's just about to start raining. Um, I mean, greening. This isn't the rainy season, it's the Green Season!

Here's Kim (just right of center), surrounded by a group of students and their teachers, showing them the baby Common Potoo through our digiscoping setup. We saw several groups of students during the time we were at Asa Wright, and it was inspiring to see the amount of educational programming that was going on at that fine nature center.

Incidentally, anyone who wants to visit Asa Wright Nature Centre, or explore nature anywhere in Trinidad and Tobago, should contact Caligo Ventures. They are THE experts on birding and natural history in T & T, and they're the exclusive agents for Asa Wright in the USA. Mark Hedden from Caligo traveled with us in T & T, and he proved to be a very impressive guy in terms of his dedication to birding, conservation, and quality travel.

Touching the Graceful Monsters

From amid a huge file of still-unprocessed photos, Kenn writes:

Baby leatherback sea turtles hatch out of eggs buried in sand and start a desperate scramble down the beach toward the water, and if they make it, they may not see land again for years. During those years they are maturing from palm-sized rubber toys into enormous sea monsters. Full-grown adult leatherbacks are the world’s largest turtles, up to seven feet long and weighing up to a ton. They are also the most wide-ranging turtles on the planet, found almost throughout the world’s oceans, traveling from the tropics to the edges of the polar regions. They are also, throughout their vast range, seriously endangered.

With streamlined leathery shells and powerful front flippers, the leatherbacks can fly through the depths with astonishing grace and speed, diving to more than half a mile below the sea surface and staying submerged for more than an hour. Their great size is no hindrance in the sea, where they are the most graceful of giants. Male leatherbacks will spend the rest of their lives in this state of grace. But unlike whales or dolphins, which have developed the ability to give birth at sea, adult female leatherbacks must go through the ordeal of returning to land to lay their eggs.

And an ordeal it must be, too, when she comes to land. As the female leatherback crawls from the surf onto the beach at night, in an instant she is transformed from graceful ballerina of the sea to clumsy, heavy drudge, plowing more than a thousand pounds of hard flesh forward with slow sweeps of her flippers, dragging herself face-first through the sand as she seeks the perfect spot to lay those precious eggs. Talk about a mother’s love demanding sacrifice. It may take two or three hours or more for her to drag herself ashore, find the right spot, dig a hole, lay the eggs, cover them over, and then drag herself, exhausted, back to the sea.

If we were to stumble across this phenomenon by chance, it would be our instinct to stay far back, to avoid disturbing this intimate ordeal of an endangered species. But Kim and I were lucky enough one night last week to be at Matura Beach, Trinidad, as insiders. We were in the company of local wardens who are almost as extraordinary, in their own way, as the turtles. Some of these men have been walking these beaches three or four nights a week during the nesting season for the last twenty years. Their devotion to the huge reptiles is obvious, but they also know exactly what visitors can and cannot do. So they told us when we had to stay back with lights off, when we could approach, when we could actually touch the mother leatherback as she was laying her eggs. Their guidance gave us the confidence to move in close without fear that we would seem disrespectful of the great beasts.

Here's a size comparison. Admittedly, Kim is quite petite, but our friend Pete Dunne (just behind Kim, with binoculars) is a normal-sized guy, so you can see that the female leatherback sea turtle is a huge animal.

The wardens had flashlight with red lenses (red light, they said, did not disturb the turtles), and in the glow of these we could watch the process. The huge female leatherback was digging with extraordinary delicacy, using her hind flippers to ladle out scoops of sand and toss them to the side, while her head and front flippers were merely spread-eagled on the sand. Periodically she would reach down with her hind flippers as if testing the depth of the hole she had created. Only after she had started laying eggs did the wardens tell us we could turn on lights and take flash photos.

Without the encouragement and guidance of the dedicated turtle wardens at Matura Beach, we never would have dreamed of getting this close to these colossal animals.

Here's a closeup of the head of one female leatherback while she was laying eggs: eyes closed, seemingly in a trance. Her head was larger than a bowling ball.

The wardens found a group of baby leatherbacks that had just hatched and were scrambling down the beach toward the water in the dark. To our amazement, the wardens picked them up and handed them to us for closer looks. Apparently this doesn't do the baby turtles any harm, and the wardens routinely handle the animals as part of their monitoring and research.

There were a number of people on the beach that night -- not only our little group of Leica-sponsored birders, but also the wardens on the beach, a number of EarthWatch volunteer helpers, and a couple of groups of students and tourists. And we were all reveling in the experience, but not in a partying sense of reveling, more like a spiritual rush, a deep sense of awe. It was extraordinary to watch these leviathans out of their element, vulnerable and slow as they finished the task of covering over their eggs with sand and went dragging back down the beach, looking slow and spent, soon to disappear again into the wilderness of the sea.

Eye-burners of Caroni

From the Asa Wright Nature Centre, Trinidad, Kenn writes: Birding in Trinidad is turning out to be even more fun than I’d expected.

I started reading about Trinidad -- and about the Asa Wright Nature Centre -- when I was just a kid. The center was established in 1967, making it one of the first nature centers anywhere in the tropics, and I first heard about it as a place that people would go for their introduction to tropical birds. But I had my tropical-bird intro in Mexico, since (as a penniless teenager) I could hitch-hike to the border and then take the cheap buses south. Later, when I ventured deeper into the tropics, I went to Peru and Ecuador and Venezuela, not to Trinidad. Working as a professional leader of birding tours, it made more sense for me to take groups to Venezuela (with a total bird list of over 1400 species) than to the island of Trinidad, just off the Venezuelan coast (with a total bird list of fewer than 500 species). So even though I knew Trinidad was famous for birding, I had already seen virtually all the bird species possible on that island nation, and I just hadn’t gotten around to visiting.

Fast-forward to July 2009. Jeff Bouton was looking to promote ecotourism to Asa Wright Nature Centre, and looking for people to try out the new Leica digiscoping setup, so (as Kim has described in a separate post), here we are. And as I said, birding in Trinidad is turning out to be more fun, more interesting, more exciting than I’d expected.

Take our evening visit to Caroni Swamp. I had been hearing about Caroni for decades -- one of the most famous birding swamps on the planet -- and a couple of evenings ago, we were able to visit. Lester Nanan took us in on his boat, a wide-hulled, flat-bottomed boat, practically a barge, so stable that we were even able to set up scopes and tripods for viewing from the deck.

Kim on the watch from Lester Nanan's boat among the mangroves

We were out cruising channels through the mangroves for more than three hours, seeing all kinds of amazing birds -- the American Pygmy Kingfisher, a tiny kingfisher, like a green-and-orange sparrow with a huge honking bill; the Greater Ani, a big, black, long-tailed bird with staring yellow eyes, looking like a flying yardstick when it flopped into the air; the Bicolored Conebill, a little bird that refused to look as drab and colorless as its illustration in the book; and dozens more.

But the star of the show, the reason why thousands of people visit here, is the Scarlet Ibis. This brilliant red bird, this glowing, shockingly red bird, all red with tiny black tips on its outer wing feathers, comes in to Caroni Swamp to roost by the thousands at some seasons. In July they were only coming in by the hundreds. But even hundreds of Scarlet Ibises make for a jaw-dropping spectacle.

We anchored about a quarter mile from a mangrove island where many of them would come to roost, and watched in awe as these spectacular birds came swooping in out of the sunset. Lester Nanan told us that years ago, people used to poach the ibises. But when Trinidad gained its independence in 1962, the Scarlet Ibis was designated as the national bird, and with the growth of national pride, the poaching stopped.

A small part of the Scarlet Ibis concentration. The photo may not look great, but consider the fact that we were digiscoping it, with the tripod set up on a boat, from a quarter mile away --

In years past I had taken tour groups to places in Venezuela where seven species of ibises occurred, where Scarlet Ibis was just one of the local species. Even there, of course, you don’t overlook this brilliant red bird. But the species never had the impact on me there that it did in Caroni Swamp, where Scarlet Ibis was THE ibis, the emblem bird of this wonderful island. Kim was calling the birds "eye-burners," and the name certainly seemed appropriate. It helped that we were toasting the birds with rum punch that was about the same color as the ibises, but the sight alone would have been intoxicating.

Kim modeling the rum punch

Another digiscoped view of a small part of the ibis concentration