The Caroni Swamp or Dancing with Ibises

The National Bird of Trinidad is the Scarlet Ibis.  Picking a national bird for Trinidad seems a challenge, since apparently they have around twenty different species of Hummingbirds alone.  But the Scarlet Ibis does stand out since it is bright red enough to make the College of Cardinals feel a bit envious.  The island of Tobago has it’s own National Bird as well even though it is the same country as Trinidad, however they have a lot of birds here so I can get my head around that.

Much like how the Flamingo gets its pink coloration from a diet of shrimp, the Scarlet Ibis lives on a diet of primarily swamp crabs.  From this comes it’s stunning color.  When they are born they are a somewhat drab greyish/black color, and it is only as they mature and eat a lot of crabs that the red plumage fills in.

I have no idea what bird this is but it’s a cool picture.

The Caroni Swamp is one of the roosting and nesting areas of the Scarlet Ibis.  It is also home to many other sorts of birds, caimans, snakes, fish, anteaters and other wildlife.  While the Swamp Tours focus on the Scarlet Ibis you get a good look at a lot of other wildlife that the swamp teems with.  The tours are conducted from a boat, leaving an hour or more before sunset to view the swamp.

Several sorts of snakes, including some species of Boa Constrictor, like to rest in the trees over the swamp where they presumably are positioned to drop onto unsuspecting prey or particularly irritating tourists in boats.  We had no snakes drop into our boat, much to the relief of some of our

Tree snake!!

party.

The swamp is a quiet place, though some parts are close enough to civilization to hear traffic noise.  Some attempts have clearly been made to control the waters a bit with the ruins of some dams and flood control hardware in evidence.  But mostly it is whisper quiet with the sounds of birds being most of what you hear when the boat’s engine is off.

Lots of channels like this in the swamp with trees over head and lots of growth and vegetation.

For the first hour in the swamp we ghosted among the channels as our guide pointed out creatures we likely would have missed.  A pair of owls sleeping the day away in a tree, the tiny crabs that give the Scarlet Ibis its spectacular plumage, hawks, snakes, red headed cardinals, herons and later bats darting through the darkening foliage in search of insect prey.  Sadly we did not see any Caiman, the the small anteaters that live in swamp are particularly elusive and hard to see.

A pair of owls resting in a tree.

An exclusive diet of these crabs may turn you scarlet.

A juvenile Black Hawk, according to the birders on our boat.

Trinidad swamp version of the Cardinal.

But the highlight of the our was of course the roosting of the Scarlet Ibis. 

Flocks of Scarlet Ibis returning to the roost

Throughout the day the Ibises fan out across the swamp to forage and feed singly or in small groups.  But in the evening they start to return to their roosts.  The Scarlet Ibis roosts in large, close communities.  They pick an island and all of them come there to sleep for the night.  There may be another island a few hundred yards away, it doesn’t matter – you won’t see a speck of scarlet on it anywhere if it’s not THE island.

Singly or in increasingly larger flocks as dusk approaches so do the Ibises.  They come high over the trees or skimming over the water.  As they start to gather on their island the place gets more and more raucous with bird calls and shrieks.  There are a few non-Ibis visitors there, though why they’d put up with the racket is beyond me.  And other birds – young Ibis that have not yet gotten their full color so they don’t quite match.

The overall effect as thousands of these brightly colored birds gather in the sunset is breathtaking.  In the gloaming the trees gradually gain more and more color and motion as the flock gathers to roost for the night.

At some point one can assume all the birds quiet down and get some sleep.  But maybe not; we had to head back out of the swamp before it became too dark to navigate safely and left them to their refuge.