Trinidad & Tobago part 1

After staying in the US for our last three annual vacations, Debbie and I decided to go international this year.  Our plan has always been to take an international trip every other year, but two years ago the downstairs furnace died and presented an unexpected very large expense so that year became a (much cheaper) road trip!  But this year things looked up, so during my break between semesters, we slipped off to the islands nation of Trinidad & Tobago.  For those who are geographically challenged (don’t feel bad, there are lots of you out there), here’s a map.  The red pin near the top center is Atlanta, where we live, and Trinidad is the purple pin near the lower right-hand corner of the map.

ARRIVAL

Debbie and I started our first day sometime before 3 am in order to catch an early flight.  While winter was very mild for us, it wouldn't go away!  On the way to the airport, temperatures were in the 40s F, unusually cool for this time of year in Georgia.  We made a quick jump from Atlanta to Miami, and from there to Port of Spain, Trinidad.  After collecting our bags, we found our driver waiting for us at the door.  There is something invigorating about walking out of an airport into warm humid tropical air, with palm trees waving in the breeze.  It is a visceral statement that says you are someplace different.

After loading into the van, we made the 45 minute drive to the Asa Wright Nature Center, our home for the next four days.

The entrance to the Center:

Inside the main house:

While the airport sits down in the lowlands of Trinidad, the Nature Center sits at about 1200 feet elevation, near the top of the Arima Valley.  It was a working estate until 1967 when the Nature Center was established.  The pictures above are of the original manor house.  There are really three things which are of particular interest to birders at Asa Wright.  The first one is the veranda:

This is a fantastic place to hang out.  In the inside corner of the picture above, there was a nest of Palm Tanagers with babies the parents fed all day long.  Just below the veranda is an extensive feeding station with hummingbird feeders and tables with fruit which draws in a good variety of birds.  It is most active just after sunrise.

  

From the veranda you are also looking down the Arima Valley:

All manner of birdlife shows up, like Purple Honeycreepers:

And Green Honeycreepers:

Here’s a female Green Honeycreeper coming in for some banana:

Great Kiskadee, which has a wide range, reaching the southernmost part of Texas:

Tropical Mockingbirds were everywhere during our trip, very similar to our Northern Mockies in the States, they just look a little different:

Palm Tanagers were bold.  Really it was their veranda, they just chose to share it with the humans.  They had no qualms about chasing moths around your legs.  They were a constant source of visible and audible entertainment.

The hummingbird feeders were constantly busy.  There were several species which showed up, but the most common one was White-necked Jacobin.  Here’s one looking around for the next ass to go kick:

Although birds are my main focus in these places, there was plenty of other cool stuff to see.  One morning a white witch showed up.  No, that isn’t an optical illusion, it really was that big, probably a 7-8” wingspan.  That’s a drawing of a bat on the left side of the moth.

DAY 2

On the second day of our trip, we got to go see the second reason birders go to Asa Wright- Dunston Cave, which is a roost for Oilbirds.  Oilbirds are interesting creatures.  They are nocturnal, and related to our Whip-poor-wills we get in the States.  However, they eat fruit and are the only nocturnal bird in the world to do so.  They may fly up to 75 miles from their cave each night in search for the palm fruits they prefer.  They roost in colonies in caves, and can be found across South America.  Almost all of these caves are physically difficult to get to.  That is what makes Dunston Cave so great, you can walk on a nice trail and reach it in about 20 minutes.  To minimize disturbance, they only visit the cave twice per week. 

So why are they called Oilbirds?  Because they carry a lot of fat on their bodies (and they’re BIG).  Once upon a time, people would take the adults and render them down for lamp oil.  Babies were given less effort.  They would just cut their heads off and light the rest up.  Apparently the carcass will burn for around three hours.  That’s no longer done today.

Here I am with our guide Molly, walking down to the cave:

The entrance to Dunston Cave:

With us in front of it:

A big group of Oilbirds and the inside of the cave:

A closer view of an Oilbird, coughing up a palm seed.  There is another seed on the rock right in front of him:

While we were walking down to the cave, Molly gave a great walking lecture about the plants and animals of the area.  Very active that day were the land crabs, including this big beastie:

A cool tropical flower, it looks like a dancer mid-leap:

Not too far from the manor house was this paper cutter ant mound.  To put this in perspective, the distance between the two vertical red lines is about 20 feet!  And the horizontal red line is about 18-24 inches tall. Molly told us this mound is about a year old!  That mound is all organic material.  All the day long the ants go out and cut leaves and haul them back to the mound.  They walk very long distances and never stop unless it rains hard.  Apparently they’re especially attracted to citrus trees, like mango, and can be agriculturally destructive.  The farmers hate them and persecute them when found. 

The first couple of days we were there, a team from BBC was there filming for a show called "The World's Deadliest 60."  Nice folks, they were looking for Bushmasters and Fer de Lances, which are both very deadly snakes present on Trinidad.  They were out all the night before we walked down to Dunston Cave and had found nothing at all.  While we were walking back from the cave, our guide Molly found this teeny tiny Fer de Lance sleeping on a log a few feet off the trail:

Debbie and I were ecstatic!  It was our first Fer de Lance.  Don’t mistake though, this little guy is extremely dangerous.  These are pit vipers, related to our rattlesnakes up north.  He was contently asleep and we were able to get good looks at leisure.  Then Molly was able to get on her radio and put the call out that we had located one.  The BBC crew was quickly roused from sleep and assembled.  We found out later they were able to relocate the critter and get the footage they were looking for.

TURTLES

Later in the day, we made our first trip away from the Center.  We met David Ramlal, who would be our guide and driver for the next three days.  David has guided for 23 years, and works for all the major tour companies when they run trips to Trinidad, and has worked with Steve Irwin and the one and only David Attenborough, among other celebrities.  Because it is a slower time of year it was just the two of us with Dave for all our trips, and he made us feel like the celebrities.

Our first field trip was to go look for nesting sea turtles.  We left about 4:00 and began our two hour drive to the beach.  Along the way, unexpected by us, we stopped and picked up Francis, a Rastafarian-looking gentleman.  We would later learn he has for the last 18 years spent almost every night during the turtles’ six month breeding season on Matura Beach monitoring and protecting the turtles.  Not an 8-5 job!  We also got our first exposure to Trinidadian creole when David and Francis conversed.  To our ears it sort of sounded like English, until we realized we couldn’t understand a thing they were saying!  Creole was developed originally by slaves, and it really is nothing more than English, just mushed up and rearranged so that it is not understandable.  It was a way for slaves to communicate without the masters knowing what they were talking about. 

After driving a good bit longer, down dirt roads through dense forest we got to Matura Beach.  We drank some rum punch and then ate supper which the Center had boxed up for us while we waited for the sun to set.  We were able to talk to Francis a bit more and learn just how much we had in common with him.  He told us sea turtles were heavily poached in Trinidad when they would come ashore to nest and up until 1990 they had no protections.  Laws were put in place that year, but naysayers said the poaching would never be stopped.  The effort was three-pronged- first there was legal enforcement, which is stout.  The second prong involved monitoring, tagging nesting turtles, and learning about their habits.  The third part, which Francis seemed most passionate about, involved education.  There was a large outreach focused on school kids, to teach them about turtles and the value that living turtles hold for the island.  The end result is that today there is no poaching on Matura Beach, a cultural shift has occurred and people in the area are now advocates of the turtles instead of predators.  Given our passion for wildlife and the many hundreds of educational programs Debbie has done (not to mention the handful I've done too!), we found kindred spirits in both Francis and David, who also does a lot of work advocating for the wildlife of Trinidad.

After the sun set, it simply became a waiting game.  From the point we entered the beach, it extended a couple of miles to our right and our left.  David suggested we sit down right there because one never knows where the turtles will come up at.  Then he took off to the right.  A few minutes later, Francis took off to the left.  And then we were alone, sitting on a beach in the dark facing the open Atlantic Ocean, not completely sure where we were at and no idea what we would do if nobody ever came back!  It was a paradoxical situation of doing something really awesome but having absolutely no control over it.

Volunteer monitors showed up to walk the beach and look for turtles, and eventually Francis returned, but no turtles to be found.  Sitting on the beach, I noticed the stars were starting to disappear, and the wind was blowing into our face.  I told Debbie we needed to move because it was about to pour!  We moved back to the palm trees to sit next to Francis just as the rain started to fall.  We’d taken no raincoats, so we just prepared to hunker down and sit out the storm.  Francis, unfazed, stood up and pulled a sheet of plastic out of his backpack, just wide enough for three people to get behind.  After doing something for 18 years, you figure out how to deal with the little problems that arise.  So we tucked in behind the plastic and let this storm blow in off the ocean.  As we sat there, Francis told us the turtles would come after the storm.

He was pretty close.  The first one came up while it was raining!  By the time the monitors found her, she’d already laid her eggs and had mostly covered up.  But we got down there in time to see her covering up and building mock nests, one after another.  She was a leatherback turtle and she was massive, the size of a kitchen table.

By the time she did slip into the water, she had disturbed the sand so much, had covered up so much that only someone who had seen her laying the eggs would have any idea where it was.  Near the end of her masking effort, she even threw a couple of infertile decoy eggs to really complete the process.

Shortly after that, another one came up on the beach and we were able to go see her dig out the egg chamber and lay some eggs.  It was amazing to see just how deeply they dig down into the sand.

The first leatherback making her way back to the water:

Debbie and Francis, happy on Matura Beach:

As I have researched this, I have found numbers differ, but sea turtles first returned to the oceans some 120 to 200 million years ago.  Dinosaurs ruled and then were wiped out in the KT Event, and the turtles continued on.  Mammals arose and evolved, whole continents have slid around on tectonic plates, and yet through all of that these primordial creatures have maintained essentially the same form.  And all of those tens of millions of years ago, turtles were laying their eggs in the same way that we got to witness.  It was a very special experience for us, and for Debbie the top highlight of the trip.

More to follow in Part 2, which you can see by clicking HERE