​A legal notice has been signed, officially making the Scarlet Ibis an Environmentally Sensitive Species.
The notice was signed on Thursday and will be Gazetted.
The national bird's designation as an ESS, based on scientific research and observation of the species’ population trend was proposed by the Environmental Management Authority (EMA) which sought to enhance the Scarlet Ibis’ legal status to ensure their continued protection. 
Despite the Scarlet Ibis’ previous protective legal status and that of its major/only breeding habitat the Caroni Swamp, the species continued to face the threat of poaching and habitat destruction.
However, with the signing of the legal notice, a fine of $100,000 or two years imprisonment can be imposed where a person recklessly endangers or adversely impacts the species. 
The Scarlet Ibis has been designated an ESS according to the standards and guidelines as set out by the ESS rules 2001 because of the following characteristics: 
1. It is indigenous to Trinidad and Tobago
2. To prevent the species from facing extinction.
3. The bird is protected under the Conservation of Wildlife Act and along with the Caroni Swamp, is recognised as having international importance.
4. The Scarlet Ibis appears on the country’s Coat of Arms and the one dollar bill. 
5. The species is found in habitats along the west and south coasts of Trinidad.

Author : Historian ANGELO BISSESSARSINGH.
In the series of articles, " FROM THE PEN OF NAIPAUL" written by Local Historian Angelo Bissessarsingh an attempt is made to put into perspective, the world of Naipaul as he made his homeland famous through his works. This article and the ones to follow are VMOTT's tribute to a famous son of the soil " Sir Vidia Naipaul " .
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Sir Vidia's Naipaul father,Seepersad Naipaul died quite suddenly in 1953. An unobtrusive man with a penchant for written drama he spent years as a correspondent for the Trinidad Guardian Newspaper, after contributing his first article in 1929. His desire to write evocative stories set in the world that he knew saw no fruit until these sketches were published long after his demise.
Seepersad Naipaul might have spent his life in relative obscurity but for one posthumous event. In 1961, his son, then a moderately successful novelist, Oxford-educated and living in England penned one of the great works of modern literature. A House for Mr Biswas stands immortally from the genius of Seepersad’s son, Sir Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul as one of the outstanding literary works of our time.
Based largely upon his father’s biography, Sir Vidia took the seemingly hapless, tragic hero, Mohun Biswas and created a new Odysseus. Long considered by critics to be the finest living writer of the English sentence, Sir Vidia to those of us who have been exceedingly fortunate to have met him is interchangeably supercilious, disdainful, engaging, acerbic or simply nonchalant.
He distances himself from his Trinidadian roots and has long been loath to reconnect to the landscapes of his early novels which show that in spite of his denial, Sir Vidia is indelibly a son of our soil.
From 1957 until 1961 and then again in 1967 with A Flag on the Island, he has shown us how deeply he grasped the nuances of being born and raised in the society that at once clung to its somewhat prejudiced identities while attempting to forge ahead in a changing environment that would trade the long-cherished mores of colonialism for something of a different stripe.
The books which earned Sir Vidia's his fame are familiar to many schoolchildren today—The Mystic Masseur, The Suffrage of Elvira, the ever-delightful Miguel Street and A House for Mr Biswas—are all stories which have overlapping elements. The NGO founded by Prof Kenneth Ramchand, Friends of Mr Biswas is the custodian of all things Naipaul, situated as it is in the home Seepersad bought in St James and here is where the spiritual nexus can be felt most intensely.
It was a time of war and Trinidad was being turned upside down by the arrival of thousands of American soldiers who brought chaos in their wake. These books show a life before, during and after the Yankees came. Who could forget Edward, Hat’s brother of Miguel Street, who was the archetypal Trini young-blood of the period falling under the American spell:
“Edward surrendered completely to the Americans. He began wearing clothes in the American style, he began chewing gum, and he tried to talk with an American accent. We didn’t see much of him except on Sundays, and then he made us feel small and inferior. He grew fussy about his dress, and he began wearing a gold chain around his neck. He began wearing straps around his wrists, after the fashion of tennis-players. These straps were just becoming fashionable among smart young men in Port of Spain.”
In continuing the theme of constant paradigm change, The Suffrage of Elvira comically assesses the ground level impact of electoral politics during its infancy in postwar Trinidad. This book was serialized some years ago by the Trinidad Guardian and was a hit, introducing a new generation of readers to a scenario that at once had shades of déjà vu—“Elvira, you is a bitch!”.
The rich descriptiveness of Trinidad enshrined in "A House for Mr Biswas" and "The Mystic Masseur" provides at once a kaleidoscope into the period as well as the sundry historical characters made memorable by the master writer himself. Sir Vidia’s eyes for detail opens a spectrum to us which only our senior citizens can remember with any clarity.
Scanning some old newspapers a couple of years ago, I became indelibly aware of just how connected the Nobel Laureate Naipaul had been to Trinidad and in spite of his rejection of the place of his birth, he exhibits a keen understanding of the place and its people. Thus, over the next weeks, we will learn that ‘Red Rose Tea is Good Tea’, be dosed on Sanatogen and live in the Trinidad of Naipaul.

Veteran broadcaster June Gonsalves has passed away at the age of 91.
She died at her Anderson Terrace, Maraval home on Friday evening.
Gonsalves, the widow of the late national goalkeeper Joey Gonzales, leaves to mourn her two children, Teresa and Gerard. 
She suffered from Alzheimer's disease for the last seven years.
Gonsalves joined Radio Trinidad in 1956 and has the distinction of being the first female programme director of a Trinidadian radio station, a post she took up in 1964.
She resigned in 1970 and served as secretary to the late Archbishop Anthony Pantin until his death in 2000. That same year, she became the first Trinbagonian woman to be named a Dame Commander of the Order of St Gregory the Great.
She also hosted a number of programmes, including a Catholic religious programme, “The Catholic Forum of the Air.

Prime Minister Dr Keith Rowley has extended condolences to the family of novelist and Nobel Laureate, Sir Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul, who died Saturday at his home in Britain, six days shy of his 86th birthday.
“This proud son of T&T established himself as an icon in the literary arts on the global stage and his world-renowned achievements caused his birthplace to shine in a positive light,” he said in a statement issued shortly after news of Naipaul’s death.
Rowley said the Nobel Laureate was “unwavering in his resolve to tell his stories as he saw fit. Moreover, his strength of character was responsible in no small part for his renowned success.
“His literary works will always remain a testimony of his strength and amazing talent as well as ensure that he will never be forgotten. May he rest in peace,” Rowley said.
Opposition Leader Kamla Persad-Bissessar described Sir Vidia’s works as inspiring and uplifting.
“For people of my generation, the children of the post-Colonial society that was Trinidad and Tobago, a society and people struggling to find and assume our identity after centuries of being ruled as marginal addendums to a social, economic and political framework that previously treated us as merely tolerated outcasts, Sir Vidia’s work was inspiring and uplifting.
“Like so many of my local and regional contemporaries, I would have been raised on books from Europe and England which described and deified people, cultures and civilisations that essentially reflected all that I could never be, until, as teenager and young adult I read Miguel Street, The Mystic Masseur and A House for Mr Biswas.
“And it was in these works, still so dear and personal to me, as they also are undoubtedly to many other of my countrymen and women, that Sir Vidia’s greatest contribution to my country and the world became not only clear, but inspiring in the greatest possible way,” Persad-Bissessar said.
His widow, Lady Naipaul who described Sir Vidia as “a giant in all that he achieved” said he died “surrounded by those he loved having lived a life which was full of wonderful creativity and endeavour.”
Locally, people took to social media to post their tributes to Sir Vidia.
Columnist Ira Mathur shared a photo of her son at an event with the Nobel Laureate during his 2008 visit to T&T and wrote on Twitter: “I heard of his death in the middle of a family celebration. Something shattered in me. The greatest writer in the English Language dead at 85. #Walcott, now him. #CaribbeanLiterature. Thank you for the words #SirVidia.”
On Facebook, Nigel A Campbell recalled his encounter with the renown writer:
“The UWI SPEC hall was ram, and all I thinking was, ‘if I don’t get up early to join that line, he might only sign a few books and leave.’ So you could imagine the scramble when his readings were over, and the announcement was made to form a line for signings. So here I was in the line with my ratty copy of the first American edition of his first novel, The Mystic Masseur. (US$5 on eBay in 2001. Some people don’t value “old books”) I nearly left the book in my car thinking that he wouldn’t want to sign an old book.
(My pal Afra and his mother said, ‘nah bring it.’)
“So you could imagine my horror when Vidia wife, Nadira, grab the microphone and said, ‘Sir Vidia won’t be signing old books, only new books purchased at the event.
“At this point, I was three from the front of the line. Someone earlier handed him random pieces of paper to sign so they could have his signature. He get vex or she get vex, I ain’t know who to blame now.
“I turned to my right, and his agent Gillon Aitken standing next to me, watched me dead in my eye and said, ‘don’t worry, he will sign that.’
“Aitken shepherded my book to the author. I smile inside.
“We reach the man, he flip it, he turn it back to front. He said, ‘I haven’t seen this in a long time.’ He glanced at me. He was not impressed, I guess, as he said nothing to me.
“He signed it quickly and pushed it aside and looked to the next person in line. I was still rambling to him, “thanks for your presence, for your writing,” but he moved on.
“Now that he is gone, my $5 investment has taken on a new significance. An encounter that lasted all of 30 seconds maximum is now an heirloom. (My daughter likes to write.) Thank you, Sir Vidia. RIP.”
Sir Vidia, who was born in Chaguanas on August 17, 1932, wrote more than 30 books, won the Booker Prize in 1971 and the Nobel Prize in literature in 2001, following the late St Lucian Derek Walcott who won the award in 1992.
The Nobel Prize in literature committee awarded Sir Vidia for “having united perceptive narrative and incorruptible scrutiny in works that compel us to see the presence of suppressed histories.
“Naipaul is a modern philosopher. In a vigilant style, which has been deservedly admired, he transforms rage into precision and allows events to speak with their own inherent irony,” it added.
Sir Vidia, who as a child was read Shakespeare and Dickens by his father, was raised a Hindu and attended Queen’s Royal College in Trinidad. He moved to Britain and enrolled at Oxford University in 1950 after winning a government scholarship.
His first book, The Mystic Masseur, was published in 1951 and a decade later he published his most celebrated novel, A House for Mr Biswas, which took over three years to write.
The editor of the Mail on Sunday, Geordie Greig, a close friend of Sir Vidia, said his death leaves a “gaping hole in Britain’s literary heritage” but there is “no doubt” that his “books live on”.
His first wife, Patricia Hale, died in 1996 and he went on to marry Pakistani journalist, Nadira. Source: The Guardian

​There will be a national consultation on the decriminalisation of marijuana. 
Prime Minister Dr Keith Rowley confirmed the consultation which was announced last week by Attorney General Faris Al Rawi as he sought to clarify the government's position on the matter during a media conference at the Trinidad and Tobago Coast Guard Headquarters at Staubles Bay, Chaguaramas, on Friday.
Rowley had previously said marijuana decriminalisation was not a priority for the government.
However, he told reporters that he did not mean the issue would not be given any attention.
“The priorities that this country has are many.  Because something is not a priority that does not mean that it is not going to be attended to. There are other situations that we have to give priority to, but it did not mean that we are not going to address it,” he said. 
Rowley said the government could not take any decision on the matter based on the opinions of one person or group and the entire population must be engaged.
Last week, marijuana advocate Nazma Muller hand-delivered a petition to Rowley calling for marijuana legalisation. The petition was signed by more than 10,000 people. Muller later met with the AG on the matter. 
“On matters of this nature, we are not going to respond to the decibels of an individual or the self-importance of an individual or a small group and make a decision on that basis," Rowley stated.
"We are going to make a decision on the basis of national consultation. And that decision ought to be a balanced position where all of us in the country will feel that our points of view were taken into account."
The Prime Minister added that he was glad the issue has been raised and he urged the public to participate in the conversation in a civil manner.
“I am happy that there are persons who have raised it and who are prosecuting it in the public domain. We join the conversation and I now invite the national community to join the conversation but as you do so, do it with some civility and common sense and it doesn’t mean that your point of view is the only one that matters or the only one that makes sense.”
Source: The Loop, July 30, 2018.

Full Circle Animation Studios, a Trincity-based design studio, is making waves internationally.
Just recently, the company completed work on Season Three of the popular HBO animated series—Animals—which features guest appearances by celebrity actors and performers RuPaul Charles, Usher, Aziz Ansari, Wanda Sykes and Raven-Symone.
The series is an American animated comedy created by Phil Matarese and Mike Luciano.
The first two episodes were independently produced and presented at the Sundance Film Festival in January 2015.In May 2015, HBO picked the series up with a two-season order, which premiered on February 5, 2016.
The series was renewed for a third season on May 19th, 2017.
Full Circle’s managing director Jason Lindsay told Express Business last week that in November last year, the company was contracted by Big Jump Entertainment in Ottawa, Canada to produce the animation for the HBO series, which premieres on August 3 2018.
He described the partnership as a major accomplishment, not only for Full Circle but for the local animation industry.
This is the first time that an animation studio from Trinidad and or the Caribbean has been contracted by an international studio for a full season of a TV show on a major network he noted.
He said the contract with Big Jump will open doors for Full Circle, given that Big Jump is one of the main production studios in Canada.“It’s a company we had always admired and looked forward to working with. I believe that post-airing, we will get a lot of visibility and we will be able to add to our showreel. It will not doubt create other opportunities outside of that relationship.”
(A showreel is a short piece of video or film footage showcasing an actor or presenter’s previous work.
Source:  Full Circle Animation, August 10, 2018

​Archbishop Jason Gordon says the Catholic Church views Saturday’s Pride Parade as a demonstration of Trinidad and Tobago’s democracy at play.
Hundreds of people, decked in rainbow coloured clothing, marched along Tragarete Road, Port-of-Spain calling for equality and love over hate.
The parade ended at Nelson Mandela Park in honour of murdered transgender woman 'Sasha Fierce' who was gunned down at the location in December 2017.
Fierce, real name Keon Allister Patterson, was found on a pile of garbage near the park.
Speaking in a recorded statement which was released on Monday, Archbishop Gordon said the event was necessary as all members of the public deserve a fair chance to live among each other equally.
“We are a democracy and one of the things of a democracy is that people have a right to protest whenever they believe that their rights are not being upheld or violated. The fact of a pride parade in Trinidad and Tobago is a testimony that the democracy of Trinidad and Tobago is alive and well. The LGBT+ community has several areas where they have, I think, legitimate concerns for their rights and that has to be taken seriously by the country and by the government and by the people of Trinidad and Tobago.”

​PORT OF SPAIN, TRINIDAD“What would you like to know about the scarlet ibis?” Kenny Rattan asked as he stepped out of a black sedan.
First of all, I was curious: What does the national bird of Trinidad taste like?
Rattan spent 31 days in prison for knowing the answer to that question. In 2013 the oysterman was caught with 18 scarlet ibis carcasses in a knapsack. “It taste good—real, real, real good,” he answered, speaking in the fast cadence of a thick Caribbean accent. “The meat’s sweet. If you taste it, you will like it.”
Rattan had agreed to meet me on a dirt road in the middle of an abandoned sugarcane plantation so we could talk privately about his days poaching ibises in nearby Caroni Swamp, where thousands of the birds feed, nest, and roost. Those days are in the past for him, Rattan said. “I learned my lesson. Now I tell people: Don’t do it. I want to protect them. I stopped hunting because I want my grandchildren to see them.”
It was legal to hunt the scarlet ibis until 1962, when the bird was chosen to be featured on Trinidad and Tobago’s coat of arms as the symbol for Trinidad. (Tobago’s bird is the rufous-vented chachalaca, known locally as the cocrico.) This special status, combined with the ibis’s role as one of the region’s biggest tourist attractions, marks it not only as a national treasure but also as an international phenomenon.
I was awestruck when I first saw scarlet ibises about a decade ago on a boat tour of the Caroni Swamp. For more than an hour I watched as hundreds of the fiery birds arrowed beneath a glowing full moon toward a cluster of mangroves where they routinely roost. Their bright red color, derived from eating crabs that are rich in carotenoids, contrasted so starkly with the green of the mangroves that it was easy to see why some people say these birds look like ornaments hung on Christmas trees.
Today the Caroni has 8,000 to 30,000 scarlet ibises, according to local estimates, out of a total population of 100,000 to 150,000 throughout their range in South America and the Caribbean. With such numbers, they aren’t considered endangered, but environmental authorities and wildlife advocates in Trinidad are concerned about various threats: habitat destruction, pollution, boat traffic (which disturbs the skittish birds while they’re feeding and nesting), as well as poaching.
Among the 1.37 million people of Trinidad and Tobago, some still consider the bird a delicacy and an aphrodisiac—something to eat in secret. The root of the taste for the scarlet ibis comes from a cultural heritage of eating wild meat—bush meat—typically simmered in curry spices. Many Trinidadians prefer wild game (not always obtained legally) to domestic chicken, pork, or beef—especially during Christmastime and carnivals, when dancers in sequins, spandex, and elaborate feathered headdresses revel in the streets.
The deep-rooted desire to eat bush meat is what makes controlling poaching so challenging, Minister of Agriculture Clarence Rambharat explained. “Hunting is so entrenched culturally that if you go to a function and they have wild meat, everyone gravitates to it. Even the churches serve wild meat in game season.”
Small-time ibis hunters kill a handful for supper. (Rattan said it takes at least three to five birds to make a decent curry.) Big leaguers slaughter the birds en masse and sell them in sets of three for about $15. “One guy come in here and shoot 300, 400,” Rattan said. Some poachers are everyday fishermen and crabbers, he continued, but others are influential people. “Big guys,” he said. “I know customs officials coming in here and doing it.”
Rambharat often hears such stories. “People in the surrounding communities have always said that well-known people—including law enforcement officers—poach, buy, and consume meat,” he said. “I do not believe it’s just a rumor.”
To help stop the poaching, last month Trinidad declared the scarlet ibis to be an environmentally sensitive species, a decision that followed persistent petitioning by Rambharat. In a stroke, the fine for killing an ibis increased by 100 percent, to $100,000 (nearly U.S. $15,000), which is about the same as the average salary in Trinidad, plus two years in prison.
The new designation also increases the likelihood that some portion of the roughly 14,000-acre Caroni Swamp, already recognized as an internationally important wetland, will be declared an environmentally sensitive area, making it off-limits to hunting and fishing without a permit. (At present, only 4,000 acres in the swamp are classified as prohibited.)
“I think there are more people who want to see the scarlet ibis protected than there are people who see the scarlet ibis as a delicacy,” Nadra Nathai-Gyan, who chairs the board of the Environmental Management Authority, told me. “It took us a while to get here, but people want to champion this species.”
Only 16 game wardens patrol all of Trinidad’s 1,800 square miles, and no more than three wardens are assigned to the Caroni Swamp at any time. In recent years more than a hundred honorary wardens—ordinary citizens who receive a small daily stipend and are authorized to make arrests—have also done independent patrols in wildlife areas. Some carry registered weapons. The program ended this year, but Rambharat said it’s being reinstated and that recruitment is under way.
Vast, sheltered, and bordered by the Gulf of Paria and Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago’s capital, the Caroni Swamp is both a nature lover’s paradise and an ideal place to commit a crime. Political unrest and food shortages in Venezuela only 10 watery miles away have created a lawless coastal area where desperate Venezuelans—struggling amid their country’s soaring inflation—come to Trinidad to find staples such as pasta, diapers, and toilet paper. Criminals dodge armed Trinidadian coast guard patrols to traffic guns and drugs, force girls into prostitution, and illegally sell animals into the lucrative pet trade.
With such high stakes, so many murders and kidnappings have stricken the semi-enclosed sea between the east coast of Venezuela and Trinidad that a local newspaper called it the “Gulf of No Return.”
Fishermen are especially vulnerable to pirates. According to news reports, in May 2015 a Caroni Swamp tour guide named Shawn Madoo and his friend Vishal Ramlochan were kidnapped while fishing. Follow-up coverage indicated that no one had heard from the men since their disappearance. Months later pirates intercepted another Trinidadian fishing vessel, shooting one man dead and critically wounding another. The report stated that three survivors escaped by diving into the sea. Bloomberg Businessweek reporter Jonathan Franklin, who went for a boat ride with some Trinidadian fishermen in August 2016, wrote about a leader of a local fishing cooperative who said he’d been kidnapped four times.
Meanwhile smugglers use the Caroni as a gateway between the gulf and the capital, and ibis poachers skulk in the shadows of the swamp’s arching mangroves. Near the small town of Felicity, at its southeastern end where hundreds of ibises feed, poaching them can be as easy as picking dandelions in a meadow.
A common method is to lure the birds in with a piece of red fabric, displayed to give the illusion of another ibis feeding. When they come down to investigate the red patch, they get snagged in a net. One poacher in Felicity, who asked not to be named, told me he kills the ibises “by clubbing them on the head.”
In May I had a chance to see the scarlet ibis spectacle again, this time from the seat of a flat-bottomed motorboat with game wardens Nicholas Leith, 58, and Richard Romlogan, 49, along with two coast guard sailors armed with assault rifles and other weapons. They were patrolling for traffickers, pirates, and poachers.
The wardens, outfitted with bulletproof vests and firearms, keep watch over the Caroni Swamp and large swaths of land in the central part of the country where forest animals are also poached. Leith said that two months earlier, a fellow warden named Rajiv Harrinarine asked to be transferred to another part of the country. “He said the Caroni Swamp is a dangerous place and he feared for his life. A lot of people won’t let their children take this job. They don’t want to lose them. Thankfully no one has been killed yet.”
Leith, a big man wearing a fisherman’s hat, gestured at the 12-gauge shotgun cradled in his lap. “At close range it will blow your head off,” he said. Romlogan nodded, adding that the guns are vital for their security—even more so now with the scarlet ibis’s new status and the higher fines. The protections will likely deter some poachers, he said, but there will always be people who want to eat the bird—and that makes the job more dangerous. “If you got the ibis and you now know it’s a $100,000 fine, what you gonna do?” he said. “Shoot.”
Waves lapped the boat as we tied up to a post at the edge of the mangroves to watch ibises arriving at their roost. A flock of migratory flamingos, recent seasonal visitors to the swamp, flew in a circle overhead and settled in the mudflats just below the ibises. “Look at all of them,” Leith said. “They’re like sitting ducks. Someone could just come in here and shoot them. That’s what we don’t want.”
Romlogan and Leith have been working in the Caroni Swamp off and on for most of their 18 years as wardens. They say they know of ibis poaching cases that were dropped because expert testimony was blocked or evidence was tampered with.
The first time in the country’s history someone was convicted for hunting scarlet ibises was 2010, following the arrest, in December 2007, of five Trinidadians and one American tourist caught with a handful of skinned ibis carcasses.
“We took them to court, and we won the case!” Romlogan said. “The Trinidadians were fined $750. The American was reprimanded and discharged.”
After the verdict, the senior warden in the case,
 Samsundar Ramdeen, now retired, told the local paper that the penalties for killing ibises—then ranging from a hundred dollars to a thousand dollars—should be stiffer. “The hunters know full well it’s illegal to hunt the scarlet ibis,” he said. “We need to be more serious about protecting our wildlife and its habitat.”
“STEALING FROM THE COUNTRY’S TREASURE”Former poacher Kenny Rattan’s solid month in prison was the harshest penalty yet for ibis poaching. A 15-year-old cousin who was arrested with him was released without charges. Another cousin, Russel Joe Pancham, fled before he could be arrested.
Rattan testified that the ibises were Pancham’s, not his. But the judge, Bramanand Dubay, was unsympathetic. “This is an offense against Trinidad and Tobago,” Dubay said at the sentencing hearing, according to news reports. “The scarlet ibis is our national bird. If everybody go to hunt down scarlet ibis, what our children and grandchildren going to see? What you are doing is stealing from the country’s treasure.”
Eventually the wardens caught up with Pancham. Romlogan said they apprehended him on 18 charges of ibis hunting and one charge of escaping arrest and that he was fined $2,500. When I asked why there was such a discrepancy between Rattan’s and Pancham’s punishments, Romlogan replied that Pancham had a good lawyer.
Romlogan is still chasing Pancham for allegedly poaching ibises. “Last year I got 40 police from another area and 10 search warrants,” he said. “But we think someone sold us out. They told Russel we were coming.”
Another scarlet ibis case is currently winding its way through the courts. One night in August 2017, Romlogan, Leith, and Harrinarine were on patrol when they saw a boat with three men coming toward them. “They were within the prohibited area, so we decided to pursue them,” Leith recounted. “We told them to stop. They refused and accelerated. We turned and started following them. Our boat was much faster than theirs, and we caught up with them on the Blue River. While we were in pursuit, we saw them throw something—we think it was a gun.”
When the wardens searched the boat, they found a bag of scarlet ibis parts. The men were arrested for possession of the birds and for being in a prohibited area without a permit. “We don’t give second chances for scarlet ibis,” Leith said. “These people, we know they’ll use any trick to evade capture and prosecution.”
The arrested men, ranging in age from 18 to 35, pleaded not guilty. The hearings, previously scheduled in May, are now set for September. Related court documents are sealed, and the alleged poachers have not made statements about the charges they face.
The wardens say that if they’re called as witnesses in the court proceedings, they’ll likely testify that the men tried to bribe them. “They offered us $50,000 each if we let them go—$50,000 for me, $50,000 for him,” Romlogan said, pointing to Leith. He continued, “Fifty thousand dollars for the next officer and $50,000 for the boat driver. One of the guys’ dads is a big boy,” by which he meant a suspected drug dealer.
When Clarence Rambharat heard about this incident, he raced to the dock to meet the wardens escorting the alleged criminals out of the swamp. He wanted photographs of the evidence: a fishing boat scattered with red feathers and dismembered scarlet ibis parts, including a head with the bird’s characteristic long, curved beak. That night he posted the photos on Facebook with the announcement that the poachers had been arrested after a short chase in the Caroni Swamp’s prohibited area.
Rambharat’s objective was to use the evidence to gain support for his campaign to list the scarlet ibis as an environmentally sensitive species. “I could overlook a lot of things,” he told me. “But not the national bird.”
His move had the desired effect: The public was outraged. “The recent arrest of three men who are accused of being found in possession of bird parts at the very sanctuary where it is supposed to be safest is just the tip of the iceberg,” read an August editorial in the Trinidad and Tobago Newsday. “People high and low are accused of this outrageous practice.”
And yet the courts rarely deliver a maximum penalty for wildlife crimes like scarlet ibis poaching. Rambharat believes that’s partly because such offenses seem trivial in the mix of cases before the judiciary. “In Trinidad there’s a serious crime every six hours.” The U.S. State Department reports that the country's crime rates are indeed on the rise. There were 496 murders in 2017—a 15 percent increase from 2015—driven largely by gangs and drug-related activities.
He suspects that law enforcement is complicit in some of the poaching. “This is not an office environment,” he said. “The wardens have endless opportunity to turn a blind eye or accept a bribe.” And if he can’t trust the wardens, Rambharat said, he definitely can’t trust the forestry division—the agency under his direction that’s charged with sustainably conserving the country’s forests and natural resources. According to Rambharat, one reason live animals seized in wildlife crime cases are now held at the zoo is because informants inside the forestry division said that officers were hawking animals to pet traders. “There were times when we were told the animals died,” he said. “But we believe those animals were sold.”
Narine Gupte Lutchmedial is the president of the zoological society. He said the issue is widely known, and that part of the problem is “when forestry officers give a warning to people caught poaching, they can seize the animals and dispose of them however they want. This is something that needs to change,” he continued. “Everyone caught with animals should have to face the court, and seized animals should always come to the zoo where we can make sure they are accounted for, properly cared for, and if possible release them back into the wild.”
In addition to the scarlet ibis, 10 other animals in the country are listed as environmentally sensitive species. They include five species of sea turtles, the ocelot (Trinidad’s only big cat), the golden treefrog, the manatee, the white-tailed sabrewing hummingbird, and the Trinidad piping guan, a black-and-white turkey-like endemic bird known locally as the pawi.
The Environmental Management Authority’s Nadra Nathai-Gyan cites the leatherback sea turtle, added in 2014, as a prime example of how the designation can help. “Prior to the listing, you had great community involvement with tourist groups taking people to see the turtles, but you still had—I don’t want to use the word ‘idiots’—persons who despite all of those tremendous efforts would still engage in undesirable behaviors. For example, being on the back of turtles, taking eggs, wanting to touch the hatchlings, hacking off a fin.”
The more stringent penalties made people stop and think, she continued. “Where before they could have done that and gotten away with a small fine, they now realize that the likelihood of being found out is greater, especially with social media. And if they are, the penalties are serious business.”
Clarence Rambharat said he might petition the government to designate other animals as environmentally sensitive species. The red howler monkey is one candidate. Named for its roar, which can be heard for miles, the monkey is one of the country’s most charismatic species. Like the scarlet ibis, the red howler isn’t endangered, and hunting the monkeys is illegal. But they’re being poached for food and for the pet trade, particularly in the Cats Hill area near Rio Claro, in the southeastern part of the country where Rambharat grew up. “In these communities they don’t have KFC,” Rambharat said. “They go hunting, and they eat whatever they get.”
 In March 2018 Kriyaan Singh, a veterinarian and former Trinidad and Tobago senator, tagged Rambharat on a Facebook post to draw his attention to someone slaughtering monkeys. He didn’t divulge publicly how he got the evidence, but Singh said he’d received several photos of poachers killing red howler monkeys and capuchins—“skinning them, killing babies, beheading them, and cooking them”—and that the photographs were so gruesome he wouldn’t post them.
In March 2018 Kriyaan Singh, a veterinarian and former Trinidad and Tobago senator, tagged Rambharat on a Facebook post to draw his attention to someone slaughtering monkeys. He didn’t divulge publicly how he got the evidence, but Singh said he’d received several photos of poachers killing red howler monkeys and capuchins—“skinning them, killing babies, beheading them, and cooking them”—and that the photographs were so gruesome he wouldn’t post them.  For more click here
Source:  National Geographic

Nicholas Leith, armed and on patrol in the Caroni Swamp, has been a game

Trinidad and Tobago stamped their name at the Central American and Caribbean (CAC) Games over the weekend in Barranquilla, Colombia, winning six medals and setting new records at the competition. 
Olympic swimmer Dylan Carter won two gold medals for swimming, breaking two of CAC's records, with times of 48.95 and 23.11. Fellow swimmer Joshua Romany won bronze with a time of 24.05. 
In cycling, trio Nicholas Paul, Kwesi Browne, and Njisane Phillip won gold with a combined time of 43.873 seconds, a new games record, well ahead of Venezuela (44.578 secs) and Colombia (44.172 secs) which got silver and bronze respectively.
Cyclist and reigning Caribbean Road Race and Time Trial champion, Teneil Campbell, won bronze in the Women’s Scratch Race (10,000 metres/40 laps). The medal for 20-year-old Campbell is the first ever at the CACSO Games by a women’s cyclist for this country in their first ever appearance as well.
Earlier on the same track, the duo of Costa sisters, Alexi and Jessica as well as Christian Farah and Alex Bovell missed out on qualification to the Women’s Team Pursuit (4,000m) medal round. The T&T women combined for a time of 4:51.022, a new national record, for the fifth spot.
Olympian, Felice Aisha Chow secured T&T’s first ever women’s medal in rowing, competing in the Women’s Singles Scull contested over a distance of 2,000 metres.
Chow, who competed at the Rio Olympics in 2016 crossed the finish line in nine minutes, 26.24 seconds for silver behind Cuban, Yariulvis Cobas (9:13.05 mins) while Mexico’s Naiara Arrillaga took bronze in (9:41.22 mins).
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Trinidad and Tobago stamped their name at the Central American and Caribbean (CAC) Games over the weekend in Barranquilla, Colombia, winning six medals and setting new records at the competition. 
Olympic swimmer Dylan Carter won two gold medals for swimming, breaking two of CAC's records, with times of 48.95 and 23.11. Fellow swimmer Joshua Romany won bronze with a time of 24.05. 
In cycling, trio Nicholas Paul, Kwesi Browne, and Njisane Phillip won gold with a combined time of 43.873 seconds, a new games record, well ahead of Venezuela (44.578 secs) and Colombia (44.172 secs) which got silver and bronze respectively.
Cyclist and reigning Caribbean Road Race and Time Trial champion, Teneil Campbell, won bronze in the Women’s Scratch Race (10,000 metres/40 laps). The medal for 20-year-old Campbell is the first ever at the CACSO Games by a women’s cyclist for this country in their first ever appearance as well.
Earlier on the same track, the duo of Costa sisters, Alexi and Jessica as well as Christian Farah and Alex Bovell missed out on qualification to the Women’s Team Pursuit (4,000m) medal round.
The T&T women combined for a time of 4:51.022, a new national record, for the fifth spot.
Olympian, Felice Aisha Chow secured T&T’s first ever women’s medal in rowing, competing in the Women’s Singles Scull contested over a distance of 2,000 metres.
Chow, who competed at the Rio Olympics in 2016 crossed the finish line in nine minutes, 26.24 seconds for silver behind Cuban, Yariulvis Cobas (9:13.05 mins) while Mexico’s Naiara Arrillaga took bronze in (9:41.22 mins).
In hockey, teenager Shaniah De Freitas netted two goals, as T&T women’s hockey team battled past Barbados 2-1 to improve to a perfect 2-0 round-robin record at the Unidad Deportivo Pibe Valderrama. However, it was the Barbadians who struck first in the 17th minute through Keisha Boyce after a 0-0 first quarter.
De Freitas, 18, playing in her sixth international match for the ‘Calypso Stickwomen” drew T&T level five minutes later from the penalty spot and with two minutes left in the match she was on spot to score again to earn her team a deserved win.
Olympian Andrew Lewis had a mixed day on Saturday as he placed second in the fourth of his Laser Radial races before a 16th placed in race five while Kelly-Ann Arrindell was fifth and ninth in race four and five respectively.  
Source: The Loop, July 30, 2018

Vincent Van Gogh sold just one painting during his lifetime. He toiled in obscurity and poverty, only to be appreciated after his death. Once art collectors started to realize the value of his work, it was scooped up, and now a Van Gogh piece rarely comes on the market.
Fifteen years after a little-known Caribbean rum distillery shut down for good, it’s having a Van Gogh moment.
The Caroni Ltd. distillery in Trinidad was a state-run distillery, producing heavy rums made from its own sugarcane crops. At its height, the sugar refinery and distillery employed more than 9,000 workers. Caroni was the preferred rum of the British Navy, but the lads apparently didn’t drink enough of it to sustain Caroni’s labor-intensive, unindustrialized methods of farming, processing and distilling.
After years of being subsidized by the Trinidad and Tobago government, the sugar-growing industry on the island collapsed, and in 2003, the distillery soon followed suit. Caroni died, and no one outside the island seemed to take much notice, until a chance discovery breathed new life into the brand. 
In 2004, Luca Gargano, the head of Velier, a Genoa, Italy-based importer and distributor of fine wine and spirits was in Trinidad on a research trip. He stumbled across the shuttered Caroni distillery and was led, Indiana Jones-style (or was it Jack Sparrow-style?) to a boarded-up warehouse and shown thousands of wooden casks of rum, some dating back as far as 1974.
Gargano bought up all the barrels, shipped some of them to Italy and left others to mature in Trinidad. Velier has been releasing small batches of Caroni to the market ever since, and for rum connoisseurs, Caronimania is officially a thing
Caroni’s cachet grew once collectors started realizing that supplies were limited and the quality was very high. A bottle that might have sold for around $30 in the early 2000s now sells for closer to $400 – and some bottles can go for more than $1,000. Velier releases just two or three bottlings a year that may yield just a few hundred bottles total.
Stefan Lercher is a bona fide Caronimaniac whose work allows him to cultivate his passion for Caroni. He’s head barman at Hotel Quelle, a luxury spa resort in Italy’s Dolomite Mountains. It might seem an unlikely place to find an extensive collection of Caroni rums and other rare spirits, but the hotel’s high-end clientele have come to expect that Lercher will surprise them with liquors they can’t find elsewhere, especially not by the glass.
The hotel bar offers a selection of 10 varieties of Caroni. They’re not listed on the bar menu; instead Lercher knows how to spot the connoisseurs among his guests, move on them with the secret handshake and seek to win them over to Caronimania.
“It’s not a rum for everybody,” says Lercher. If drinkers are accustomed to sweet rum, then dry Caroni – which is cask-strength, meaning it’s not diluted or blended once it’s aged – might make them shudder. This is a collectors’ rum, not for cocktails with paper umbrellas and pineapple wedges, but for snifters or small grappa glasses, to be sipped, not slammed. Lercher wouldn’t think to dilute it with soda water or even ice.
“It’s a question of romance, a question of respect,” Lercher says. “This is a sacred distillery. If you add even one ice cube, you’ve just reduced the value of the rum.”
The only suitable accompaniments? A fine cigar (like, one that costs as much as the rum), or maybe a piece of dark chocolate. “It is a party after all,” Lercher says.
I’m certainly no rum connoisseur – unless ordering a Myers floater on top of my piña colada counts, and I’m pretty sure it doesn’t – but Lercher’s enthusiasm had me ready to drink the Caroni kool-aid. He explained that two marks of quality define Caroni. One is the integrity of the distilling and aging process: “If the bottle says the rum was distilled in 1996 and bottled in 2006,” Lercher explains, “you can be sure you’re drinking 10-year-old rum that has aged in the original casks.” The other is what’s known as the “angels’ share,” the percentage of liquid that evaporates during the barrel aging process and lost “to the angels.”
For Caribbean rums, an angels’ share of about 7% is the average. For certain distillations of Caroni, it’s as high as 85%, making the finished product incredibly concentrated and high in alcohol content.
And so went my introduction to Caronimania – a dram of a 20-year-old, 100-proof heavy Trinidad Rum, distilled in 1996 and bottled in 2016 (bottle 1700 of 3800 released that year, to be precise) with that stunning 85% angels’ share. Bottled undiluted from the barrel, it clocks in at a mouth-searing 57.2% alcohol by volume.
It’s best to start with a small taste, which habituates the mouth to the tongue-numbing heat of this high-proof hooch, then wait several minutes before sipping again. The second sip is a revelation – still heady, but that burning sensation has disappeared, instead replaced with a complex, interesting character that lingers long after the last sip.
It’s easy to get sucked into the romance of Caroni and its rags-to-riches tale. Since Velier started releasing varieties a little bit at a time, Caroni’s cult following has grown, and collectors enjoy a scavenger hunt of sorts to grab up remaining bottles at auctions and online sales.
And since there are just a handful of places in the world where Caroni can be purchased by the glass, if you want to sample this rare and vanishing breed of rum without purchasing an entire bottle, you may just have to head for the Italian Alps. Because unlike Van Gogh’s masterworks, which can be visited in art museums any old time, Caroni Rum has to be consumed to be appreciated. And once it’s gone, it’s gone.
​Source: Eat, Sip and Drink 
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An animation studio from Trinidad and Tobago has produced the animation for an HBO series featuring performances from RuPaul, Aziz Ansari, Wanda Sykes, Raven-Symone and Usher, among others.
Season three of Animals will premiere on August 3.
Full Circle Animation Studio was recently contracted by Big Jump Entertainment in Ottawa Canada to produce the animation for the HBO series.
A release said the show is considered to be one of the funniest, most idiosyncratic shows on television.
An in-house team of 12 people (nine animators, one animation supervisor, one project coordinator, and one project manager) worked tirelessly between December 2017 and May 2018 at the studio located in Trincity.
“This show had a very unique and distinctive style of design and animation. It looks simple and minimalist but it required us to transmit a lot of emotion through the characters using very limited animation movement. Going in, we had otherwise underestimated how challenging that could be while keeping the provocative edge that really defines the style of the show. In that regard, it was a new technical experience for us," said Managing Director Jason Lindsay.
This is the first time that an animation studio in Trinidad or throughout the Caribbean has been contracted from an international studio for a full season of a TV show on a major network.
“For a young animation industry like ours here in Trinidad, the main long-term benefit of an opportunity like this is the investment in our human resource. The experience and technical/creative insight gained from our animators working with an experienced production studio like Big Jump Entertainment are invaluable. The entire team benefited from it tremendously," Lindsay said. 
The release said that projects like this and other overseas productions outsourced to Full Circle puts the company in a position where over the last three years, over 50 percent of its income has been from foreign exchange revenue, with this most recent project catapulting its export earnings for the first half of 2018 to over 90 percent of its income during that period – a very unique position for any small business in general to be in but a major achievement for the studio and the industry as a whole.
Lindsay pointed out the role that institutions have played in various capacities in getting the studio to this point in its growth. Organisations like ExporTT has given tremendous support in positioning the studio for export and continues to support the animation industry as a whole. InvesTT planted the seeds that spawned this growth through guidance, support, and exposure to position the studio for opportunity and success. Though there is still a lot to be done the studio is well on its way with this landmark achievement on the journey, he stated.
The release said that this accomplishment exemplifies how the Government, the education sector, and enterprise can work hand in hand to achieve and change the landscape of the economy. 
The release said below the surface of this model is the seamless education thread that few are aware of and appreciate.  Students from the YTEPP Animation Retraining Programme, went on to complete the UTT Diploma in Animation programme and now 90 percent of the workforce is part of that thread that makes up the studio.  
“This is a great example of success in creative sector and seamless education in a country that depends on Oil and Gas. Programme Coordinator for animation Studies at the University of Trinidad and Tobago Camille Abrahams said.
Season 3 of the HBO animated series ANIMALS will premiere on August 3.