Orinoco Delta

The delta is fan-shaped and open to the sea, without the enclosing lagoons that define most large deltas. Its two dominant arms are the Río Grande, which runs southeast and is dredged deep enough for ocean-going ships, and Caño Manamo, which runs north past Tucupita into the Gulf of Paria. Between and beyond them lie hundreds of smaller channels, most of them unnamed on any map a visitor will see. The whole system breathes twice a day. Tidal range in the delta proper is close to two metres, enough to reverse the surface flow well upstream, and on certain tides the incoming water arrives as a visible wave the Warao call a macareo. On top of that sits the annual flood. Water is at its lowest from October through March, begins rising in April, and peaks in July, and the difference between the two states is measured in many metres rather than centimetres. Half the forest you paddle past in August is standing in water that was dry ground in February.

The Warao are the second largest indigenous group in Venezuela, numbering around forty-nine thousand at the last census, and their language is an isolate, with no demonstrated relatives anywhere. The name means boat people. In a landscape where walking is often impossible, the curiara, a dugout canoe worked from a single trunk, is not transport so much as the basic condition of life; children handle one before they can swim well. Houses are palafitos, built on stilts above the water and thatched with palm, open-sided, with the canoe tied beneath. Warao cosmology places ancestor spirits, the hebu, at the edges and cardinal points of the world, approached through three distinct shamanic offices: the wisiratu who deals with the hebu, the bahanarotu of the eastern realm, and the hoarotu of the western realm of the dead, who can heal or kill. The sacred rattle is the hebu mataro, the spirit calabash.

Almost everything in the western delta runs through one plant. The moriche palm, Mauritia flexuosa, grows in dense stands called morichales in the freshwater swamps, and the Warao call it the tree of life without much exaggeration. The pith of the trunk is processed into yuruma, a starch that becomes bread and a fermented drink. The fruit is eaten and juiced. The leaves are woven into hammocks, baskets and cord, and thatch the roofs. The trunks become house stilts. The palm weevil grubs that live in a felled trunk are a delicacy and a serious source of protein, farmed rather than simply gathered. In the Warao origin story the first people came down from the sky through a hole made by an arrow, and the palm stands at the centre of what they found. Understanding the morichal is most of the way to understanding why the delta is settled where it is.

In 1965 and 1966 the Corporación Venezolana de Guayana closed Caño Manamo with an embankment, intending flood control and agricultural land in the western delta. The freshwater that had flowed north for millennia stopped. Salt water pushed up the channel behind it. Soils that had been permanently waterlogged dried, oxidised and turned acid, killing vegetation across large areas. Fisheries collapsed. The land subsided. Warao communities that had lived along the Manamo for generations left in their canoes, and the displacement is still described by Warao leaders as the event that broke the western delta. It is the single most important thing to understand about this landscape, and it is the reason any conversation about conservation here starts with hydrology rather than with wildlife.

The delta swamp forests hold something over a hundred and seventy-five bird species, including around a dozen wading species, and the one everybody comes for is the scarlet ibis, which roosts in the coastal mangroves in flocks that turn a green treeline red at dusk. On the water and in the canopy above it: red howler monkeys, capuchins, hoatzin, toucans, macaws, herons, five or six kingfishers, spectacled caiman, capybara and piranha, which are caught, eaten and are genuinely good. River dolphins work the main channels. Rarer and a matter of luck rather than planning are the Antillean manatee, the giant otter, anaconda, and the Orinoco crocodile, which is critically endangered with field estimates of the remaining wild population running from a few hundred to fifteen hundred animals. Much of the delta falls inside the Delta del Orinoco Biosphere Reserve and Mariusa National Park, declared in 1991. You will be told, correctly, that nothing is guaranteed.