Silvio came up the bank like a rocket.
But Manuela caught his arm. “Don’t hit him, Papa,” she said quietly. “There’s something much better you can do while we take care of the eggs.”
Gomez shouted until he was hoarse, but no one wanted to buy the manatee meat. He and his sons had to carry it the length of the village and run their generator to cool it in a fridge.
Meanwhile, Silvio quietly went to every house and every boat, seeking everyone’s opinion. When he knew that the whole village felt the same, he went to see Luis. “We need to make a call on your phone, brother,” he said.
Luis nodded. “The number for the police is in the memory.”
Killing manatees had been illegal for years, but it was impossible for the police to know what went on in all the little villages along the river, unless someone told them. Now someone had.
Gomez was given plenty of warning. Luis told him that it would take the police launch at least two hours to get to San Larenzo. That was easily enough time for Gomez to load his boat with manatee meat and his two sons and leave. Forever. Which is exactly what he did, watched in complete silence by every family in San Larenzo.
As Gomez disappeared up the shrunken river, shouting threats and insults until he was out of earshot, Silvio put his hand on Manuela’s shoulder. “No one in this village will ever kill another manatee,” he said. “Not ever.”
But her heart still felt like a stone.
In the five years that followed, fishermen up and down the river often saw a manatee with a white scar on its back. And if they had been thinking of throwing a spear, they changed their minds. No one wanted to kill the famous Airuwe.
But Manuela told herself that Airuwe was dead.
Granny Raffy didn’t believe it. “You didn’t see a white mark on that corpse,” she’d say. “Gomez just pretended that he’d killed Airuwe to spite you.”
Manuela shook her head, but she couldn’t quite shake the hope out of it.
Then, one day, when Manuela, Libia, and Ant were coming back from a village downriver where they’d been performing one of Libia’s puppet shows, their outboard failed. They paddled into a lagoon to fix the engine.
It was a beautiful sunny afternoon. Little grasshoppers plinked on the floating vegetation, a damselfly landed on the gunwale, and a camungo boomed sadly in the reeds.
“One nice thing about a broken engine,” Ant joked. “We get some peace!”
On the opposite side of the lagoon, floating weeds trembled, and there was a minute swirl on the surface, not quite a ripple, not quite a bubble.
Manuela pointed.
“Manatee!” she said. “Manatee!”
Pppff!
A snout with two nostrils kissed the surface. Below, in the still, shadowy water, there was a flash of white, like the memory of a summer storm, passing in a long lost sky.
Manuela’s heart sang.
I kept my promise after all, she thought. I kept my promise to Airuwe.
There are three different kinds of manatees: West Indian, West African, and Amazonian. They and their close cousins the dugongs are the only water-living mammals that eat plants. They have two front flippers and a paddle-shaped tail.
Manatees are big, slow-moving animals, which means that they burn energy much more slowly than other mammals and so can’t keep warm in cold water. They can only survive in water that stays above 68°F (20°C) all year round.
Their eyesight is poor, but they can hear well. Touch-sensitive bristles surround their mouth and help them to find the right plants to eat, and muscled lips gather the food into their mouth. Eating plants wears down their teeth, but manatees shed their worn teeth at the front; they’re replaced with new ones from the back.
Manatees can live for thirty years or more. They have just one baby at a time, with a gap of three years in between. A baby manatee stays with its mother for up to two years and doesn’t have babies of its own until it is between six and eight years old.
The manatees in this book are Amazonian manatees. Unlike dugongs, which live in the ocean and are happy in fresh or salt water, Amazonian manatees live only in fresh water, in the Amazon River and the rivers that run into it. Amazonians are the smallest manatee but can still be 10 feet (3 meters) long and weigh 1,100 pounds (500 kilos). Other manatees are gray all over, but the Amazonian manatee has darker, more rubbery skin and a big white patch on its chest.
The Amazonian feeds in a different way from its relatives, too. In the murky waters of the Amazon, there’s too little light for plants to grow under the surface, where other manatees find their food. So Amazonian manatees feed mainly on floating plants, nibbling at them from underneath or sometimes poking their heads out of the water.
Water levels in the Amazon can vary between the wet and the dry season by as much as 46 feet (14 meters), which is nearly twice as high as an average two-story house. In the wet season, the river floods the forest and there’s a lot of surface where floating plants can grow. Manatees eat a lot and get fat! But in the dry season, the river shrinks, and manatees must retreat to lakes or deep parts of the river, where the water stays deep enough to hide them.They survive there by living off their fat reserves.
Unfortunately for manatees, in addition to being big and slow-moving, they also taste good to humans, rather like pork. So everywhere they are found, manatees have been hunted. They also get tangled up in fishing nets, injured or killed in collisions with the propellers of motorboats, and poisoned when rivers are polluted. Their low breeding rate means that manatee numbers can’t recover quickly if too many are killed.
Amazonian manatees have been hunted by humans for at least five hundred years, especially in the dry season, when many manatees can be found together taking refuge in lakes. They can be herded using boats and then speared or caught in nets. Sometimes, many manatees are killed at once.
Calves, orphaned when their mothers are killed or caught in nets because they were too young and inexperienced to avoid it, are sometimes kept in captivity until they are big enough to eat or are traded as pets.
There are more motorboats and nets in the Amazon than ever before, and manatees are now an endangered species because people still hunt them, even though it’s illegal.
One way to keep manatee numbers from falling is to return orphaned calves to the wild, which is happening in many parts of the Amazon. But the hunting and careless use of nets still continue, and calves are still orphaned.
The real problem is that in places where food and money are scarce and the police can’t see what’s going on, it doesn’t work to tell people not to kill manatees; they have to want not to.
In Puerto Nariño, a small town on the Amazon in Colombia, an organization called Natütama has been working with local people to encourage them to love manatees and not to hunt them.
Natütama’s work began with a real-life incident very like the story in this book. An injured manatee calf was rescued and passed on to Sarita Kendal, cofounder of Natütama. Sarita and her helpers worked over two years to restore the calf to health, feed it, care for it, and finally to wean it, so that it would be able to survive in the wild. The calf was named Airuwe, the Ticuna word for manatee.
Many people in Puerto Nariño got involved in Airuwe’s care. He became a celebrity, and when it was time for him to be returned to the river, almost all the village came along. He was fitted with a radio collar so that Sarita and her team could track him and check that he was safe. At the same time, the collar gathered valuable information about manatee behavior. For several months, Sarita and a team of local fishermen spent hours every day watching Airuwe and learning about manatees.
Eventually Airuwe’s collar dropped off, so it wasn’t possible to keep track of him. But when a manatee was killed by the one local fisherman who had always been determined to keep hunting manatees, he was reported to the police and fled from the village.
Since that time, no one in Puerto Nariño nor its neighboring villages has killed a man
atee. Fishermen and their families say that they will never hunt manatees, as they want their grandchildren to be able to see manatees as they themselves have always done.
Now all schoolchildren from Puerto Nariño, and from communities up and down the river and across Colombia, visit Nat¨utama’s thatched headquarters. They learn about manatees and the animals and plants that share their environment by visiting an exhibition of the manatees’ underwater world and through songs, games, stories, and puppet shows. Natütama holds gala open-house days and takes part in local festivals. They even bake manatee cookies just like the ones in the book. Natütama workers visit villages across the border in Peru and Brazil to remind people of their connection with the natural world and the value of wildlife. Fishermen are employed to help monitor the small, precious population of about 35 manatees in the Puerto Nariño area, and they report over 500 sightings of manatees every year. Natütama’s conservation work grows out of the community around it and encourages a culture of respectful stewardship, rather than exploitation.
Sarita was never sure if Airuwe had been killed. But to this day, people tell her that they’ve seen him upriver.
If you’d like to help keep manatees in the Amazon, you can support organizations like Natütama.
http://natutama.org/
E-mail: [email protected]
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or, if real, are used fictitiously.
Text copyright © 2013 by Nicola Davies
Illustrations copyright © 2013 by Annabel Wright
Illustration of Manatee Action Plan copyright © 2013 by Robin Crossley
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, transmitted, or stored in an information retrieval system in any form or by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, taping, and recording, without prior written permission from the publisher.
First U.S. electronic edition 2016
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 2014953073
The illustrations in this book were done in watercolor.
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