Times of the Islands Summer 2020

Resplendent silence
By B Naqqi Manco, TCI Naturalist
On a high traffic day on Bellefield Landing Road in
Kew Settlement, North Caicos, we might see a dozen
cars roll by. Dogs lying side-down on the narrow strip
of asphalt are barely bothered to move and aside from
the breeze and the birds, my landlord’s firm “Yo!” to the
drivers is all that’s heard. It’s difficult to conceptualise an
inhabited place quieter than North and Middle Caicos.
The COVID-19 quarantine period of 2020 showed
us a new—ah, old—side of the Turks & Caicos Islands.
The country did indeed wind down. The ferries toting
day-trippers ceased. Flocks of rental cars were corralled
into inactivity. Daily commuters to the docks vanished.
Fume-billowing school buses and dump trucks desisted
from their roars and rumbles. The frequency of the “Yo!”
declined to barely one a week—usually to Her Majesty’s
Royal Police.
As streets around the world emptied and bustling
urban centres fell into an eerie, post-apocalyptic stupor,
documentation of peculiar natural events—both factual
and fallacious—began appearing on social media. The
first I remember seeing was a poorly edited photo of
Venice, captioned with a claim that following the dearth
of anthropogenic disturbance and pollution, dolphins
had reinstated themselves in the waterways, frolicking
Flipper-esque along the Canal Grando. A similar meme
appeared with equally image-doctored swans swarming
over the same aquatic routes, then another appeared with
hundreds of photo-replicated pink flamingos.
Eventually the memes began lampooning themselves;
one celebrated the return of blue whales flying through
the now-clear skies of at least three Eastern European
megapolises. Ridiculousness manifested itself into the
claims, and I was asked if the slightly more credible
claims were true. There being no solid evidence, I told
my associates to get-a-hold-of-themselves and brushed
off the memes as products of boredom. But then, the
deer showed up downtown.
A friend of mine shared a video made from a police
dashcam in an urban neighbourhood of Pittsburgh. A family
of deer a dozen strong placidly allowed themselves to
be herded along by the squad car’s gentle advance. They
moved forward, ignoring a direct route of escape into
wooded hillsides and made a sharp left onto the main
drag of the town. Looking less like typical deer gripped
in fight-or-flight response and more like a blasé meander
of window-shopping stags, they occasionally glared at
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the car with an anthromorphised accusatory scowl. They
would not be hurried. As humans no longer had the ability
to execute their myriad daily things-to-do, the does and
bucks opted to see what it was all about. “Surely there
must be something to it if they like doing it so much,” I
imagine the deer queried, and “Now that they’re out of
the way let’s go see what it’s all about.” Tragically, they
will have missed some of the better points of the tour,
with things like soft pretzel stands and upmarket confectionary
shoppes being shuttered; most likely they’ll
have returned to the oak-hickory forests with an apathetic
aftertaste for whatever so obsesses the naked apes.
Meditating on the downtown deer on an afternoon
stroll through my garden, I noticed the first gray kingbirds
of the season had arrived from their winter in
Hispaniola, their sharp trills notably more audible against
the silent backdrop. The return of the Antillean nighthawks
a day later was revealed by their distinct staccato
buzz as they swooped after the season’s first mosquitoes.
The scratches of a land crab’s legs on a rock and a
curly-tail lizard’s telltale dead-leaf-scattering were clear,
but not unusual, sonorities.
But a week later, in the midst of complete lockdown,
an evening promenade around the garden led to a startling
encounter. There, right on the lawn in the open, was
a Key West quail-dove, one of Turks & Caicos Islands’
rarer birds. Inhabiting only the shadowy floor of the tallest
dry tropical forest in southwestern North Caicos, these
mahogany red pigeons are notoriously shy and retiring.
To date none of my colleagues has been able to get a
meaningful photograph of the species, and yet there one
was, its iridescent green and purple neck glossing the low
sunbeams back to me, its distinctive eye stripe concealing
its otherwise obvious focus on looking for insects and
seeds in the grass.
B NAQQI MANCO