To an outsider, there's little to suggest that Grenada is struggling to get back on its feet. Virtually all of the homes have roofs now, instead of the sea of blue tarps that settled over the island for months after the hurricane. Hotels have repaired, repainted, and in most cases upgraded their rooms. Hiking through the center of the island, you can still find one-hundred-foot twin palms that bent their way to survival against the killer winds.

But beneath the renovated and relandscaped resorts and the repaved roads lies a mountain of debt. The government is so eager to welcome investment, in fact, that last year it amended its Parks and Protective Areas Act to allow Grenada to sell national parklands to developers. This bit of legal legerdemain was followed swiftly by the sale of park parcels to a company named Cinnamon 88 that is developing a resort, a villa complex, and an eighteen-hole golf course which will be managed by Four Seasons. All of this would likely have gone unnoticed and unchallenged, had it not been for one vital fact that the government, in its haste to make a deal, seems not to have considered: The land in question is in Mount Hartman National Park, home to the Grenada dove, which is not only the national bird but one of the most critically endangered species in the world.

Those without a supremely honed appreciation of feathered creatures would be forgiven for thinking the Grenada dove an unremarkable, even sad, little bird. It lacks the brilliant plumage of the tanager, the statuesque grace of the egret, and the pedestrian charms of the Carib grackle, a bold and compact blackbird that will steal the breakfast toast and bacon right off your plate. No, the Grenada dove is a painfully shy, drab, greenish-gray-and-white creature whose only extravagance is its feet of carmine red. Its song is not an optimistic chirp or an anxious thrum but a mournful call that brings to mind nothing so much as the sigh of the defeated. When frightened, it will descend from its perch and run from danger rather than fly. But it could not run from this resort development project.

International reaction to the government's move was swift and at times fierce. The World Bank, which was involved in the creation of the park, and the National Geographic Society, which is planning a geotourism project on the island, voiced concern, and international environmental groups condemned the project. Literary lioness Margaret Atwood and her partner, Graeme Gibson, bird lovers both, threatened a boycott of the island and Four Seasons hotels (headquartered in Toronto). In July 2007, when the controversy was reaching a fever pitch, Cinnamon 88 called in Bonnie Rusk, a conservation biologist who has been studying the dove since 1991, to help it find a way to build its $800 million resort without wiping the bird off the earth.

"Ivan was brutal to the doves," Rusk tells me as we bounce along one of the park's rutted dirt roads in her four-wheel drive, passing a bulldozer that's clearing land for the resort. Her research shows that the hurricane destroyed more than a third of the dove population and that only 136 birds remain. Rusk worked for months with Cinnamon 88 to devise a plan that would allow it to build while still preserving the dove's habitat. In the end, the developer pared down the number of villas it would construct from 250 to 175 and changed the layout of its golf course more than a dozen times. Then the government redesignated the park boundaries. The collaboration not only left the dove's most critical habitat intact but actually increased it slightly. "Conservation and development are colliding more and more," Rusk says, "and history has shown that if it comes down to an either/or scenario, development will always win. The dove is just one species of many that are struggling to hang on. We have to find a way to work together."