Wanderlust magazine 9 page colour feature
Beautiful 9 page colour feature in the UK’s top travel magazine for the independent traveller, Wanderlust, by James Stewart who visited Cayman earlier this year. The feature is in the Dec. 2012/Jan. 2013 issue which is on news stands now.
Cayman Islands
Treasure Islands
The Cayman Islands just a pretty tax haven, right? Wrong. This idyllic Caribbean trio has prolific and wonderful wildlife both on and off shore.
Words by James Stewart.
James Stewart on the Mastic Trail, Grand Cayman, May 22, 2012
There are plenty of easy ways to strike up a conversation on Grand Cayman – drive to North Side district and pull up a bar stool at Over The Edge restaurant, perhaps. But I chose to do it one heroically stupid way…
It was a beautiful afternoon in a botanic park made treacly by heat and tropical flowers. A teenager, pointed out to me earlier as Ruth, caught my attention and nodded; she was steely-eyed and exotic. I returned the greeting and she sidled closer. She nodded again. Flattered, I returned the compliment. She studied me, yawned, then sauntered into the vegetation: my first chat in the argot of the Grand Cayman blue iguana and it turns out I am a crushing bore.
Is anywhere in the Caribbean so maligned as the Cayman Islands? Here it is, a tropical destination with wildlife like B-movie monsters and all outsiders want to talk about is taxes. So, let’s deal with the awkward facts first. The Cayman Islands – Grand Cayman, Cayman Brac and Little Cayman, often known collectively as Cayman, never the Caymans – are the world’s fifth-largest banking centre and its leading offshore hedge fund jurisdiction. Six corporations are listed for each of the islands’ 50,000 residents.
George Town – the only town worth the name – harbours the financial centre but its heart isn’t in it. A Florida-lite of mirrored low-rises and clapperboard giftshops, it is built on Caribbean time and warm sea breezes. Feral chickens scratch among the officeblocks. Just across the main road is spectacular Seven Mile Beach, the only tourist resort on the island.
Blue is beautiful
The tax-free status of this British Overseas Territory dates back to Oliver Cromwell’s effort to lure settlers. Yet if history suggests anything, it’s that these islands are more nature haven than the tax haven they became in the mid-1980s. Columbus wrote about seas so full of turtles he could practically walk ashore, and the islands took their name from caiman crocodiles.
Bloody Head-Raw Bones – Capparis flexuosa, Family: CAPPARACEAE. The flowers open in the evening and fall off in the morning. It is one of the larval food plants of the Great Southern White butterfly – Ascia monuste
Photo: Ann Stafford, Grand Cayman, May 8, 2008
Bloody Head-Raw Bones – Capparis flexuosa, Family: CAPPARACEAE has gory-looking opened fruits which give this viny shrub its Cayman common name. Photo: Ann Stafford Dec.29, 2006
Red Birch – Bursera simaruba, Family: BURSERACEAE is a very common, fast growing tree in Cayman. It is sometimes nicknamed the Tourist tree because it has a red skin that peels. It is called Gumbo Limbo in the US. Photo: Ann Stafford July 18, 2004.
Nowadays Cayman has more species of flora than the Galápagos, including three orchids found nowhere else. New species are found regularly, botanist Ann Stafford explained as we walked through one of the Caribbean’s last undisturbed subtropical forests. We were on the Mastic Trail, which cuts across the east of the island, an empty green space on my map. Ann pointed out flora such as bloody head-raw bones and red birch, whose peeling bark leads Caymanians to nickname it the ‘tourist tree’. We paused at a spindly shrub: Casearia staffordiae, one Ann had discovered herself.
Cayman Casearia – Casearia staffordiae, Family: SALICACEAE, Grand Cayman endemic shrub, Critically Endangered, North Side Nov. 10, 2002. This species was first noticed on the Mastic Trail on June 22, 2001.
The fascination of Cayman is its interplay of nature and culture, Ann told me. “Plants are part of the identity of these islands; they make them unique. We don’t have large animals but because of these plants we have an interesting diversity of wildlife.”
The world’s smallest butterfly, the pygmy blue, was presumed extinct until it turned up in Grand Cayman in 2002. Over 180 bird species make merry carnival in the canopy. And then there are those iguanas.
Click on Cayman Islands link above to see 9 page colour feature.
James Stewart, Wanderlust magazine, by the big Yellow Mastic tree – Sideroxylon foetidissimum, Critically Endangered, on the Mastic Trail, Grand Cayman. Photo: Ann Stafford, May 22, 2012.
Cayman Casearia tiny flowers, Casearia staffordiae – SALICACEAE, Grand Cayman endemic shrub, Critically Endangered. Photo: Ann Stafford, Mastic Trail, Aug. 3, 2006. Proctor’s FLORA of the CAYMAN ISLANDS 2012, page 316.
THE INDEPENDENT
Tropical Treasures of the Natural Kind
The Cayman Islands may be known as a tax haven, but for Cathy Winston it’s the rare butterflies and blue iguanas that raise her interest rate
Cathy Winston Sunday 29 January 2012
Grand Cayman endemic Ghost orchid – Dendrophylax fawcettii, Critically Endangered, Apr.4-2011
…….. It takes far less effort to immerse myself in the island’s natural side. Ann Stafford, a British expatriate who has lived on the
islands since the 1970s, runs nature tours of Grand Cayman, between growing ghost orchids in her garden and co-authoring a book on the islands’ butterflies.
“Native plants are part of the history, culture and identity of the islands. They’re what makes them unique,” she explains. “We don’t have large wild animals but we do have an interesting diversity of wildlife.”
One option is walking the mastic trail, a three-hour hike in Grand Cayman’s interior through a two million-year-old sub-tropical dry forest, past black mangroves and the mastic trees that give it its name. Instead, I opted for a less strenuous but no less fascinating way to see the best of the island, as Ann led me on a journey down backstreets and behind tennis courts, in search of native plants: the evocatively named Bloody Head Rawbones, the spiky Shake Hand tree and the innocently lush Maiden Plum, with its poisonous, rash-inducing leaves.
Cathy Winston, Governor Gore Bird Sanctuary, Grand Cayman, Jan.14, 2012
From Grand Harbour, just east of George Town, we set off on the trail of some of the birds which migrate and settle on the stretches of water here – sandpipers, plovers to egrets, – before spotting blue herons from the pond-side bench at the small Governor Gore bird sanctuary, named after Michael Gore, a former governor (and keen wildlife photographer).
Christopher Columbus was the first to spot the Cayman Islands during his fourth and final voyage in 1503. After noting there were so many turtles in the water that he could almost walk to shore on their shells, he named them Las Tortugas and promptly set sail again. Successive sailors arrived and swiftly departed, complaining about mosquitoes and a lack of anything to tempt settlers.
In 1586, Francis Drake called it a dreadful place with “great serpents called Caymanas, large like lizards” while the French confidently announced the islands weren’t worth bothering with at all. Later renamed after the island’s native crocodiles – the Spanish caiman stuck even when the archipelago came under British control in 1655 – Cayman was finally settled by a mix of deserters from Oliver Cromwell’s army and retired pirates, before receiving its tax-free status from George III, after inhabitants rescued the crews of 10 British merchant ships that struck the reefs. ………………..
Ironwood Forest
Ironwood Forest gallery
Ironwood Forest
Ann Stafford’s Gallery, photos from 2002. The forest is now inaccessible because of University College of the Cayman Islands security system.
The Ironwood Forest, Grand Cayman, is a unique, self-sustaining ancient growth forest, anchored on a ridge of pinnacled Cayman Dolostone limestone rock. It is SE of George Town, on a fresh water lens, in a high rainfall area and has an amazing diversity of Cayman indigenous plants, including endemics and single-neighbor endemics. Many plants are Endangered and Critically Endangered, such as a giant Bromeliad – Hohenbergia caymanensis and the Grand Cayman Ghost Orchid – Dendrophylax fawcettii.
Maybe it will take an orchid to save a forest.
Ghost Orchid – Dendrophylax fawcettii growing on Wild Fig tree – Ficus aurea.
Photo: Ann Stafford April 20, 2003.
The 100 most endangered species on the planet
The Guardian Sept.11, 2012
The 100 most endangered species on the planet
The full list of flora and fauna
Orchid in 100 most threatened species in the world
Click here to read Orchid in 100 critical species
CaymanNewsService posted on Sept.11, 2012
(CNS): The beautiful and hauntingly delicate ghost orchid, which is found only in the Cayman Islands, has been included on a list of 100 species around the world that are facing extinction. The new report on the world’s most threatened species, entitled “Priceless or Worthless?”, which is a collaborative effort sponsored by a number of international conservation groups, examines what can be done to save the animals and plants that are most at risk. It reveals that the ghost orchid is now confined to one square kilometre in what is known as the Ironwood Forest in George Town. The writers call on the Cayman government to enact protective legislation to save the flower before it is too late.
…..
The report notes that the ghost orchid (Dendrophylax fawcettii) is found in this last “remaining fragment of old-growth forest” on Grand Cayman and is surrounded by urban development. The forest extends just 46 acres and the orchids are confined to an area of only six of those acres.
Grand Cayman Ghost Orchid
Cayman Islands Ghost Orchid – Dendrophylax fawcettii, is a Critically Endangered Grand Cayman endemic. The flowers, with a long spur, are delightfully fragrant at night. It grows in the Ironwood Forest, SE of George Town, Grand Cayman. Photo: Ann Stafford April 3, 2008
Cayman Islands Ghost Orchid
Priceless or Worthless?
The world’s most threatened species
by Jonathan E M Baillie and Ellen R Butcher
Nominations provided and text reviewed by members of the IUCN Species Survival Commission Specialist Groups and Red List Authorities
Dendrophylax fawcettii Cayman Islands Ghost Orchid
The species featured here represent the 100 most critically endangered species in the world. If we don’t rapidly increase the amount of conservation attention that they receive they may soon be lost forever.
Dendrophylax fawcettii Cayman Islands Ghost Orchid (page 40)
Population size: Unknown
Range: < 1sq.km
Ironwood Forest, GeorgeTown, Grand Cayman
Threats: Habitat destruction due to in frastructure development
Action required: Development of legislation that will facilitate the protection of the Ironwood Forests
Ironwood Forest map
Click on the link above for a map of the Ironwood Forest, SE of George Town, Grand Cayman. The white roof of the University College of the Cayman Islands hall can be seen clearly.
The forest is inaccessible, because of UCCI’s security system.
Ironwood Forest, SE of George Town, Grand Cayman, aerial photo: Lois Blumenthal, Jan. 2008. The white roof of the University College of the Cayman Islands hall can be seen in the middle at the left.
Ironwood Forest FAQ’s
Click here for Ironwood Forest FAQ’s
Ironwood Forest, SE of George Town, Grand Cayman, is approximately 70 acres, one quarter of which is CROWN LAND. Click on the link above for map showing property boundaries and more information.
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