The Puppet government of animal farm

                In Orwell’s “Animal Farm” he discusses how the idea of socialism, in its purest form of equality for all, can be corrupted and turned into a brutal dictatorship as in North Korea or the Soviet Union.  For the purpose of his book Orwell writes of a farm in which the animals of a farm gloriously rebel against the tyrannical human owners and drive the farm. At first everything is well and the animals live in peace. But as time goes on the pigs seize control and begin to savagely enforce their rule upon the other animals, bettering their lives at the cost of everyone else’s.  On Bonaire, and many other islands across the world, the story is not so different. Except here the humans were not the deposed rulers. The humans installed the pigs as dictators in their absence.

Victorian sailors left pigs (and other herbivores) on islands they encountered as they explored the world as living larders for the next passersby.  Often in the absence of any natural predator, the pigs when about making themselves comfortable rooting through the native delicate habitats and generally eating everything in their paths.  In so doing, the pigs have persecuted often rare and unique island species of both plants and animals to the point of extinction.  Bonaire is no exception. The pigs, alongside goats and donkeys, have eaten everything that is not capable of slashing their tongues.  This is what has turned the island’s forests into the nightmarish tangle of thorns I have come to loathe.  This change has also robbed the native birds, and lizards, of a vast array of their foods, forcing them to steal from the gardens and farms of the now returned humans.

There are many ways of dealing with puppet dictators turned rogue, such as the herbivores on Bonaire. Some of them have sound ecological background to them, such as herbivore exclosures or enforcement of the policy stating that goats must be kept within a fenced farm (or “Kunuku”). Some are convoluted and ridiculous, but must be so to keep the tourists’ money happy, like the plan to catch all of the donkeys on the island, keep the females and foals in the donkey sanctuary, then sterilise and reintroduce all the males. There is another option, of which the CIA are strong supporters, violent deposing of those you are against. When it comes to the pigs on the island, there seems to be very little room for negotiations. No-one claims ownership of the animals, and they continue to decimate any chance the forest has for regeneration, and you certainly don’t see the tourist clamouring to set up a pig sanctuary. There is also next to no meat produced on the island and the sale of pork would bolster the conservation camps’ coffers. Although Echo is not involved in eradication projects it is an extracurricular opportunity that volunteers are afforded...

And with the snap of a twig, there is a pause and a glance from the pigs, and just like that, there is the scent of violence at the edge of a forest clearing. 

I love the smell of dead iguana in the morning

Upon landing on Bonaire it is immediately clear that hell is, in fact a place on earth. As the plane taxis back along the runway to the “terminal” a flat arid expanse lays before you and in the distance you can see salt mountains towering in comparison to the scrubby plants. The plane makes and abrupt right turn and comes to a halt on a parking stand you’re fairly certain the captain will have to pay and display like the other cars you can see just off the wing.  Stepping from the plane a wave of dry heat hits you as you make your way across the tarmac to the bright pink “Flamingo international” terminal.  Immigration, a sullen “woo you’re a tourist,” and the bags have beaten me from the plane.  On the other side of the exit doors I stand blinking I am either supposed to be met by Echo’s head “Chris” or the camp manager “Michelle.” I have seen a photo of Chris, which incidentally he no longer resembles, but have no idea what Michelle is supposed to look like fortunately, she spots me.

We clamber into what is left of a pickup truck (well what is left of a car, there may well have been a roof over the back at one point but it has long since vanished leaving what resembles a ragged pickup) and head off down the road. Michelle points out the sites and I quiz her on the state of the islands nature, although I am far too tired to take any of it in.

“What is there in terms of terrestrial animals?” I roar over the struggling engine

“Apart from the obvious” she says swerving between a goat and a donkey, “A snake, and iguanas and a few smaller lizards are all that’s native”

A second later we come to a halt outside a house and peer through its gate. “There’s one now” she says gesturing. Towards the gate lumbers a large dog triumphantly carrying a dead iguana.

            

            Bonaire is not the tropics I am accustomed to, there is no canopy to shelter under. The sun is fierce, with night time temperature falling to a frigid 27 Celsius. The only thing that prevents you from collapse is a more or less constant breeze out of (I believe) the northeast.  If that stops you have nowhere to go, if you try and seek shade it will cut you, quite literally. One of the problems on Bonaire is the invasive herbivores; pigs, donkeys and goats, that will eat anything and everything they can. Together they have uprooted or grazed out all native plants that aren’t defended by savage thorns. All that is left by the sides of the roads are stunted shrubby trees with a thirst for blood. That’s not all that wants to cut you. The rocks are jagged volcanic looking outcrops that slice at hand, legs and boots alike.

The forests are for the most part silent, stiflingly hot and alien habitats. The plants are xerophytes, tolerant of extreme lack of water and have taken forms that seem conjured from the imagination of Dr. Seuss {picture above}. The forest floor of sand is littered with drag marks of the reptiles that roam them. The reptiles here are not the slow and sluggish beasts you see in northern zoo, but possess a frightening speed that makes you grateful the only snake (the Bonaire silver snake (Leptotyphlops albifrons)) is at most 15 centimetres long, 1cm wide and completely harmless {picture below}. That speed does not necessarily apply to the mental abilities of the reptiles. The iguana, for instance is an arboreal species with one elemental escape strategy: let go.  When a threat is perceived the iguana will simply drop from its tree and make good its escape. If, of course it is not too concussed from the impact of falling from a tree on a small cliff to do so.

The other thing you notice about from time to time walking through the forest is the occasional sudden stench. It is slightly sweet, but sickly. It is of course rotting flesh. It is, inevitably emanating from a deceased iguana. It is not a victim, as our first case, but has simply died as it lived, sprawled upon a sunny branch in a tree.  There, after its demise it has become snagged on the thorns of whichever spiteful tree it was in at the time and fermented in the sun.

But up ahead there is a clap of wings, a screech, a “troo-pee-oh” and blazes of colour against the arid backdrop.  The diminutive dinosaurs of the class Aves race overhead. The birds have escaped the hell that is on the earth here by taking to the skies. Only they thrive here, everything else must do its brutal best to just remain in existence. This is their island, a Jurassic park in miniature and it is this I have just begun to explore.  

Southbound

Across the globe millions of birds are coming to rest. They have just completed journeys of a gargantuan scale. At this time of year there seems to be an overwhelming consensus in the bird world that north is best. The long days of the northern hemisphere provide the perfect conditions to forage and rear young and attract many species familial to us, such as ruby throated humming birds (Archilochus colubris) in the USA and barn swallows (Hirundo rustica) and cuckoos (Cuculus canorus)of Europe.  Some birds however, will not come to us. 

                It is because of this that I must undertake my own migration. I am an ornithologist based, for the time being, at the University of Leeds. For the next year I will be working with various conservation organisations to gain experience in the conservations of birds. This current, personal migration takes me south, against the northward grain of the birds, south to Bonaire in the Dutch Antilles off the coast of Venezuela.  Here, for the next three months, I will be working with the Echo Bonaire project under the umbrella of the World Parrot Trust.  

                Echo Bonaire works to protect a subpopulation of Amazon parrot, the yellow shouldered Amazon (Amazona barbadensis).  It works in a number of ways; rescue and rehab of birds from the illegal pet trade, native forest regeneration, public interaction and scientific study. Over the next 3 months I will learn much more about Echo Bonaire, the parrots and Bonaire as a whole, first hand.

                The point of this blog is to share that learning experience and the learning experiences throughout the coming year. To share the trials and tribulations faced by a conservation biologist and to help me remember what I have done when I come to write reports upon my return to University.  To avoid insult any names of people will be changed and due to the rarity of some of the species that will play lead roles in the coming stories locations will, at times, be quite vague. I will be trying to post on here once a week, and whilst I cannot guarantee it will all be great literature, or the most well referenced scientific articles, I hope there will be some entertainment and at the very least there will be brilliant photographs.

                But for now, I know as much, or as little as you. To tell you more I must take to metal wings and fly south.