Antigua and Barbuda Ferns Bounce Back After Centuries of Sharp Decline Kevel C. Lindsay klindsay@irf.org

Antigua and Barbuda is seeing a resurgence of its fern flora—many species are new records for the islands. It has been a life-long dream of mine to experience Antigua and Barbuda’s unique wild fern flora, and I have been granted a most rewarding opportunity to study the islands’ ferns—and it is wonderful to witness this natural event unfold, as a once ravaged part of our natural heritage slowly returns, though quite slowly. As a boy running the open pastures of Jonas Road chasing goats, sheep and cattle while daydreaming about exploring space, of becoming a great naturalist like Gerald Durrell traveling the world and seeking the majestic creatures of Patagonia and the Amazon, I developed my love for nature. I would spend hours exploring the ghauts, mesmerized by the ferns cascading from the Date Trees (Phoenix spp.) and the thick fern groves along the banks of springs. Antigua back then (1980s) was simpler place, and the landscape was more open and consisted of large areas of grasslands and “cassie” bush. People farmed the land, cattle grazed, and in the early summer, people picked wild mangoes and filled buckets and bags, carrying them on their heads, relishing the yellow sticky juicy goodness of the fruits almost sacred meat. There were few cars on the roads, no houses for miles and even the sky seemed grand. It was a perfect time and place for a young and impressionable mind to become trapped in a world created all of his own—for the imagination to run wild. I loved ferns and always sought them out. I would stand at the edge of lush fern groves and imagined that land before me would suddenly be transformed into a hot humid jungle like those I often read about in books or saw on television. I promised myself that one day I would know all I could about the ferns of Antigua. By the 1990s, I found myself in the thick of things working as a forester in the Forestry Unit at the Ministry of Agriculture. This was my dream job—I could indulge my passion for the outdoors and experience the many wild wonders of Antigua and Barbuda; and I was getting paid to do it, a bonus. Before we get ahead of ourselves, let’s become familiar with the setting for where our ferns are found. Antigua is broadly divided into three geographic areas, including the Volcanic Region, the Central Plain and the Limestone Region (see map 1). The landscape of much of the middle and north of the island consist of open fields, patches of woodlands along streams, wooded

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limestone hills and is where most of the current agriculture production occurs. These two regions also hold most of the island’s settlements. The Volcanic Region consists of steep hills and the highest point on the island, Mount Obama (formerly Boggy Peak) at 403 meters. It is also where the island’s rainfall amounts occur, and is experiencing increasing forests and woodland cover in some parts. Photo 2 shows Christian Valley as it looks today, but 20 to 30 years ago, much of this area consisted of a patchwork of degraded forests, scrub and extensive grasslands.

Map 1. Geographic regions of Antigua. Source, Brian Cooper, 2013.

Antigua, after it was settled by the British in 1632, was brutally and almost completely deforested in an effort to pave the way for the establishment of large fields for agriculture. About 100 years or so after European settlement, much of the island had been reduced to tiny fragments and patches of

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woodland, and large tracts of open fields, mainly dominated by sugar cane cultivation, illustration 1. In photo 1, it shows an aerial photograph of the northeastern part of Antigua, showing a mosaic of large cultivated fields, and fragments and strips of natural woodland. This is what much of the island must have looked like throughout much of its colonial history. When the British decided to settle Antigua, they felled the ancient forests, chopping and burning the trees to make land available for farming, as well as timber for homes and wood to provide fuel for the sugar mills.

Photo 1. Aerial view of northeast Antigua showing mosaic of extensive cane fields. Photo taken by botanist Walter H. Hodge, circa 1960s. Source Island Resources Foundation Walter H. Hodge

collection. Within 100 years, Antigua had lost most of its natural vegetation, and countless species. Despite the fact that much of the Antigua had largely been deforested by the mid-1700s or so, the decisive effort to rid the island of native vegetation continued well into the mid to late 1800s as photo 3 shows. Here, the last remaining large trees of Wallings area are felled. Note the epiphytes on the branches. This photo is believed to have been taken just prior to the beginning of the 20th Century.

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Photo 2. A view of Christian Valley from the entrance showing the heavily forested slopes.

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Illustration 1. Cutting sugarcane in Antigua in 1823.

By the early 1900s, much of the south of Antigua—the most diverse, wettest and richest part of the island (in terms of its biodiversity)—had resulted in a depauperate and degraded patchwork of strips of trees and woods, fruit tree farming, including mangoes, coffee, cocoa, bananas, citrus and pineapple, along with the production of Arrowroot. Photo 6 shows Fig Tree Drive in sometime around the very late 1800s to 1900s. Note that main roads at the time consisted of foot trails and paths for horse-driven carriages, and not the expansive highways and special lighting (electric lamps) that we are accustomed to today. Much of the area was open and very dry, unlike today.

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Photo 3. Taking down of an old silk cotton, circa late 1800s by John Anjo. Source: Museum of

Antigua and Barbuda. Barbuda did not suffer a similar fate because it was considered too dry, though many of the old trees were cut and used for timber and for fuel-wood. Unfortunately, many livestock species were set loose on the island, some eventually going feral, causing considerable damage to delicate and friable ecosystems, and many native species may have disappeared as a result. There are not many images of Barbuda from the pre-1800s period unfortunately, so the reader will just have to use the imagination here. Photo 4 shows the woodlands of the Highlands of Barbuda today; note that this is as a result of the impacts of livestock, severe hunting and the decimation of the native forests.

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Photo 4. The Highlands of Barbuda today showing the destruction of native forests quarrying.

Redonda, the imposing fortress of a rock, and the third island in our tripartite state, was never permanently settled. It has been suggested that soon after it was sighted by early Europeans, goats were let to run wild there, and these animals began to destroy the vegetation. Extensive areas of the island were also mined for guano from the late 1800s to around 1921, increasing the damage and thereby compounding the damage caused by the goats and also introduced rats. Photo 5 shows a view of the landscape of Redonda, 2013, Jenny Daltry (Fauna and Flora International, (FFI)).

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Photo 5. Redonda as photographed in 2012 by Jenny Daltry, Fauna and Flora, 2012.

Photo courtesy Jenny Daltry, Faunal and Flora International (FFI) 2012. Nature was never of great importance to the early British, so they never recorded much about the islands in those formative settlement years. The Amerindians—though largely forcibly driven from these islands by the mid-1700s—lived by the land, not only because they deeply relied on it for survival, but also because their spiritual beliefs relied on maintaining balance in the natural world and they practiced what for us today is often dismissed as ancestor worship and animism. They, however, also left little in the way of written records of the islands’ pre-European state. For the period between the first European’s arrival in the region in 1492 and the late 1800s, we have little in the way of actual information on what the islands looked like and the many native species that called here home. But by the late 1700s, Antigua had been denuded of its forests and the island resembled an emerald glade of expansive grasslands dominated by sugarcane.

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Photo 6. Fig Tree Drive, circa 1900 late 1800s by John Anjo. Source: Museum of Antigua and

Barbuda. This tree is likely located at the bottom of the Fig Tree Ghaut where it crosses the road, given the situation of the photo. Photo 7 is an image of the same area today.

Illustration 1 is taken from “A History of the Island of Antigua, One of the Leeward Caribbees in the West Indies, from the First Settlement in 1635 to the Present Time,” Volume I, by Vere Langford Oliver, written in 1894. It is entitled “View of St. Johns Harbour in Antigua” and shows a very open landscape, covered mostly with sugarcane—a very bleak and deforested landscape, something that would be very typical of the island from that time.

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Photo 7. Fig Tree Drive in 2011. Note the impact of modern agriculture on the area has resulted in a new form of “colonial deforestation” in the form of a renewed emphasis on the destruction of

Antigua’s native flora similar to European colonisation. Illustration 2 shows a view of Antigua around 1830, some 184 years ago. Despite the vagueness of the image, there are two possible positions from which this view was taken: looking toward Dunnings Valley, and from the north of Five Islands. I vote for the former, given the geology of the landscape. I believe that this view is from Note that the hills in the background seem forested, which in and of itself is an artistic flourish, since during that time, the summits of all hills would have been cleared for one purpose or another (except steep, rocky and inaccessible areas too unsuitable for cultivation). But this illustrates how much of the lowlands of Antigua were completely deforested and degraded, and very likely absent of ferns. Naturalist and researchers such as myself, in an effort to understand what has happened to our islands, may glean a great deal about Antigua, Barbuda or Redonda from such historical illustrations, especially in the absence of more concrete and descriptive scientific data and records. Because writers from those days paid particular attention to certain types of features and not to

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others, we can begin to build a certain picture and reconstruct the situations and conditions from that period, though, a word of caution, we also do recognise the limitations as well. Now use your imagination and go back to an Antigua back in the 70s and 80s, when the island still had large tracts of sugarcane fields and cornfields at Sandersons, Burkes and Potworks, and when large-scale agriculture still ruled the land. How can a young boy be inspired in such a stark and rather uninspired vista? The imagination and books, that’s how. By the time I had begun to eagerly and consistently tear through the collections of the Antigua Public Library, those of the Museum of Antigua and Barbuda, and regimentally harass my mentor, Desmond Nicholson, I had begun to recreate and established in my mind, a certain notion about our islands and the folly of colonialisation, of missed opportunities, and the implications and impacts of the trajectory of our past on the modern view of the landscape of Antigua, Barbuda and Redonda. For me, the complex and volatile blend of history, slavery, conquest, colonialisation and geography, has resulted in the obliteration of a region’s natural wonders and legacy, including our native fern flora were among them.

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Illustration 2. Vue de Cedarhall dans Isle d’Antigua By Hurlimann, circa 1830. I now know quite a bit about Antigua and Barbuda’s fern flora, and the decline and likely extinction of many species that would have occurred when the islands were first settled by the British. The earliest account of Antigua’s fern flora was by A. Alston and Harold Box who wrote the Pteridophyta of Antigua in 1935, in which they reported about 35 species (they also suggested the presence of the hybrid Thelypteris x rolandii, a naturally occurring cross between T. tetragona and T. poiteana). The Antigua of this period was dominated by large tracts of sugar cane fields, similar to the view presented in photo 1, which was taken around 1961 or so. Even 26 years later, much of the island was intensively cultivated. Alston was a British botanist and naturalist who was quite familiar with the flora and landscapes of many of the West Indian islands. Harold Box was at the time, the Government Entomologist at the Antigua Sugar Factory, and who also spent a great deal of his time exploring and recording many of its natural features, including its plants. For Barbuda, no similar work had even been done, even though Box and many other experts had visited Barbuda on many occasions. Box did visit Redonda, and published a short paper entitled, A Note on the Vegetation of Redonda, B.W.I, published in 1939, and in which he provided described his observations on that island’s ferns. For many years, the Pteridophyta of Antigua remained the most comprehensive work on Antigua’s ferns. It offered a unique opportunity for researchers to look back and understand some of the environmental and ecological conditions at the time. Other researchers also visited Antigua, Barbuda and Redonda, and published their findings on the vegetation and flora of these islands, but the number of species largely remained below 40. In the early 1990s when I returned from Trinidad where I had studied tropical forestry, I began to some research on the islands’ flora and I began to see evidence that Antigua had several other species of ferns. In1995, I moved on to work with Island Resources Foundation (IRF), and one of our main areas of focus was updating as much of the country’s biodiversity knowledge. IRF published the Biodiversity Profile for Antigua, Barbuda, and Redonda (authored by Lindsay and Horwith), and the team increased the number of species of ferns from Alston’s and Box’s 35, to 45 (43 for Antigua and two for Barbuda).

Illustration 1. View of St. Johns Harbour in 1752. Not Mosaic of cultivated fields on hills around St. John’s.

In 2007, the Environmental Awareness Group (EAG) began work on surveying and assessing the country’s native and naturalised plants. This effort continued until 2009 and culminated in the publication of The Wild Plants of Antigua and Barbuda, yet again increasing the number of fern species, this time 45 to about 54.

Photo 8. Adiantum fragile var. rigidulum, right corner.

During the surveys to gather data for the book that I really began to focus on ferns and realised that there were many more species and quite a few that I could not identify. I then vowed that I would find the resources study our ferns and finally get some answers. So, in 2010, work began on a field assessment of the ferns of all three islands, and this work continues today. By the end of 2013, my field work determined that country has at least 109 species, far more than the 35 that Alston and Box recorded. Some of the increase is due to taxonomic revisions and splits, the recognition of many hybrids, and because of several introduced species, but most were new records, such as the delicate and beautiful Adiantum fragile var. rigidulum, photo 8, a species first noted by me back in in the early 1990s, but at the time, I was unsure as to its identity. I even

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cultivated it for some time to study its habits. This species is endemic to the West Indies and is rare in Antigua. Then there is Adiantum pulvurulentum, a species recently discovered on Mount Obama in early 2012, photo 9. This species was long suspected, based in large part to the fact that there is available habitat, so it was puzzling that it was not previously recorded.

Photo 9. Adiantum pulvurulentum at Mount Obama.

Another of the Adiantums discovered for the first time is A. capillus-veneris, a species long suspected, but not found until 2013. It likes moist habitats with running water. It is also one of the first ferns mentioned for Antigua, back in the 1700s as being used to produce a compound ‘Capillaire’ used as a cough medicine. It has also been used to treat dandruff, and for other ailments. However, compounds from this plant and other ferns are often carcinogenic and should not be used. Photo 10 shows the species at Christian Valley.

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Another interesting discovery is Microgramma nitida, a “viney” species that looks very similar to other members of this genus, but this plant often has very large leaves. See photo 11.

Photo 10. Adiantum capillus-veneris along a stream at Christian Valley.

On Barbuda, I found a population of Pityrogramma chrysophylla var. gabrielae, photo 12, which was a surprise because this species not often found in limestone areas. Barbuda was also where we added another aquatic species, Marsilea ancylopoda, photo 13, in addition to the existing West Indian endemic (found only on Cuba, the Bahamas and Puerto Rico), Marsilea nashii. These are not the only new discoveries; there are many more not mentioned here, and undoubtedly many more to be discovered, but the new species for the islands. But the new records are part of a trend where the number of ferns of Antigua, Barbuda and Redonda. As the forest continues to recover in some areas of the south of the island, viable habitat return and this allows many species to re-establish themselves. However, this may only be a temporary recovery of our native biodiversity, especially because some fern species are known from only one small colony or just one plant. This makes them vulnerable to disturbances, including droughts, floods, land-clearing, diseases, invasive species, and fires. Added to this is the increasing stress of the effects of climate change and sea level rise, which compound and amplify existing threats.

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Photo 11. Microgramma nitida.

While some areas in the volcanic south of Antigua are seeing an increase in forest cover, the central, northern and northeastern end of the island are experiencing a decline in forest cover and a loss of wetlands due to tourism and upscale housing developments. On Barbuda, introduced feral livestock, which include goats, sheep, pigs, donkeys, horses, Fallow Deer (Dama dama) and wild boar, some of which may have been introduced as early as the 1500s, are causing a gradual but steady ecological decline in ecosystems. Barbuda also has seen a dramatic increase in sand mining and quarrying, which have destroyed large tracts of rare native woodlands. Redonda is now largely deforested due to guano mining, to goats introduced prior the 1600s and introduced Black Rats (Rattus rattus). Sadly, at least two species: Pteridium caudatum and Microgramma piloselloides may be locally extinct on Antigua. Field surveys have so far turned up no evidence that either species is still present on the island. Photo 11 shows the

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author high on the slopes of Saddle Hill, from where Alston and Box reported P. caudatum.

Photo 12. Pityrogramma chrysophylla var. gabrielae on Barbuda.

Field studies continue, and new species are likely to turn up. But it is now necessary to develop effective ways to protect suitable habitats and ensure that these species maintain sustainable populations. Working with local authorities, I have been planning the development of a native plant nursery and garden to maintain populations of native species, and to eventually repatriate many of these to the wild. These plans are now in the beginning stages. The EAG’s field study of the ferns of Antigua, Barbuda and Redonda is generously funded by the Rufford Small Grants for Nature Conservation, UK, and the Mohamed bin Zayed Species Conservation Fund, Abu Dhabi. The study has resulted in the production of a Regional Red List of Ferns for Antigua and Barbuda, and a Conservation Perspective, both researched and authored by myself, and which can be freely downloaded from the EAG fern project website at: http://www.eagantigua.org/page525.html. Also being produced is a guide to the ferns, expected by early summer of 2014.

Photo 13. Marsilea ancylopoda at a pond in Barbuda.

Many of the newly recorded species require humid habitat in which conditions are more reminiscent of the more mountainous islands of St. Kitts, Nevis and Guadeloupe with their resplendent rainforests. Photo 14 shows habitat on St. Kitts, which would have existed at the high elevations and small isolated areas of the Volcanic Region of Antigua of Antigua before Europeans arrived. I have come to this conclusion because several rainforest species are now extinct on Antigua as a result of the deforestation of the island, and the transformation of the island to an intensive and export-driven agricultural system. Undoubtedly many other species are also now extinct, including many ferns.

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Photo 14. Rainforest habitat on St. Kitts, similar to what is now lost on Antigua.

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Selected References Alston, A.H.G. & H.E. Box. 1935. Pteridophyta of Antigua. Journal of Botany Vol.

73 No., 366. Beard, J.S. 1949. The natural vegetation of the Windward and Leeward Islands.

Oxford Forestry Memoirs, 21. Oxford University Press. Box, Harold E. 1939. A note on the vegetation of Redonda, B.W.I. Journal of

Botany, British and Foreign, Vol. 77, No. 923. Government of Antigua and Barbuda. 2012. Census 2011: preliminary data

results. Ministry of Finance, the Economy and Public Administration Statistics Division.

Harris, D. R. 1965. Plants, animals and man in the outer Leeward Islands, West

Indies – an ecological study of Antigua, Barbuda, and Anguilla. University of California Press.

Howard, R. A. & others. 1977. Flora of the Lesser Antilles. Pteridophyta. Arnold

Arboretum, Harvard University. Island Resources Foundation, 1991. Antigua and Barbuda country environmental

profile. Caribbean Conservation Association. Lindsay, Kevel. (In Prep.). The ferns of Antigua, Barbuda and Redonda: an atlas

and illustrated guide to the native and naturalised pteridophytes. Environmental Awareness Group.

Lindsay, Kevel & Bruce Horwith. 1997. A biodiversity profile of Antigua, Barbuda

and Redonda. Island Resources Foundation. Lindsay, Kevel & Bruce Horwith. 1997. A vegetation classification of Antigua,

Barbuda and Redonda. Island Resources Foundation.

Lindsay, Kevel. 2012. Protecting native pteridophytes in Antigua, Barbuda and Redonda: a conservation perspective. Environmental Awareness Group.

Lindsay, Kevel. 2012. Regional Red List of pteridophytes of Antigua, Barbuda and

Redonda. Environmental Awareness Group. Lindsay, K. & Horwith, B. 1997. Plant species of Antigua, Barbuda & Redonda.

Island Resources Foundation.

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Loveless, A. 1960. The vegetation of Antigua, West Indies. Journal of Ecology Vol. 48, No. 3.

Nutting, C. C. 1920. English Harbour. The scientific monthly. Volume 11, No. 1. Pratt, Christopher, Kevel Lindsay, Melanie Pearson & Carolyn Thomas. 2009. The

Wild Plants of Antigua and Barbuda: an Illustrated Field Guide to the Native and Naturalised Vascular Plants. Environmental Awareness Group

Wheeler, L. Eichmond. 1916. The botany of Antigua. The Journal of Botany, British

and Foreign, Vol. 54.