Hey, UDC, are you there??

The Jamaican Rock Iguana

Photo credit: Dr Stesha Pashachnik

I went to see the iguanas at the Hope Zoo in Kingston last Saturday. I heard some of my colleagues and friends who work on the conservation of the Jamaican rock iguana (Cyclura collei) were there and I wanted to hail them up. The fight for Goat Islands seemed a long time in the past and I was fairly sure that promises to declare the two islands a wildlife sanctuary for the iguanas had not been met. It would be good to get an update.

A recap: Our critically endangered, endemic iguanas used to be on the two Goat Islands off Old Harbour Bay – the last one was seen on Great Goat in the 1940s. Little Goat had been cleared for a US seaplane base in World War II and someone decided that islands named for goats should have goats on them, so goats were introduced. Other predators, specifically mongoose and cats, along with the goats brought about the end of iguanas there.  

Once widely distributed across the south coast, the Jamaican iguana was driven to presumed extinction by hunting, loss of habitat and predation by the introduced mongoose, cats, and other predators. It was rediscovered twice – once in 1970, by Dr Jeremy Woodley on an expedition to Hellshire, and then in 1990, by a feral pig hunter, Edwin Duffus, who rescued a mortally wounded iguana from his dogs. This 1990 rediscovery sparked new interest in searching for and protecting the Jamaican iguana and the Jamaican Iguana Recovery Group was born.   

The essence of the iguana recovery programme was head-starting – taking hatchlings to the Hope Zoo in Kingston and growing them to a size where they were less vulnerable to predation by mongoose and cats – and then releasing them back into the Hellshire forest, where efforts were put in place to reduce the threat of predation. Funding was provided by several zoos and international foundations and our own Hope Zoo. Slowly, the numbers of releases increased and so did the number of breeding females and hatchlings emerging each year. When I visited the Zoo four days ago, the 700^th individual was about to be released and the period of time between hatching and release had come down from eight+ years to three or four. The iguanas even had their own vegetable farm at the Zoo which had reduced the cost of feeding them. Their salad plate looked pretty good!

The Jamaican iguana recovery programme was written up in the scientific literature and regarded by the international conservation community as an incredible success; an animal pulled from the brink of extinction, followed by a model programme to re-establish an endangered species in the wild. But it was also clear that the current programme would always be dependent on conservation funding unless a sanctuary could be found for the Jamaican iguana. Great Goat Island was agreed to be ideal, if predators and competitors were removed, and this became stated government policy in many documents.

Back in 2012, I was invited to visit the iguana project in the Hellshire hills and although by then I had been diagnosed with having weak bones – from carrying the planet around, I told people – and warned not to fall down, I went. I convinced my husband, Fred, to come with me, in case I needed to be carried out. We went with the field team by boat from the Port Royal Marine Lab to Manatee Bay in the Portland Bight Protected Area.  

We put on our hiking gear on the beach and walked through the mangroves past the dark orange crocodile ponds. And then we started to climb and the paths disappeared, stones turned underfoot, and although it was January, it was sweltering.

At first, I took in the Hellshire forest – spindly trees, epic heat, treacherous ground. The canopy dappled the fierce sun into trembling gold circles on the ground, the fallen leaves held the colours of autumn, rare patches of red-brown dirt nestled in the crevices of white limestone rock. Soon I was too out of breath to notice anything but where to find secure footing.

My vision darkened at the last steep stretch, and I had to sit. I wet the small scarf around my neck from my water bottle and wiped my face, ashamed of being weak, mourning my younger self who would have run up the trail. Fred stayed with me while the others went ahead and in one of those wordless moments of marriage, he transmitted: why are we here again? I wasn’t sure myself. It is enough for me that the Hellshire forest exists, that Antarctic penguins raise their chicks in huddled colonies, that blue whales roam the deepest seas, even if I have never seen them, will never see them. I didn’t need to see a Jamaican iguana in the wild to value them. When my head stopped spinning, I got up and we climbed the last bit into south camp, past a pile of bleached out pig skulls – the remains of some of the enemies of the Jamaican iguana.

The camp iguana, Stumpy, appeared undisturbed by our visit. Born without a tail, she was perfectly camouflaged for Hellshire. Despite her pet status, she retained the dignity of age and harsh survivorship. Iguanas eat the fruit of the Hellshire dry limestone forest and spread the seeds into the small pockets of reddish earth in the sharp white rocks. Each seed has a dollop of fertilizer and seeds passing through the guts of the iguanas germinate faster and more frequently. This is a forest that needs reptiles.

I sat on a wooden platform and looked out over the unbroken forest canopy to the coast, another kind of trackless sea, its complexities hidden, poorly understood, insufficiently valued. I drank more water and tried to eat a bit of my sandwich. Eventually, Fred and I walked together along some of the trails, and we saw two wild iguanas. They were not animals to make you catch your breath at their beauty or grace, but I ended up being glad I saw them that day in the Hellshire forest.

A few months after that visit, rumours of a logistics hub at Goat Islands started and the then environment minister, the Hon. Robert Pickersgill, went to Beijing and from there came the announcement – yes, the Government of Jamaica was giving ‘very serious consideration’ to the building of a large transshipment port on or near to the Goat Islands in the Portland Bight Protected Area. Details were few, but any port would result in dredging, excavation, land reclamation and devastation of the marine environment.

For the next eighteen months, the fight to save Goat Islands and the surrounding coast took up most of my time and energy. Along with the staff of the Jamaica Environment Trust (JET) and others, we went to meetings, organized trips to the islands, printed T-shirts, developed a website, made a calendar (and presented copies to a head table of government bigwigs at the launch of a recycling company), critiqued an environmental scoping report, wrote articles and letters to everyone imaginable, did Access to Information requests (most were denied), begged photographs and video, and finally, filed legal action to ask the court to review the denials of access. Now, when I look back at the Save Goat Islands website Save Goat Islands website I am amazed to see just how much interest there was, including international interest, in an issue that was once disparaged as being merely about ‘two likkl lizaad’.  

The personal abuse arrived. A large headline in one of our daily newspapers invited me to go to hell. A columnist referred to his wet dreams about me. Another one suggested I was ‘screeching’ without mentioning my name – which somehow annoyed me more than if he had made it plain who he was talking about. And every media article attracted scores of comments, many of which suggested ‘that woman’ – me – was going to ruin Jamaica’s entire economic future.

The years went by, and the Goat Islands port disappeared from the headlines. Every now and then, I sent out a half-hearted letter to the regulators asking about the status. Most were never answered.

And then on September 22, 2016, I was idly checking my Twitter feed and I saw a tweet from our new Prime Minister, the Most Hon. Andrew Holness, who was at a Town Hall meeting in New York. The tweet read: “In essence, despite some media reports, the government will not be allowing a port at Goat Islands”. I read it over and over. The time when a US President would govern by tweet was still in the future. Had any natural resource in the world ever been saved by a tweet? Had the person in that Town Hall meeting seen our campaign? Or were they from Old Harbour and had seen and loved the bulk of Great Goat Island rising from the sea?

The threat of the logistics hub receded. The Jamaican Iguana Recovery Group continued its work on the head-starting programme and protection efforts within the Hellshire Hills. The protected area where the iguanas live has nearly tripled in size, breeding has increased, and the number of hatchlings brought into the Hope Zoo for head-starting each year has gone from 40 to 150 annually. Now there’s an achievable target of 1,000 releases by 2026 – a long-term milestone for the programme. A 2020 announcement from the government revealed that almost $2 billion Jamaican dollars would be spent on the Goat Islands wildlife sanctuary, ushering in howls of protest that such a large amount of money could be spent on lizards, when so many Jamaicans still live in poverty.

I’ve come to learn announcements don’t mean much. The sanctuary has still not been declared, hampering efforts at fund raising. The Goat Islands are owned by the Urban Development Corporation (UDC) and I imagine they are hedging their bets, hoping for a project with way more income generating potential than whatever might be earned by such an uncharismatic creature as the Jamaican rock iguana.   

At the Hope Zoo last Saturday, I watched the iguanas at different stages of their lives, some clinging to the wire fences, others hiding in PVC pipes, still others sunning themselves on branches. A hatchling bared his tiny teeth at me, showing the inside of his scarlet throat. The adult iguanas have an ancient look, like a dinosaur from a world long gone. They are hard to anthropomorphize – you can’t imagine them with human characteristics, except perhaps patience. You just have to respect them wholly for what they are and that is: still here.

So, UDC, what’s going on? What’s the hold up with declaring the Goat Islands a wildlife sanctuary and finally, returning our born yah Jamaican iguana to one of the places where it belongs?