Botanical Survey

This week there are specialists from all over the world coming to Statia to do a botanical survey. They arrived on Monday night, and I was able to hike the trails with them on Tuesday. Although the group walks very slow, collecting every plant with a fruit or flower, they were a wealth of information about plants as well as field work gone horribly wrong. My favorite story was from Bill, when he was working in Tanzania. The helicopter came to airlift two people down, then came for another two, then came for another two. Bill opted to keep the tent and the food, which was a good thing because the helicopter broke leaving him and one other person stranded at the top of the mountain. They ran out of food and about 6 days later, the military came to rescue them!
We found other things on the trails than just the plants, as you can see by this bug up above. We actually thought that the bugs were fruit on the ground, until they started moving! We also managed to see this Lesser Antillean Iguana. The iguanas have been protected on Statia since 1994, and a lot of older people remmber eating them in soup. Unfortunately, a lot of younger people also remmber eating iguana soup... The iguana population numbers are pretty low because they've been hunted for quite a while. Hannah, the trails ranger had never seen an iguana in the Quill before and she was quite pleased to find them there in their natural habitat. The iguanas turn a grey color when they get older. This one isn't an adult yet, but isn't quite a juvenille either. Even though you can't see the tail, it's about twice the size of the iguana's body!

This afternoon I'm helping with the Junior Rangers club and we'll be walking with the botanists to learn more about the plants in the Quill. It is a wonderful opportunity for the kids because specialists don't come to Statia very often. However, I have a feeling that their usual rambunctious behavior will not be welcome among the botanists! We shall see....

Children's Garden

Children's Garden

Work in the Children's Garden is full tilt right now. The new volunteers are very excited about making stone walls. The bulldozer came through and although the area is not complete, it is looking good so far. The bulldozer has already dug a cistern and 4 out of the 5 levels. On two of the levels, we removed all the stones, raked it level, and planted grass seed. The current stone wall is very impressive. Unfortunately, we still have quite a few more stone walls to make and we're running out of stones.

Carlton and I have taken a ton of cuttings and right now the shadehouse is at capacity! All of the cuttings are going to be put in the Children's Garden. In addition, we just ordered about 50 bags of potting soil and another hundred pots to take even more cuttings.

After about a week of no rain, it poured for the whole weekend and we ran out of water! Oddly enough, the holding tank that we use most of the water out of, does not collect any rainwater. We have to pump it from another cistern (that does collect rainwater) into the holding tank. I was standing by the side of the house last week when I heard gushing water, which immediately made me run outside because it's the only running water that we have. Due to a broken pipe, we lost half of the water in the holding tank. The water actually lasted us about a week, which was good. However, the weekend was so overcast that we had very little power from the solar panels (hard to imagine in a tropical country) and it went out frequently at night. The weather is back to normal now, which is a blessing. It has finally gotten a little bit cooler at night and in the mornings, which makes it nicer to work in.

The new volunteers are all very nice and they're settling in all right. I've been learning a few new cooking recipes as well as sayings. One of my favorite recipes I actually learned from Carlton (the garden ranger) which is plantain pancakes. Plantains are one of my favorite foods to eat here, along with all the tropical fruit in the garden (passionfruit is in season right now!)

Tonight is trivial pursuit night with SECAR which is the archeological group on the island. They want to see what life is like at the garden so we've invited them up for a match. We only have the genius edition of the game so I hope that the game moves at least a little bit. It should be fun regardless. All the volunteers think that Julia and I have an advantage because we're American and it's an American version, but little do they know I'm horrible at trivia!

The garden sans volunteers

Garden Maintenance

The garden has been a lot of work lately, and Carlton and I have been keeping it up while there haven't been any volunteers. Phase I is looking really good but the fruit garden is a mess. Corallita sprang up overnight and now there's actually a jungle of it in the fruit garden. We're hoping to clear it enough to put grass seed down and then hopefully do some planting of fruit trees. Over the break, Julia and I (the other intern) built these beautiful arches in the garden, and I must say the finished product looks great. The arches are going to be at the 3 entrances of the garden, and they will all have climbing plants growing up them. Most of these plants Carlton and I have started from seed, so it will be very nice to see them growing up the arches. Unfortunately, there's a shipping crisis at the moment and the fruit trees that we've ordered are lost somewhere possibly in Puerto Rico or maybe Saaba, no one knows for sure. In addition to that, no one wants to pay for the lost items. So, unfortunately, some of the major planting might happen after I leave.

The new volunteers have just arrived two days ago and they're settling in nicely. Everyone seems very friendly. There are only 4 of them this time, but they seem very enthusiastic about working in the garden, and for that, I'm very glad. One woman has been working in a nursery for the last two years, and she is very excited about the veggie patch.
Unfortunately, one of the volunteers has a scorpion problem near his tent and he's actually found 3 or 4 of them inside the tent although the tent has stayed closed. Although they won't kill you, they'll give you a really nasty bite and make your appendages swell up wherever bitten.

After completing 10 dives with the dive shop, I was able to dive with STENAPA. So far, I've done about 3 line cleans. The last line clean that I did was quite spectacular because there were lots of really cool fish. We saw jawfish, which looked like little eels coming out of the sand and whole schools of barracuda. The barracuda are apparently a delicious fish, but around here, they harbor ciguatera which makes you get a kind of fish poisoning. (It's actually a benthic dinoflagellate that accumulates up the food chain- that's for you bio nerds!) I'm hoping to do some more line cleans next week, because although it makes your arms very tired from scrubbing the line with a wire brush, you get to see everything at that dive site.

This picture on the left is of the Quill which is the dormant volcano on the island. This is the view from the other side of the island.