The Little Blue Book

In the Cayman Islands and anywhere else in the world, you can read about and purchase the Little Blue Book at:

www.ircf.org/lbb

… and in the Cayman Islands, you can also buy copies  at these stores, with more soon to come:

West Bay, and the West Bay Road area – Macabuca at the Cracked Conch; Ambassadors of the Environment, and the Blue Tip Golf Shop at the Ritz-Carlton; Captain Marvin’s Watersports; Red Sail Sports (Mariott, Westin Casuarina, Grand Cayman Beach Suites); Books & Books; The Book Nook.

George Town area – Cayman Islands National Museum; Artifacts; Blue Iguana Souvenir Outlet; Hobbies and Books; Cathy Church; National Trust for the Cayman Islands; Tortuga Rum Company; Vigoro Nursery; Pure Art; Books by the Bay; Hurley’s.

Eastern Districts – Pedro St James; Vigoro at Agricola; Boddentown Art Shop; Lighthouse Restaurant; QE II Botanic Park; Red Sail Sports (Wave, & Rum Point).

Little Cayman – National Trust visitor centre; Pirates Point Resort.

Cayman Brac – Heritage Designs

3 December 2009

Fred Burton MBE receives Blue Turtle Award from JNCC Chair, Peter Bridgewater

Fred Burton MBE has worked in conservation in the Cayman Islands for over 20 years, with the last nine as the Director of the Blue Iguana Recovery Programme – an unsalaried position. He is deeply committed to creating a viable wild population of blue iguanas in their own protected area. The Joint Nature Conservation Committee (JNCC) yesterday evening celebrated Fred’s dedication, at a ceremony held in Peterborough. He was the inaugural winner of the ‘Blue Turtle’ Award for nature conservation in the Overseas Territories and Crown Dependencies.

JNCC Chair, Peter Bridgewater, one of the panel of judges for the Award, said: “It is not often that one person’s efforts are contribute so much to bringing a species back from the brink of extinction, but in Fred’s case this was absolutely the case. There are many examples of extraordinary professional and enthusiastic work being done to conserve and manage the biodiversity of our Overseas Territories and Crown Dependencies by the local populations, often with little fanfare. JNCC wanted to help by, once a year, rewarding the work of a particular individual or group. For 2009, Fred was the unanimous choice of the judging panel.”

Blue Turtle Award

The Blue Iguana Recovery Programme relies heavily on its volunteer programme. Dedicated members of the local community feed and care for the animals in the captive breeding facility, as well as give talks and provide public education experiences. Key volunteers from overseas also contribute time and expertise in areas such as specialist veterinary care and radio tracking of released animals. The Recovery Plan for the Blue Iguana is a collaborative effort that is reviewed every five years with the involvement of representatives from local and international environmental agencies and groups.

Gina Ebanks-Petrie, Director, Department of Environment, Cayman Islands Government said of the Programme: “The Blue Iguana was once referred to as the most endangered rock iguana on the planet. Through Fred’s work a very successful captive breeding programme was established and blue iguanas are being re-introduced to the wild. Fred has taken the programme from a backyard project to a fully-fledged captive breeding facility which produces over 100 young iguanas for release into protected areas each year. The programme has been so successful that it serves as a model for other regional projects.”

Tara Pelembe, JNCC’s Overseas Territories Officer, commented: “We hope this is just the beginning of JNCC being able to shine a light on projects and actions that deserve a wider audience and acknowledgement. Fred is inspirational in his care for the blue iguana, and it is a pleasure to celebrate his success.”

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A well-fitting, dry and comfortable rock hole retreat is one of a Blue Iguana’s most prized assets, essential to escaping unwanted attentions from bigger bullies, and a place of safety to sleep in at night. It seems that really good rock holes, where an iguana can turn around inside and come out head first, are in quite short supply. Years after release the iguanas are still using our Mark 5 wood retreats so long as they can still fit inside them.

Thanks to another generous grant from Greenlight Re on Grand Cayman, we are now working hard to build and install a large number of bigger retreats, hoping to encourage the growing Blue Iguanas to remain within the protection of the Salina Reserve. Because we’ve learned these retreats are important long term, we are converting to a new Mark 7 design cast in a high tech cement-type material.

The design work started with a small grant from the British Herpetological Society in 2006, and then was tested and developed further by the Blue Iguana Recovery Programme with technical support from IRCF, and local structural engineers at Halcrow Yolles. The Mark 7 design was finalized by late last year. Our stalwart perennial Team Blue volunteer Doug Bell was tasked with making the initial prototype.

After setting up a temporary workshop at the “Lizard Lair” volunteer accommodation at Boddentown, Doug wrestled with concrete, clay, fiberglass and plywood, creating successive molds in a bid to make the first master retreat. Halcrow Yolles researched and sourced a bag of cementaceous grout, strong enough to make the retreats with a mere half-inch wall thickness. The Machine Shop band-sawed the forms Doug needed to carve out the precise dimensions in clay and concrete.

And so to the first test pour. After three days of grout curing in the mold, the first attempt showed promise (the half-inch walls were good and strong!) but also disappointment – the retreat “locked” in the mold and had to be broken out in several pieces. Some head scratching, some modifications, then on to the second try. Result: better, but still the retreat didn’t come out whole. The third try finally brought us success! Once we had the fine details solved, the casting came out strong and intact, and our first test iguana took to the first Mark 7 size C retreat with obvious enthusiasm.

The Mark7-C casting has been sent to a professional mold maker in Florida (Unique Species Inc) whose owner Rick Hardy is generously making ten production molds for us, for the cost of materials only. The molds will be shipped back to Grand Cayman, and we will be set to start mass production, casting usable retreats ten at a time!

Halcrow Yolles’ supplier Coastal Construction Products Inc. secured a discount from manufacturer SIKA on a full palette of their Grout 212, and threw in free shipping for us also. So now we have the material we need to cast the retreats at a fraction of the commercial cost.

While the first ten production molds are being made in Florida, Doug is working away on Mark 7 size D, then size E…

So our wild iguana housing will be transitioning from wood to cement, and the square footage options are getting larger and larger! It’s just the beginning, of course. Decades from now the biggest of these Blues will have grown huge, and we will probably be assembling iguana mansions for them…

Several volunteers are helping our first Warden, John Marotta, bridge the gap while we complete the hiring process for Cam’s successor. From Cayman, local “Durty Reid’s” Alberto Estovanovich has been enjoying volunteering at the captive facility, taking a breath outdoors before the next phase of his business ventures. Hannah Reid, a local student preparing to start college, is satisfying her love of nature as she helps feed the growing Blue youngsters in our care. Our wonderful Sunday troopers Sheilagh Rickard and Stu Petch have been there for us, as always. And from Colorado, Team Blue volunteer Amy Rothenberg is with us for at least the month of March, happily involved in the daily routine of the captive breeding and head-starting facility.

The Blues seem to appreciate the quality of care they have been getting. Our youngsters are growing at the fastest rate we have ever recorded!

This is an unfortunate consequence of heightened security at the facility, following the killing of seven captive Blue Iguanas in May 2008 – in a case which has still not been solved. That grim event, followed by increasing incidences of wild dogs invading the QE II Botanic Park, has required security fencing as the only long-term solution.

A security guard has been protecting the facility since last May. The flood of heartfelt donations and assistance which came to the Blue Iguana Recovery Programme and the National Trust in the wake of the attack have been focused both on covering the substantial security guard cost, and on building the high-security fence now in operation.

The four breeding pens which were formerly visible from the woodland trail are of necessity within the secured area, and so can’t be viewed from outside. Guided tours inside the facility are still available, however. The Blue Iguana Safari tour, which covers inside the captive facility and also the free roaming iguanas throughout the Park, is offered at 11am every day except Sundays, with tickets available on arrival at the Botanic Park ticket booth.

Seeing the captive facility behind a high security fence leaves us with very mixed feelings. Obviously in view of what happened last year, this is absolutely necessary, but it is very sad that we need to spend so much on physical protection for such a well-loved symbol of Cayman’s natural heritage.

Behind the big fence, the iguanas in the captive facility continue to thrive. Now that more protected habitat is becoming available, the programme is on course to continue full scale restoration of Blue Iguanas to the wild.

 photos by Sam Addinall

At this stage the shipment is under the small tent on the shed slab at the Captive Facility, and I plan to make a start on some assembly tomorrow, since we have immediate needs for these! The egg hatch continues as I write, Hal and Gloria’s clutch is coming out now. We took a look at the single pre-assembed cage, and both Sam and I were quite impressed – they are sturdier than we expected, and nicely made. It will be essential to fix the floors to the stands, apart from holding the cages in place, without this the floor can be lifted from beneath, potentially giving access to snakes.

Without the financial assistance of all those who donated we would have had a huge disaster on our hands. Fred has worked so hard at getting the Blue Iguanas to breed. He and the volunteers carefully collected the eggs and it would have been devastating to not have a safe place to put the emerging hatchlings.

We so graciously thank all of our donors: Rob Ferber, AJ Gutman, Carole Saucier, Chris and Dana Belstler, Mrs. S.J. McCann, Allison Carey, Christopher Boote, Marc Taslimi, Tim Martyn, Tavia Smalley, Raymond Huerta, Ella Marie Poyner, Desiree Wong, LeAnn Monson, Kim Scott, Lorraine Baker, Kathryn Tosney, Pamela Tangredi, Renata Watson, Erik Carlseen, Tom Comfort, Sharron Lang, Patrick Kubeja, Patrick’s Iguana and Herp Forum, Robert Allen, The Rob Dorson Trust, Jamestown Community College Earth Awareness Environmental Club, Elaine Powers, Sheridan Edwards and Lucy Gilliam, Christine Plesnicher, Dennis Litto, and Baby the Green Iguana, Carol Greco, Chicago Herpetological Society, Leigh and Mikiann England, Applied Conservation Division-Conservation & Research, Endangered Species-San Diego and Erik Carlseen and Renata Watson.

Extra Help is always appreciated!.

As each clutch hatches, we wait until most of the hatchlings are out, then carefully open the incubation box and take them out one by one. We wash off the egg fluid and adhering incuabtion medium, dry them, then weigh and measure them before we put them in their new homes for their first experience of the warming sun. Here Blue Iguana Warden Sam Addinall checks a baby blue over carefully, before bagging it for weighing.