From the Cabinet decision, to negotiating the lease agreement, to signing the lease, has taken time, and admittedly the process hasn’t been material for compelling news. But the lease has now been signed, and registered, and the National Trust for the Cayman Islands is the lessee of 190 acres of Crown land in the East Interior of Grand Cayman, for the next 99 years at least. It’s a hugely significant step forward, both for conservation of the Grand Cayman Blue Iguana, and for its habitat – Grand Cayman’s unique xerophytic shrubland environment.

The Blue Iguana Reserve is closely intertwined with a European Union grant to the National Trust, which (among other things) will pay to build a visitor centre in or next to the protected area. We already have a design for the visitor centre, thanks to Trevor Baxter (Rutkowsi Baxter Houghton) and with ongoing assistance from the structural engineers, Halcrow Yolles. What we don’t know yet is exactly where in the Blue Iguana Reserve this will be sited, and that in turn depends on which suitable access route can be secured.

In the meantime, there’s a lot we need to know about the new protected area, and the only way to find out is to spend time out there. Blue Iguana Recovery Programme staff and volunteers are beginning to trace the boundaries of the Reserve, and are recording the natural features and vegetation at a series of pre-set points scattered throughout the area. This fieldwork will be backed by expertise at the Department of Environment, where specialist Jeremy Olynik will be combining the field reports with high resolution aerial photography to create a detailed habitat map.

Will we find ancient surviving Blue Iguanas out there? Unlikely, but still possible! Will we find soil basins where iguanas could nest? Where will there be natural fresh water we can draw on, to cut the need for field staff to carry huge weights of water every day? What and where are the notable natural features that we should consider when planning nature trails?

We hope as we explore we will soon be able to define some optimal areas to release young captive-reared Blue Iguanas. The first release is scheduled for July-August this year.

Most of the Blue Iguana Reserve is potential Blue Iguana habitat in one way or another. The area is dominated by dry shrubland, and lots of it is growing on the sharpest cliff rock. Add in dense stands of spiny “Corato” (Cayman’s unique Agave), Maiden Plum, Manchineel and Lady Hair, and you could be forgiven for thinking the land has been designed to repel humans.

But walking through slowly and safely on a trail, perhaps in the late afternoon sunshine, the beauty of the landscape is undeniable. Thanks to the low vegetation there are long vistas across the landscape, set off by groups of tall, slender Thatch Palms. Closer at hand the terrain looks like an elaborate rock garden, with an astonishingly diverse array of unusual plants, many of them unique to the Cayman Islands and to this specific habitat.

Apart from a small fragment in the QE II Botanic Park, this specific type of environment was almost completely absent from our protected area system, until now.

We envisage this special place will be accessible to all, once we have completed the access, visitor centre and nature trails. And wandering around it all, will be the next generations of young Blue Iguanas. The new Blue Iguana Reserve gives us space to bring this once near-extinct mascot of Grand Cayman back to a population which can sustain itself indefinitely, and a place where we can commune with them and their wild ancestral home.

This article by Fred Burton originally appeared in the Cayman Islands Department of Environment’s on-line journal, “Flicker”.

It is time now to take a detailed look at how all those iguanas are doing. We know they started breeding in the wild in 2006, but how successful has natural breeding been in raising the total wild population even further? Now that we have placed permanent artificial retreats of a wide range of sizes throughout the core release area, what effect has that had on the population density within the protected area? How many of the iguanas have dispersed out of the release area, and how far have they moved? These sorts of questions need some answers, if we are ever to be able to answer the really important question which we should never take for granted. Is our release strategy actually working?

Field gear in preparation for Salina Blues survey

So we are in the final stages of preparation for a major three-week survey, which kicks off on 2^nd March 2010. Matt Goetz and Stacy Whittaker joined us on 27^th February, with Joe Freeman and Carly Easby following the next day. Megan Rasmussen and Crystal Robertson are on their way as I write on 28^th February, and Doug Bell has already been with us for several weeks.

We’ll be forming three survey teams and one “catch-and-tag” team. The survey teams will be stealthily walking every trail in the Salina Reserve, scanning intensely for iguana sightings twice a day six days a week over three weeks, for a total of 18 survey days and 108 individual survey walks. The catch-and-tag team will back them up with focused attention on any un-tagged or elusive iguanas which the survey teams can’t indentify as they pass.

If all goes smoothly, we will complete the survey before the end of March. Then the survey teams head back home, and the number crunching and mapping work begins. By early May the results should be clear enough to guide us in our next big endeavor of the year – the first iguana release into our new Blue Iguana Reserve!

Warden Alberto Estovanovich works on restoring old cages

The Blue Iguana captive facility is now, as we anticipated, packed with more iguanas than ever before. “It’s a good problem to have” we keep saying to each other, as John, Alberto and the Team Blue volunteers scavenge the last of our oldest and most damaged hatchling cages and build anew, to keep pace with emergence of clutch after clutch from the incubators.

Each freshly hatched egg clutch is left undisturbed in the incubation box for three to four days, while each hatchling’s umbilical opening seals over. Then they are cleaned, weighed and measured, and placed in individual cloth bags for transport to the captive facility.

As of the beginning of September we have 94 new baby Blues, and the last few clutches are still hatching. The final count for 2009, depending on hatching success in five remaining incubation boxes, is expected to reach somewhere about 119.

At that stage, not a single cage will be vacant, until December when we have scheduled the next release of captive-reared two-year-olds into the Salina Reserve.