August 25, 2006: We leave Cockpit Country with a wealth of new information on its flora
 Lauren Raz Assistant Keeper of the Herbarium, FTBG |
We spent our last morning at Windsor packing up all our gear and cleaning the last of the living plant specimens for inspection. We had a 2PM appointment at the airport for a phytosantiary inspection, and we decided we should spend the night in Montego Bay to be close to the airport for our early morning flight. Jason and Jennifer did some work tidying up the nursery that had been set up earlier in the year. They also worked with Sugarbelly to review propagation techniques. Kristie and I put our heads together with Mike and Susan to discuss future work that we could do together to study the impacts of bauxite mining, which poses the greatest threat to the biodiversity of The Cockpit Country. We'd like to do all we can to protect this valuable watershed and all the species that depend on it. Feeling optimistic that we would return in the future, we then said our goodbyes to Mike and Susan, and piled all our gear into the truck. D'Owen graciously offered to help up transport some of our stuff to Montego Bay, and we filled the bed of his truck with our gear and specimens. The inspection at the airport went smoothly, and we received our phytosanitary certificate, stating that the plants were free of soil, pests, and diseases. We then drove into town, picked out a hotel, and said goodbye to D'Owen with a promise to keep in touch and continue working together. We had a lovely meal with Georgia, sitting right on the bay, celebrating our accomplishments for the trip. We found ten of our lost species, not seen for 30-50 years, documented over 30 species previously unrecorded for the flora of The Cockpit Country. We collected ca. 1500 herbarium specimens, over 100 accessions for our living collection, and gathered preliminary data for a quantitative study of how diversity varies within a cockpit hill. Not bad for just under three weeks of work, including time for sorting out permits and other logistics. I think we earned our last night of sleep in an air conditioned room. | ||
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Lauren Raz Assistant Keeper of the Herbarium, FTBG |
We finished pressing the plants and waited for Charles MacKenzie, the plant inspector from Jamaica's National Environmental Planning Agency (NEPA) who had worked with us on August 15. Charles arrived and inspected the last batch of federally listed plants we were planning to export. After the inspection we had an early lunch together before the expedition team headed out into the field. Jason, Jennifer, D'Owen, and Georgia went on one last excursion to find a burgundy-flowered species of Portlandia that only D'Owen had ever seen. This genus is known for its large, showy, trumpet shaped flowers in shades of pink and white. A burgundy colored form has never been described, and we were eager to collect it for study and cultivation. Kristie and I remained at Windsor, drying, organizing, and packing our gear. I had paperwork to do, assembling a list of all that we had collected in accordance with the terms of our permit. When Jason, Jennifer, Georgia, and D'Owen returned after a few hours in the field, we were eager for news of what they'd found. They reported that they could not find the original site in which D'Owen had seen the Portlandia. Unfortunately he did not have GPS coordinates for the locality, and the trail had become very overgrown in the three years since he'd originally seen the plants. He couldn't pick out the path. Fortunately, since the Forestry Department was doing some survey work in the region, there is a GPS record of the locality in their files. We may ultimately be able to track down the coordinates on a future trip. In the meantime, D'Owen, promised to return on his own and report to us any new sightings. Although the Portlandia eluded us this time, the team did pick up some other interesting species, including an attractive yellow flowered Hamelia, related to the Florida-native firebush. Kristie and I pressed the specimens that the team brought back, and I continued working on the list well into the night. | ||
 This was our last opportunity to dry our soaked camping gear (JL) |
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Lauren Raz Assistant Keeper of the Herbarium, FTBG |
We got up with the sun, and after a quick breakfast we headed back up the trail to our study site and continued working up the slope of the hill. The work was going well, but the weather started conspiring against us, and by around 2 PM we had to wrap up because a ferocious "man rain" was on its way. We had hoped to be able to work longer before packing out of our campsite. Unfortunately the conditions were too wet and dangerous. We packed up Gladys as best we could, but the weight balance was not quite right without the water, which we had consumed. We started trundling out just as some of the loudest peels of thunder I've ever heard in my life broke overhead. The rain was heavy and miserable and the trail quickly turned into a river six inches deep in some places. Surprisingly we all found our footing to be very stable under the water, more so than it would have been if the trail was just mud. I've never seen a group of soggy, heavily laden botanists move so fast in my life. We just wanted to get out of there as quickly as possible. When we reached the long mile hill, we were glad to be going down, rather than up, and I've rarely been as grateful as we were to come in sight of our truck again. Jason climbed in and skillfully maneuvered the vehicle backwards down the steep hill and we met him down below. We dropped Ian and Delroy off and drove back to Windsor Research Center. We were greeted by a dry and cheerful group consisting of our hosts Mike Schwartz and Susan Koenig, along with D'Owen Grant (Jamaican Forestry Department) and Georgia Tasker (Miami Herald). Georgia had come to the Cockpit Country to learn about our work there, and her first impression of the expedition team was of a wet, tired, bedraggled bunch. Sugarbelly greeted us and told us he was making fried chicken with french fries and it sounded like the best thing in the whole world. Once we dried out, we had an enjoyable dinner and watched an informative presentation that Mike and Susan had prepared about the biodiversity of the Cockpit Country. We headed off for a long night of pressing plant specimens. D'Owen stayed up and helped us to identify some of the sterile branches we'd clipped from the transects, all of us impressed with the diversity we found in the relatively small plots, each one turning out to be different from the next. | ||
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Lauren Raz Assistant Keeper of the Herbarium, FTBG |
We got up at the crack of dawn, downed some coffee, and piled in the car: Ruffy, Jennifer, Jason, Kristie, and myself. We stopped along the way to pick up Ian and Delroy, and bumped our way along the road until the truck could go no further on the rocky incline. Fortunately we got a tip from Sugarbelly that there was a shortcut we could take on a road that looked off limits, but was actually public and open to everyone. It would shave over two miles off our hike. Just before we reached the end of this road, we picked up Gladys, our donkey. She was calmly waiting for us, her big ears raised, as if in salute. We were all immediately smitten with her. Ian and Delroy jumped out of the truck and began to lead her up what they called "long mile hill," the first part of our journey. We were able to start the ascent in the truck, but we didn't get very far. As fate would have it, we started our hike at the very point we had reached on foot on a previous visit to Jamaica. Getting there last time required an arduous hike of more than an hour. We thanked Sugarbelly again for saving us that first leg of the trip. After loading up Gladys and shouldering our own large packs, we slowly made our way up the hill. The trail climbed through a long stretch of old growth forest and it was great to see so many large, old trees. Eventually we started to descend until we reached the bottomlands; the vast majority of the trail winds through the cockpit bottoms where it is much easier to make a path. Our plan was to select a hill off the trail and to set up transects to compare forest composition on different aspects and elevations of the hill. We were aiming to get deep into the heart of Cockpit Country to see how the vegetation compared to better known sites along the periphery. George Proctor, the country's most authoritative botanist, told us that there were few botanical records from this region, and none from along the trail we were taking, so we were eager to see what we'd find. As the sun climbed higher, we eventually reached the point where Rumpy and Ian had stopped clearing and a little further ahead we came to our first serious obstacle. An enormous sweetwood tree (Nectandra, in the same family as bay leaves and cinnamon) had fallen across the path. Gladys on her short, spindly legs would not be able to make it across, and there was no way she could walk around. Discouraged, we chided ourselves for not packing a chainsaw, and as we considered our options, Ian decided he would try to hack through the log using only his machete. We stared in disbelief as he pounded away at the cut, as if he had a robotic arm. Gladys stood by calmly, indifferent to the tremendous show of effort made for her benefit. In about twenty minutes Ian had hacked the enormous log in two, and he, Rumpy, Jason, and Delroy shoved the it out of the way so we could lead Gladys through. Soon we encountered other, smaller logs, and Jason hacked through the next one. The going was getting pretty rough, and finally we reached a small clearing by a giant clump of bamboo that must have been planted at least fifty years ago The bamboo reminded us that there is no such thing as an undisturbed forest in Jamaica- people have been everywhere on the island! At the southern end of the clearing were several logs across the trail, and there was no way we could have hacked through them. For Gladys, and for us, this was the end of the trail. We decided to set up our camp there, taking advantage of the relatively even ground and the availability of a makeshift wicker and bamboo table that had been made by other campers before us. This had apparently been a site where wicker was harvested for commercial use in furniture and baskets. As we unloaded our gear, the clouds started to gather, so we quickly set up our tents and a couple of large tarps to create a roof under which we could cook and sleep. The rain came just as we finished setting up- a strong “man” rain, which in Sugarbelly's terminology refers to a hard, driving rain of short duration, as opposed to “woman” rain, a light rain that goes on throughout the day. We had lunch and waited out the rain, and then we set off to start working on the transects. We selected a hill about a kilometer south of our campsite, one that was less obviously impacted by human disturbance. We began the slow, steady work of measuring out our plots, 50 x 2 meters, on the difficult, rocky terrain. We sent Rumpy ahead to mark the plots with plastic tape, and next went Jason and Jennifer to gather data about soil/leaf litter depth and to make estimates of the percentage of rock cover in each transect. Kristie and I measured the diameter of every woody plant over 2cm in diameter and estimated tree heights. With the help of Ian, who proved to be an adept tree climber, we collected a voucher specimen of each species as a lasting record of the plants we measured. I took notes about epiphytes and other herbaceous plants, and Jennifer and Jason worked the hill to do general collecting of any interesting plants in flower or fruit. We worked through the rest of the afternoon until the rains came back and then we headed back to camp. Hoggy, another local field assistant that we had worked with last time we were in Jamaica, was waiting for us at the camp. He is also a great tree climber and very adept with a pole pruner, so we had asked him to meet us. We were all glad to see him. We lit some low, smoky fires to keep the mosquitoes away and prepared a frugal dinner consisting of beans and quick-cooking couscous. The Jamaicans had never tried couscous, and it became a joke for the rest of the trip. Gladys was nearby, munching contentedly on the saplings and herbaceous plants of the cockpit bottom. We set up some hammocks under the tarp and turned in shortly after dark. |
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 Ian and Delroy securing our water and gear on Gladys (KW) |
 Jason leading Gladys over difficult terrain (KW) |
 Ian using a machete to clear a fallen log from the path (KW) |
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 Our campsite in the heart of Cockpit Country (KW) |
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Lauren Raz Assistant Keeper of the Herbarium, FTBG |
We made arrangements for the export of our last batch of plant materials, which again would require a CITES permit. Our second team of horticulturists would be bringing back an undescribed Anthurium species and a wild relative of the sapodilla, Manilkara excisa, which are both protected under Jamaican law. It was only Tuesday, but we planned to depart on Saturday morning and needed to get everything squared away before the camping trip where we would be beyond the range of cell phone reception. Our goal for the next stretch of the trip was to reach a region called Africa by members of the Forestry Department. It is smack dab in the middle of the Cockpit Country, and can be reached via a footpath that connects Windsor to South Trelawny. This path is lightly traveled: only a few people a year make the journey, which is about six hours for the unencumbered hiker. For our team of researchers, horticulturists, and field assistants we were anticipating a half-day march, even with assistance from a donkey, donkey handler, and two sturdy young guys to clear a path. Although the donkey would carry our water, food, and a portion of our gear, each of us would still have a heavy pack to carry. We completed our preparations by the end of the day. Rumpy, who we brought with us from Troy because he's such an excellent field hand, and a young man from Windsor named Ian (cousin of Ruffy, who we worked with earlier in the year) came trudging back to our base camp near sundown, exhausted from clearing the brush. They told us that the trail was in good shape. We arranged to meet Delroy, our donkey handler at 6AM the next morning at the trailhead. |
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Lauren Raz Assistant Keeper of the Herbarium, FTBG |
We were just about ready to leave South Trelawny, having completed two weeks of exploration along the eastern, southern, and western boundaries of the Cockpit Country. We were gearing up to return to the northern end of the plateau, but before we departed, we decided to climb one last hill. It's accessible from the road and is close to where we were staying, "Near Troy." Those two words are not much to go on, but they are the only locality data we have for the elusive Euphorbia alata, last recorded by William Harris in 1906. You can think of Euphorbia alata as the ivory-billed woodpecker of Jamaican plants. The hill we had in mind has large areas of exposed limestone, and looks like the sort of habitat where we've seen the related Euphorbia punicea thriving. We thought it would be worth a look. Harris wasn't likely to have strayed far from the roads, so any hill “Near Troy” could be a candidate. Our botanical descendents will surely be grateful that we have recorded precise GPS coordinates for each specimen collected on this expedition. Earlier in the week we learned that this particular hill is privately owned, so we made arrangements with the owners to return in search of our quarry. We scheduled the climb for our last morning in Troy, expecting it would be a quick scramble up the hill and that we'd be back in time for lunch. As fate would have it, this turned out to be one of the most difficult climbs of our entire trip! It wasn't more than a 100 foot elevation gain, but the terrain was steep and treacherous. In the end we didn't find Euphorbia alata, so we'll have to keep searching for it. We did however collect some interesting species not previously recorded from the Cockpit Country flora. One of these is “donkey eye,” Mucuna sloanei, a member of the bean family with large round seeds. Rumpy told us the seeds are placed in jugs of water to keep the water cool. I have to say I'm skeptical about the physical properties of these seeds, and I'd like to do my own experiment some time. Another good find was Urera expansa, a large tree in the nettle family that somehow escaped notice of botanists working in this region (or else has expanded its range in recent years). This climb (and all the others) have taught us that the documentation of the Cockpit Country flora is far from complete, and it's gratifying to be able to add to this knowledge. After we got down the hill safely, we headed back to the house, pressed the specimens, and packed up all our gear. It was evening before we finally made it back to our northern base camp at the Windsor Research Center, where a hot and delicious dinner awaited us, courtesy of Sugarbelly, the cook. Sugarbelly is much more than a cook. He's the beloved local sage who will tell you everything you ever need to know about surviving in The Cockpit Country. He, and our hosts, Dr. Susan Koenig and Michael Schwartz, both long time residents of the Cockpit Country and key players in Jamaica's conservation community, helped us to plan logistics for the next stretch of our trip, a camping expedition in the interior of The Cockpit Country. |
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 Jason Lopez Rainforest and Exhibit Manager, FTBG |
The team, which included Dr. Lauren Raz, Jennifer Davit, Kristie Wendelberger, Dr. George Proctor, his assistant Patrick, our guide Rumpy and myself, decided to return to the locality where the elusive Buxus arborea occurred in the past. We had to wake up at 4AM again to allow enough time for a good search before the noon rains. Two new members joined us today from the University of the West Indies, Patrick Lewis, Curator of the Herbarium, and a graduate student, Phillip Rose. The base of the hill is clay and it has rained daily, so the ascent was very slippery. This slippery terrain gave way to loose, jagged karst limestone that gets your attention quickly. About twenty minutes into the climb we picked up two more members, Paul and Pamela, who both live on the farm at the bottom of the hill. As we carefully made our way through the forest, trying to look up for the Buxus and down for our footing, I was filled with mixed reactions. The forest at this locality is beautiful but it was clear that this beauty would be fleeting. Evidence of yam pole harvesting was beginning to appear. This went against earlier thinking that yam cultivation was not common in this area. In between carefully placed steps we were able to collect several neat plants, highlighted by Tournefortia staminea, a Jamaican endemic species and Salpixantha coccinea, a monotypic Jamaican endemic genus. Both may prove to be great introductions to the FTBG living collection, assuming that they grow from cuttings. After another hour of searching we decided that it was lunch time. Mmmmm, peanut butter sandwiches. Over lunch we learned that our friend Paul was the one responsible for cutting down the trees for yam poles. It turns out that he would prefer not to harvest from the forest, but the alternative, bamboo, is expensive. It may last two to three times longer but he just can't afford it. I wanted to be mad at him for destroying the forest. How can you be mad at a person who is just trying to feed his family, and someone so nice? You may have noticed that there hasn't been any mention of the Buxus arborea lately. We didn't find it. Still lost. The mid-seventies was the last time this species was collected, by Dr. Proctor himself. It is possible that the species is now extinct. The 86 year old Dr. Proctor did not accompany us on the hike today. It seems to me that he lives for those moments when he gets to look over the specimens collected in the field. George's mind is like an encyclopedia. He can tell you when he first saw each species, even if it was over 50 years ago. When we did finally descend the hill, the rain was catching up to us. We knew we had to leave but Paul wouldn't let us. First he needed to go into his farm and collect ears of fresh corn, pumpkins, bananas, alligator pears (avocado) and june plums as gifts for us. Like I said, what a nice guy. The corn, in case you were wondering is not sweet corn. Sweet corn won't bear in Jamaica because it is a long day plant, and the days in Jamaica are too short. Congratulations, Ohio! You may not be able to grow mangos, but you've always got sweet corn. |
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 Today's climb was one of the most challenging (JL) |
 Jason on the rocky hillside |
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 Jennifer Davit Conservatory Manager, FTBG |
Within minutes of my arrival in Jamaica, D'Owen Grant, a veteran forester for the Jamaica Department of Forestry, began talking to me about Cinnamodendron "grantii," one of the lost species the Fairchild team was hunting for in Jamaica's Cockpit Country. After hearing about this lost species for 2 days, I was certainly anticipating today's hike. Today was finally the day we were setting out to find this lost species. Fortunately D'Owen and his colleague Alvin, the forest warden for the area, had been monitoring the species and knew where we would be able to find this hidden gem. There was, however, one huge obstacle that was out of our control: the weather! The past few days we had been chased out of the forest by thunderstorms. Being stuck in Cockpit Country in the middle of a huge thunderstorm is not something I would recommend. The treacherous terrain is composed of jagged karst limestone that is difficult to navigate even in the best of conditions. Trails through areas of red clay soil become extremely slippery when wet. For our own safety, we wanted to avoid being stuck on a trail in less than optimum conditions. To ensure a successful trip, we rose before the cows, roosters, and donkeys, at 4 am! Fortunately D'Owen, Alvin, and Rumpy agreed to this early departure. After loading up the truck with our supplies for the day, we headed out in the darkness to begin our search for Cinnamodendron "grantii." We drove for 2 hours and then passed through the town of Quickstep, where we picked up Alvin at Quickstep Square. The formal road ended and we picked up a Forestry Department Service road that we followed for another 45 minutes. We were now ready to begin hiking into the woods, under a clear sky nonetheless. Fortunately our early start allowed us enough time to take another look for the Antirhea tomentosa, which we were not able to find the previous day, before heading down a separate trail where the Cinnamodendron "grantii" was said to be growing. Unfortunately our search for the Antirhea tomentosa again proved fruitless, but we were amazed to find many other Jamaican endemics that both Fairchild's horticulturists and conservationists were thrilled to find. We now were ready to head in search of the legendary Cinnamodendron! D'Owen and Alvin were anxious to head down the trail, as they sensed imminent rain. They said the plant's location was only 3 chains away. A chain is a Jamaican unit of measurement equal to 66 feet, so were expecting a short hike about 200 feet. After 30 minutes of strenuous hiking, we realized the plant's location was certainly farther than we expected. We were now hearing thunder and hiking under gray skies. We were also practically running through the woods so we could get to the plant in time. We finally reached the location and we thrilled to not only see the famed Cinnamodendron "grantii," but to find fruit! Since this plant is not formally described yet, we needed to get as many plant parts as possible in order to be able to identify this new species. Luckily Alvin is a superb climber, and he ascended the tree with bare feet in a few seconds so we could get a specimen to press for a herbarium voucher. We then quickly made our way out of the forest as the raindrops began to fall. I was fortunate to also pick up some Blechnum occidentale, a gorgeous Jamaican fern with a bright pink new leaf. We drove home to Troy, thrilled to have seen one of Jamaica's lost species with the man for whom it will be named. |
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 Church in the town of Quickstep (JL) |
 Lauren and Rumpy in the field (JL) |
 Jennifer wrapping cuttings collected in the field (KW) |
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 Jason packing the seeds and cuttings (KW) |
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August 17, 2006: It's the rainy season in Cockpit Country
