Let’s say you want to have a wildlife reserve, but you don’t have any wildlife. Barbados faced just that problem.
The only mammals here were rats brought by ships, so they imported mongooses from India to get rid of the rats. Mongooses are diurnal. Rats are nocturnal. System failure. The local snakes ate the rats, but the mongooses ate the snakes. Sometimes you can’t win for losing.
Brocket at rest in Barbados
Barbados, however has its Wildlife Reserve. It is in large part a dumping ground for unwanted exotic pets. One of its pools has a caiman. There are green monkeys all over the island, brought from Africa 500 years ago. This was long enough for the monkeys to develop into a unique subspecies. Outside the reserve monkeys are farm pests; the islanders hate them; but the reserve feeds them, luring them in as a tourist gimmick. Hey, it works. There are also brocket deer, charming, quiet little deer with spikey antlers that wander about the small reserve.
Green Heron at the Barbados Wildlife Preserve
And tortoises, red-footed tortoises. Here the reserve truly shines, for they were extirpated elsewhere else and facing extinction. In the reserve they are abundant.
Tortoise in Barbados
Birds? Furgeddaboutit. There are not even any seagulls. The cruise ship port is on Pelican Island, but there aren’t any pelicans around.
Brown dove and tortoise
Tourism? The beaches are plentiful and gorgeous, and all are public. Barbados has no private beaches. The coldest recorded temperature was 60o F. That’s freezing, the guide informed us. They sometimes get damaging tropical storms, but they are comfortably south of hurricane alley.
Peacocks showing off at the Barbados Wildlife Reserve
The Portuguese were the first here, along with the Spaniards. But there is no open surface water, so they moved on to other islands. The Brits arrived and deduced that there must be fresh water somewhere because vegetation is so lush. Unlike most of the Caribbean, which is volcanic in origin, Barbados is coral limestone, all of it except a little sandstone area on the east coast. The 65 inches yearly of rainwater percolates well through limestone and the island has a fine aquifer. They supplement the well water with desalination. Knowing a paradise when they see one, the Brits stayed, and the island is so thoroughly British they drive on the left side of the road.
The British also brought in breadfruit trees from Polynesia during the 1790s. In fact, the Bounty of mutiny fame was bringing breadfruit to the Caribbean. Bligh, was you know, rowed over open sea to refuge; what you may not know, he brought the breadfruit saplings along in the boat.
Sugar used to be the king crop, but now it’s second to tourism. Other than for local use, most of the sugar still grown becomes molasses becomes rum. Which is then drunk by the largest cash crop, the tourists. See? You can win after all.