Life on Mars – Introducing Edsel

I had been back in the UK for a couple of years, and had started my own consultancy.  I had worked a few times in the Caribbean and helped an ex-NRI colleague with some work on rats in Africa.  I had also started to work with a Kittitian called Edsel Daniel.  Edsel had been a PhD student and when I was working for NRI, a friend in St Lucia, Keith Nichols,  had put me in touch with him to give him some GIS advice for his thesis on modelling beach erosion in his home island.  Edsel had worked for the Planning Department in St Kitts but had decided the world was bigger and had moved to the very reputable Vanderbilt University in Nashville Tennessee.  We corresponded by email for several months and he sent me chapters of his thesis, which confused me greatly as it plotted its way through empirical and physical models of sand dynamics on Caribbean beaches – all I ever wanted to do was to lie on them.

While in BVI, I finally got to meet Edsel.  I travelled over to St Kitts for a long weekend – it was only about 40 minutes flight from Tortola.  He showed me the sights of this wonderful little nation, but also he discussed a lot of his ideas for GIS in small island nations.  His ideas and mine tallied so closely that we thought we would either become deadly rivals or the greatest of friends.  Since he was a lot larger than me, I decided it was in my interest to go for the latter.

We started to develop project ideas and came up with one for Anguilla that after I left BVI, we were able to develop and deliver.  It concerned mapping coral reefs and other coastal resources of this little Overseas Territory.  Edsel invited me over to Nashville to give a guest lecture to some of his students about our work, which I delivered then was able to stay over to celebrate the Thanksgiving weekend.

We met Edsel’s boss at Vanderbilt just before the holidays  and started to talk about where the ideas for these GIS for small nations might go.  I glibly reeled off a list of islands, mostly UK overseas territories as if they would all do our bidding and we had a career set up.  As luck would have it, the conservation officer from the island Brendan had been waxing lyrical about, Ascension, emailed me while I was in Nashville and asked us to put together a proposal for just such work.  Brendan had told this lady about our work in the Caribbean and she felt it was a good idea to have a similar system for Ascension.  So during that Thanksgiving weekend,  we sat around stuffing ourselves with roasted turkey sandwiches late into the night writing a proposal for two years of funding.

Edsel Daniel

 

Life on Mars – Proposition over a daiquiri

Cane Garden Bay

Brendan put together some great projects for BVI and we discussed at length the overlap between our pet subjects, GIS, environmental management and conservation.  I had done a lot of work in Africa and the Caribbean to date, and Brendan had worked in many countries tracking turtles, including Trinidad and Cyprus, but one place fascinated me…. he had seen an amazing collection of turtles on Ascension Island.

After work one tea time he had arrived back in the Conservation and Fisheries Office in Road Town and I was just tidying up the day’s work before thinking of heading home.  We decided instead of heading straight up to my apartment (where I usually cooked Spag bol or scouse) we would take a pass to Cane Garden Bay, one of the most touristy of Tortola’s beach villages and have a drink at Myetts.

We sat on the stools under the grass roof, still dressed in sweat drenched work shirts and chinos – amongst the others in their surfing shorts and humourlessly themed t-shirts (American tourists thinking they were being ironic, or as many would suggest, “ionic”).  Brendan was renowned for his beer – he drank two Caribs to my one and would always finish up a table of beer if someone had left some.  His large hands were made to carry four bottles at a time from the bar.  But something about the tropical ambience of Myett’s made him choose a strawberry daiquiri.  It came in a frosted cocktail glass, the bright pink liquid specked with ice and yes, the umbrella (a bright mixture of pastel and deep tropical shades ) bobbed about on top.  I went for my favourite mix; brown rum and coke.  His daiquiri would have been blackmailable enough, but he drank it too quickly, his sinuses froze and he suffered the agony of an ice cream headache.  He was lucky smartphones were not around just then.

Enough embarrassment to poor Brendan.  He was doing his usual mixture of talking high philosophy and emotion mixed with base jokes and working class cultural references, with a smattering of logical scientific reasoning thrown in which always made him a delight to be in his company (if vaguely annoying if he decided to act all lecturer like and pull you up for tautology, non sequiturs or even getting the wrong name for some type of grammatical error you had ever suggested he might have made).  And he raved about this small island in the middle of the Atlantic that he visited. He told me of the thousands of green turtles that come ashore every year and lay eggs there, kicking the few leatherbacks on Tortola into touch.  He had visited for several years and monitored them on four main beaches but they were present on almost every scrap of sand on this island. Ascension also had the most amazing bird colonies, huge land crabs, and a Marsscape of recent volcanic activity.

Brendan visited my islands a couple of times while I was on BVI (and we met up once when we were at a conference in Bermuda with other overseas territory conservationists) and introduced me to more of his turtle colleagues.  He would often embarrass me by introducing me as the guy that told him the disgusting joke about Sherlock Holmes, Dr Watson and a jar of lemon curd.  I had great respect for his method of work, balancing the pragmatism of working in someone else’s country with having the integrity of your science.

Life on Mars – Turtle Hunting on Anegada

Another time with Brendan I accompanied him to Anegada, the second largest island in the BVIs; a flat coralline landmass amongst shallow turquoise water.  At that time there were no regular ferries to Anegada, and you flew the ten minutes from Beef Island airport, sometimes stopping off at Virgin Gorda en route.  The approach to Anegada was stupendous ;  because of its flatness it was barely visible from the other Virgin Islands, but once in the air the large fat sausage shaped landmass drew nearer; the large salt ponds in the centre where flamingos played and the stunning set of coral reef heads in the shallow turquoise sea were an unworldly sight.

Loblolly Bay – Anegada – Sun, Sea and Sand

We went out with two fantastic fishermen to these coral heads, Damon and Jim.  Damon piloted the boat to the circular coral heads in the sandy shallows and we spied hawksbill turtles sparkling in the sunlight.  Once spooked they would flee into open water and by following them closely we ensured they did not have time to take breathe.

Damon and an injured Hawksbill Turtle

Instead they had a habit of dropping to the sandy bottom to conserve energy and it was a relatively easy job to slip over the side of the boat and reach out with your hands and grab them.  It was essential to make sure you held them behind their front flippers so you could not have your fingers snapped at.  It was one of the few times I was able to open my eyes as I dived underwater and was jubilant as I brought this hawksbill turtle to the surface to be measured, the skin snipped to obtain a DNA sample and tagged.

The one and only time I caught a hawksbill turtle

Brendan and I also walked almost two thirds of the coastline of Anegada, from the Anegada Reef Hotel on the south coast round to East End Point, the long way.  We looked for evidence of hawksbill and green turtle nesting, and in that day saw the most amazing lagoonal landscapes; shallow seas, great banks of seagrass, the odd nurse shark, waders and land birds, and all the thick scrubby vegetation types that vary over this coral land.  Anegada is a coral reef island and is often thought to be flat and boring to the occasional visitors; most head straight for the eye-aching white beaches and the magnificent coral reefs offshore, but in that day, by treading every mile, I saw the subtle changes in the land from the sandy dunes in the west, the “highlands” of the central north shore with low limestone cliffs coming down to the beach and the long rocky shoreline of the east, where pitted limestone flagstones made walking difficult.  From the flotsam and jetsam washed up on the shore we saw man’s litter – lightsticks used by fishermen, hundreds of trainers, nets, ropes, tyres, even part of an old hovercraft.  We met up with Shaun Kadison, a colleague from my work, and Bill Bailey, an amateur turtle expert who lived on Tortola and had spent many years carefully cataloguing the records of turtle nesting and hatching.  With him we learnt a lot about the turtle fishing, now illegal, and how a boycott of one supermarket because it sold turtle meat led to that territory-wide ban. Tensions between conserving turtles and the ancestral rights of fishermen (some of with whom I now worked in Conservation) were high and like many other projects, it showed that a purely scientific study of such a creature was nary possible.

Mobile phones did not work on the far side of Anegada at the time but Bill had a ship to shore radio that he used and he called up a bar, Neptune’s Treasure, to ask them to prepare lunch for us.  It also proved useful when we were leaving to do the final isolated stretch of the coast, we realised the easiest way would be to walk back to Neptune’s Treasure and grab a taxi back to the little airport.  We got back to Neptune’s Treasure after it had shut for the day, but the barwoman had left an ice cooler of much needed beers behind the bar, and once Bill had radioed the other side of the island for the taxi, we had a while to get them down our parched necks.