Let me set the scene… Imagine an ancient volcanic island rising out of the sea; every face is a sheer cliff, 20 metres high, collapsing into the depths of the Indian Ocean below. Ancient layers of ash make up the crumbling cliff rocks, littered with boulders made of basalt; as black as ebony and often almost entirely porous with residual gas bubbles that never managed to make to escape the fiery molten depths of larva. Today half the volcano remains, the other half of the summit was blown to pieces during the volcanic explosion. The remnants of the exploding larvae and ash piling up in nutrient-rich layers, has formed what is now visible as a tropical island.
Starting at the western summit, the island is rich with native palms and densely forested areas, vines and lianes as thick as your arm, with leaves as succulent as a pig tangling everything in their wake, but providing much needed shade and retreat in the not-so forested areas. In the east, the island slopes gently down towards a grassland plateau, a boulder field full of loose basalt rocks, thrown further from the mouth of the volcano and covered in a blanket of grass, concealing the ankle-breaking dangers below. But here is less rich in good soils, the main vegetation is a spikey invasive plant called Flacourtia that forms a low but very dense canopy. Invasive, but useful; shielding what’s below from the scorching sun and rough trade-winds coming up from the South-East. Protruding out from this plateau are two small peninsulars; pointing north and south, which in more modern times, came to look like the shape of the coin from the end of a gun, thus giving the name of the island (though I like to think it looks more like a Sunfish).
Sloping down to the water’s edge these boulder-ridden protrusions of land are where the sheer force of the ocean hits the island sending enormous salty blows of white cascading over the washed-up boulders, and trickling violently down into the deep black rock pools, the temperature of a thermal spring, and encrusted with a contrasting white rim of salt crystals around the edge.
And yet with all this extremity, there is an abundance of life in every corner of the island, and this, my friends, is why we are here.
5 minutes helicopter flight across from the Northern tip of mainland Mauritius and we arrived on ‘Quoin de Mire’ or Gunner’s Coin to the non-Creole population of Mauritius. As the ‘Drove’ looped around to land on the plateau, the summit cliff (50 metres of completely vertical, crumbling cliff) loomed up above us. At the base of the cliff, a wave-shaped cave had been carved away, smoothed by a thousand years of time and the colour of history.
The water below us was a shade of paradise, mottled with untouched coral reef; underwater forests of greens and blues, corals as orange as fire, and reef fish, every shape and size swimming tirelessly, and unaffected by the rocking swell of the waves. Beyond the shallows, the sea turns suddenly to an azure blue, the depths so clear, and so beautiful you swear you can see deep into the soul of the earth below. But below, sharks loom secretly in the swirls of current, waiting for the unexpecting spear-gun diver, keen to make an illegal living, but ignorant of the threats awaiting his thoughtless and bloody fishing methods.
As we hover above the grassland plateau to land, the wind from the rotors flattens everything in sight, the door slides open and one by one we run, heads bent against the force of the wind, towards the protection of some bushes. 8 people, 1000 kg of gear and 4 minutes later, the helicopter takes off, leaving us in a tornado of dust and grass that sticks like glue to our bodies. Drenched with sweat; dusty beads running off every surface, we wave to the pilot with a slight hint of regret; it’ll be another ten days of 45 degree heat and 100% humidity till we see that red and blue ‘Drove’ again, and I already wanted a shower!
So by now I am sure you get the impression that this island is full of extremes! It really is a place so full of crumbly rocks, spikey plants, rocks as hot as the larva they were made from and humidity like an island sauna, that one may wonder how there is life here at all! But thanks to the Durrell Wildlife Preservation Trust, the Mauritian Wildlife Foundation (MWF) and the National Parks and Conservation Service (NPCS) the island became a closed nature reserve and is only accessible to specific people who work for those organizations, namely us; the DIRT team (Durrell Initiative Reptile Translocation team) and whichever NPCS members come with us to assess the island, in terms of forestry plans and general park management stuff.
We set up our tents out near the helipad, on a flat area of grass that was deceptively comfortable; what looked like a soft tuft of fluffy grass that one would want to just run and jump on, was actually very prickly grass that sank about 2 feet under when you stood in it. But, under a sleeping mat and tent, it was perfect and made for a nice cushioning! There was such a gap underneath the grass, that there must have been whole other world underneath, full of smaller life avoiding the incredibly hot sunshine. As you walked through rather than over the grass, each leg lift was a considerable effort like walking through freshly fallen snow; but as the grass acted as an insulative blanket over the rock, the daily grass temperature reached up to 58 degrees! As a result the inside of the tent during the day was as hot as an oven and you would have been stupid to try and stay inside longer than a few seconds!
Once our tents were set up we headed up into the thickets where vines and taller shrubs shaded the paths made for our use. Here in an open clearing we rigged up a tarp over the top of some bushes and set up our kitchen/dining/working area. Out of pure luck the guys had previously acquired some planks of wood they had found a month earlier during the trail clearing trip in preparation for this trip. They had been washed up on the rocks after a tanker had gone aground on the reef just off the mainland, upcurrent of the island, and the guys and their (pretty impressive) engineering imaginations rigged up a really strong table with a bench either side which made life a hell of a lot easier than doing everything: cooking eating and working in the dirt.
A long time ago before human settlement here, Gunner’s was inhabited by a large number of reptile species including the Telfair’s Skink, the Keel-scaled Boa, the Ornate day gecko, the Bojer’s Skink, the Bouton’s Skink, Orange-tailed skink, and the Lesser night gecko, but with settlement brough habitat destruction, cats, dogs, rats and mongeese. When Gunner’s Quoin was declared a nature reserve, most of these species had been wiped out from the island. In 2002 the DIRT team began to translocate Telfair’s skinks back to the island from Round Island to reintroduce them to their lost home. Since then the skinks have bred successfully and today there are hundreds thriving all around the island. Since then, every year the DIRT team has been monitoring and adding to this population. When a skink is translocated, they are given an identification pit-tag inserted under the skin just in front of their left hind leg, so that we can scan each skink (just like a bar code), and from this know who they are, where and when they were released, and by continuously tagging skinks on the island can begin to get an idea of the overall population here on the island. So one of our aims for the 10 days was to attempt to capture as many Telfair’s Skinks as we could from all around the island. The island was divided into habitat areas; there was North peninsular, South peninsular, Summit, Upper Valley, Lower Valley, and Central Flacourtia Thicket. We would methodically search each of these areas usually in pairs (as it helps having a scribe when you are handling a skink) and would either catch by hand (easy in open-ish areas) or using noosing poles, we would “go fishing for Telfairs” – involving a simple noose made from tooth-floss on the end of a pole. It was great how much joy you got from saying “I got a big one” on the end of a noosing pole that looked identical to a fishing rod!! But jokes aside, we would morph/process every skink we caught in the field (take body and ambient temperatures, sex, body measurements, individual scars and tail breaks for recognition, faecal samples , (for dietary analysis, these became known either as poo-tubes or kaka-tubes by the creoles :P), and overall body condition) and those which had not been caught previously, we would also bring back to camp at lunch time or after the afternoon searches in a cloth bag to pit-tag, and then release them where we found them.
For the rest of the time there, we did invertebrate sampling in all habitats, using two methods; the first, the Winkler method involves scraping a 1mx1m square of vegetation, leaf litter and top soil into a shaker with a sieve to allow all invertebrate life to fall through into a cloth sack. This we would then hang up for a 3 days with no exit point for insects to crawl out of, and a jar of ethanol at the base, so that any crawling, flying, wriggling insects would fall into the jar, and be preserved, which we would then collect and take back with us to the mainland to analyse. The other method in pit fall trapping, a simple method of digging a small hole in the ground and putting a tube of ethanol/detergent mix in to catch anything that crawls over. These were left for 5 days at a time. Form these sampling methods, data can be obtained to give an idea of what sort of invertebrate life is available throughout the island which is vital for looking at diet options available for the reptiles there.
Since human settlement, the Orange tailed skink was restricted to Flat Island, but in 2008, the invasion of the shrew happened, which took no time at all to get established there, and the species was fast on its way to becoming extinct. The DIRT team realized that action had to be taken fast, unless they wanted an extinction on their hands, and so, in 2008 a small population of orange tails were sent to Gunner’s Quoin where there are some patches of their preferred habitat. Last year, in 2010 a search was carried out on Flat Island for orange-tailed skinks, and there were next-to-none left. Quickly, the team managed with a lot of effort and to get their hands on another 10 skinks which were sent immediately to Durrell in Jersey, UK for captive breeding as a safe-guard against the small Gunner’s Quoin population should anything happen to them. Thank goodness they did, because only a couple of months later, today they are officially extinct on Flat Island. In less than 18 months, shrews had completely wiped the island of small reptiles, and it is estimated that about 1 million reptiles had been killed and eaten by these fast invaders.
So here on this magnificent island lives a small population of orange tailed skinks, saved by the forward thinking of Nik and his team which would now be yet another extinct Mauritiun species if it weren’t for them. So during the trip we would do a daily search for these tiny but beautiful creatures; about two inches long fully grown, fast as lightening and as sneaky as ever moving around under the leaf litter out of sight. You would sit there, absolutely stock-still, listening out for the faintest rustling sound, so quiet that if you breathe, you will miss it. And then if you hear that distinctive sound that definitely isn’t a Telfair, or a Bojer or even a tiny tiny spider jumping from leaf to leaf, you shout to the others, and everyone dives down in a heap, using any limb they can possibly find to barricade off a small patch of leaves and hope that he will poke his little shiny head out of the leaf litter. It’s an intricate process attempting to capture one of these animals, and involves at atleast 6 hands, 5 arms and possibly a couple of legs and knees. They are so small and so fragile that you have to be so careful grabbing them, making sure not to hold them by their beautiful orange tails, which, with the smallest tug can rip off and leave you with a wiggling bleeding orange stub of a worm left in your finger tips, with the skink now nowhere to be seen. Although saying this, this can often come to be quite handy as the tail tips is what we were after. We wanted not only to observe as many of the skinks as we could, get GPS reading for them all, hopefully get morphometrics on them but also to collect DNA samples for them to determine the genetic side of the population to look at their dispersal and to ensure that there is a big enough population with enough genetic variation to ensure that the species survives and does not begin to go through a genetic “bottleneck” where inbreeding occurs and leads to infertility down the line. If the species begins to go down this path, then hopefully the small population in Jersey UK will be able to provide us at some point down the line with new genetic variation in the form of new skinks bred in captivity that can be released and begin to diversify the population and hopefully save the species once and for all. Ideally the eradication of shrews on Flat island will become an easy feat (still a long way off) and then we can begin to move the orange tails back onto their home land. But that is all a long way away and today all we can hope for is that Gunner’s Quoin remains a haven where this very vulnerable and critically endangered skink can live and breed in peace.
So those were the reasons we were here, but there was so much else do to see and do, with the smallest night gecko I have ever seen scurrying around on the rocks after dark. This species known commonly as the lesser night gecko (Nactus coindemiresis) is found only here on Gunner’s Quoin and in its adult size reaches just over an inch long! This species has been wiped out from all the other Mascarene Islands since the invasion of the common house gecko which unfortunately, at about twice its size, finds these little Nactus quite a nice sized meal.
When we weren’t working you would most likely find us either passed out with heat exhaustion under the kitchen tarp, trying desperately to reach that tiny breath of slightly luke-warm air that passes by, or playing dominoes, or fishing down on the rock edge on the Northern peninsular. On our last day, we were treated to the option of a swim; the only form of cleanliness we had all week. You can imagine how dirty we were after 10 days of sweaty dusty work, often involving crawling around on hands and knees after various species of reptile. So we had a much needed swim and Sam the only other girl on the trip, and I enjoyed bathing in a nice big rock pool washing our filthy hair with the only shower-gel we had and scrubbing ourselves with rough crushed shells and sand from the bottom of the pool. It was not the most pleasant bath I had ever had, but damn it felt good to be clean! When we were clean we spent the rest of the morning attempting to catch fish off the cliff with limited bait (we tried everything we saw, from fish guts (previously caught by Roopa) to crab claws to an attempt at a rock-hopper fish which was so slimy it got away pretty quick). But Sam still managed to catch the biggest fish of the morning on her first cast much to the annoyance of Roopa who had been fishing for about 3 hours already! That night was our last, and we celebrated a very successful 10 days on island with a 1 Litre bottle of rum, a banquet of fresh fish and cold soggy chips (they still tasted good), and a packet of extraordinarily melted marshmallow (singular by this stage as it had formed one soggy mass) which we dipped in nutella as a fondue! All was going great, we were all very merry until a scorpion fell from the tarp down the back of my trousers and stung me right on the bum, bummer! I in an alcohol-induced haze, luckily managed to grab it out before it stung me properly, and even before I knew what it was… lucky the thing didn’t then decide to sting my hand too! Funny thing was, Nik had sat on one 3 days previously and had had an itchy bum ever since, which I found rather amusing, so pretty sure karma had her way with me that night.
So that was the end of the trip and the dear Drove arrived the next morning as planned, and after packing all our 1 tonne of gear up we headed back to the mainland away from that magnificently quiet rock with not a soul on it but us, to be greeted by the bustling back streets of Port Louis town at midday on a Friday. Mistake. We weren’t home for 3 hours! But totally worth it for such a wonderful and unforgetable experience on Gunner’s Quoin.
More coming soon... :) Missing you all back home xo
