Plan proposed to protect nesting seabirds
(CNS): The National Conservation Council has issued a draft Seabird Conservation Plan for public consultation to protect six of Cayman’s vanishing colonial nesting seabirds. Department of Environment (DoE) Director Gina Ebanks-Petrie has warned that some of the Cayman Islands’ most recognisable birds could be lost due to habitat loss, coastal development and invasive species unless they are given legal protection.
“Without such measures, we think we are likely, in the not too distance future, to lose nesting brown boobies and the white-tailed tropicbird,” Ebanks-Petrie told the NCC at its general meeting last week. “The decline in numbers of nesting red-footed bobbies on Little Cayman in the sanctuary is worrying.”
She said that bridled terns are restricted to a single, very small nesting site on Grand Cayman at Vidal Cay off Barkers in the North Sound, and least terns, which once used numerous nesting sites, now use only Sand Cay in the South Sound on Grand Cayman.
Ebanks-Petrie explained that the proposed plan included critical habitat conservation because with the loss of habitat, the seabirds were losing safe places to nest. She added that population decline called for priority protection through a single conservation plan for six species: the red-footed and brown boobies, the magnificent frigatebird, the least and bridled terns, and the white-tailed tropicbird.
She said they had already begun talking to stakeholders, such as landowners and the MPs in the relevant constituencies, about the critical habitat that will need to be protected, and she was hopeful that everyone with an interest would work with the NCC to protect these iconic and much-loved birds.
The NCC voted to circulate the plan for public consultation to help shape the final draft of the plan before it goes to Cabinet for consideration.
The council also discussed the protection plan for the Aegiphila caymanensis, a very rare scrambling plant. This had already gone through the public consultation stage, but because it is so rare, there were very few contributions.
The plant is found only in Grand Cayman and nowhere else in the world. It is now restricted to a small patch of land in East End at the Shetty hospital, where it has been preserved, and in a garden in North Side, where the landowner safeguards the plants. A third patch of the plant was recently found by the roadside in West Bay, and the DoE has secured permission from that landowner to build a small fence around the plant to protect it.
With the plant teetering on the brink of extinction, the NCC voted to forward the species protection plan to Cabinet to secure the plant’s survival.
See proposed protection plans on the NCC meeting agenda in the CNS Library.
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Category: Land Habitat, Science & Nature
https://periodismoinvestigativo.com/2022/01/cayman-foreign-investors-identity-crisis/
Still relevant
Where’s Kayla now?
Never was.
Section 18 of the Bill of Rights.
That land has been for sale at an exorbitant ask for many years. Your question is as well directed at PPM as current government.
Pick some nice inland property and buy it! Pick some stretches of ironshore and buy it! Do the necessary to set up a “Friends of the NCC” US qualified charity so Americans can make tax deductible contributions to be passed on to NCC to buy land. These are no brainers. You already have a few thousand offshore professionals who could set up the charities as well as promote them.
Pick some nice inland property and buy it! Pick some stretches of ironshore and buy it! Thse are no brainers.
Thank you Humane Society! Do you come close to recognizing the irreparable harm you have directly contributed to?
with all due respect, your pleads deafening to the politicians, the governor and the developers. When are you going to join forces with the environmentalists and together protect our fragile ecological system. You are the laughing stock to these guys and the planning department.
A portion of every airline ticket since the 1990s goes to the Environmental Protection Fund which was supposed to be used to buy and reserve these areas. National Trust was also supposed to protect our critical natural spaces and heritage. Then there are thieving regimes that have illegally and immorally tapped these cash reserves to make up for their own bad planning and policy failures, even while giving Billionaire developers get a free pass. You can’t make this stuff up.
Shocking and yet, not surprising
Well meaning and needed, but developers will still have it their way.
We have liars and thieves in our leadership.
If PACT had any interest in conservation they would have purchased the large tracts of land recently listed for sale at the east end of the bluff near the lighthouse on Cayman Brac. But did they?
198 acres they could and should have bought for conservation. Spent it all on Kenny Beach I guess.
That land has been for sale at an exorbitant ask for many years. Your question is as well directed at PPM as current government.
Yet still less than what they paid for Kenny Beach.
For what it’s worth, PPM did not run on an e platform of conservation.
Maybe they wanted more money for themselves.