Frank Balderamos General Manager, National Trust

 

By Tad Stoner
tad@caymannetnews.com

The Cayman Islands’ West Bay may be home to a tourist attraction known as Hell, but that doesn’t stop it from being a heaven to birds. A National Trust bird sanctuary in West Bay, built around Uncle Sammy’s Pond, is slated to open later this year, possibly in early 2010, converting part of an affordable housing site into a community park.

The site, on approximately four acres, will feature nature paths, a boardwalk, gazebos, a picnic area and bird blinds, sheltering hundreds of species of migratory fowl from local predators.

Frank Balderamos, General Manager of the National Trust, said the pond would be dredged, flattening the sides to accommodate wading birds, but the organisation had first to complete a major project at the Mastic Trail.

”It’s a good idea to scoop out the sides of the pond, and we’ll create trails though there and develop some sort of pubic area, with a small parking lot, and a gazebo or two so people can sit and enjoy.

We’ll also replace a lot of the non-native vegetation with native species,” he said.

Fencing would bar iguanas and stray dogs, the general manager said, but “we first have to complete a major project -- moving the southern end of the Mastic Trail. That will be done by mid-year, so we hope by late this year, maybe early 2010, we can open” Uncle Sammy’s Pond.

The National Trust, in 2007, acquired the site, named for Sam Parsons of Mount Pleasant, whose descendants still live in West Bay. The acquisition was part of a deal with the National Housing Development Trust, which built 69 low-cost homes on a 10.57-acre site at the pond, but because of maintenance problems and the availability of an alternate location near the lighthouse for another 47 structures, decided not to expand on the older site.

Housing officials will continue to use the 69 homes until their end of their lifespan, in some cases pegged at another decade, before making any redevelopment moves.

“The National Trust wanted a part of the site in order to preserve it [and] it’s been purchased,” said the organisation’s Field Officer Stuart Mailer. ”It’s a source of freshwater in an otherwise dry area and a potential bird sanctuary.”

On 26 March, Leader of Government Business, the Hon Kurt Tibbetts, suggested that the area could become “a Ramsar site”, a tightly protected area of international importance, named after the Iranian city where the first proposals for such global preservation sites were agreed.

Mr Balderamos said he was not aware of a Ramsar application for the area, but Dr Mat Cottam, research officer at the Department of the Environment, said it might be possible to gain international protection for Uncle Sammy’s Pond, although it would require heavy, ongoing effort to qualify, and could prove too small.

“The site needs extensive management to improve its value for wildlife,” he said. “The ‘international importance’ is a fundamental bit of Ramsar wetland criteria … however, while small ponds like Sammy’s will be unlikely to qualify, that does not mean that they are not valuable, or could be made that way.”

Cayman’s only Ramsar site is on Little Cayman, which shelters as many as 20,000 red boobies in a broad swampy area abutting a 215-acre allotment recently made available by government for development of a new airport.

However, the National Trust development of Uncle Sammy’s Pond meets a basic Ramsar requirement that a site must have local protection before gaining international recognition.

Still, Mr Balderamos said, the pond is still in development and on the list for the next meeting of the Trust’s environmental committee, which he predicted would gather soon.

Costs, he said, were not onerous, but funded entirely by Trust fundraising efforts and likely to run into “the tens of thousands of dollars.”