Whilst gathering information for this section, I have learned a great deal not only about the resilience of plants but also about the quite extraordinary dedication of those botanists, horticulturists, and others who have done so much to preserve the diversity of flora around the world. And I do not want to end this section without sharing the story of a truly dedicated field biologist whose work led to the restoration of an island. This was Reid Moran, who was for decades a sort of living myth in botanical exploration in Baja California and the Pacific islands of Mexico.
Guadalupe Island lies in the Pacific Ocean some 162 miles off the coast of the Baja California peninsula. Early accounts of the sixty-four-thousand-acre island describe great forests of endemic cypress, pine, and oak and groves of California juniper, as well as extensive shrublands and island chaparral. Alas, this once beautiful island suffered the same fate as countless others. After goats were introduced, the vegetation was systematically destroyed, and during the last quarter of the nineteenth century entire plant communities were eliminated; some endemic species were lost forever. Not surprising considering that an informal report written in 1870 gave an estimate of one hundred thousand goats; even if this was exaggerated, there were clearly a great many of them! And during the late 1800s when more people were visiting the island to trade goods, a number of alien plants were introduced. Some of them spread, taking over from native species.
A great deal of what is known about the history of Guadalupe Island is thanks to Reid Moran. He spent 48 years studying the sequence of the destruction of its flora, and the richness that yet remained, describing it as “the most beautiful island I know.” He learned that at one time at least 215 different plant species had been recorded for the Guadalupe archipelago, about 35 of which were endemic to Guadalupe and its adjacent islets. Dr. Exequiel Ezcurra, director of the Biodiversity Research Center of the Californias at the San Diego Natural History Museum, was a personal acquaintance and an admirer of Reid Moran and generously shared his knowledge with us.
Since the early 1960s, Moran had been organizing research expeditions to the islands of the Sea of Cortés and of the Pacific, and to the most remote mountain areas of Baja California. A person of extreme physical endurance, said Exequiel, Moran could spend months in the field working under the most taxing conditions. And he published countless papers and research notes on his expeditions. In 1996, he produced an exhaustive book, The Flora of Guadalupe, into which he poured all the knowledge he had accumulated during forty-eight years of research. The book is bittersweet; on the one hand it describes the immense richness of the island, but on the other it also analyzes, with despair, the devastating impact of the goats and other introduced species.
All these writings were familiar to Exequiel, and the question lingered in his mind: Could some of this collapsing paradise, with its incredible biological richness, still be saved? With Reid Moran’s approval and blessing, he discussed the issue with colleagues in San Diego. The plan materialized, and in 2000 he co-led an expedition to Guadalupe Island. It was, from the outset, a bi-national, multidisciplinary affair, with eight Mexican and nine American scientists who would spend a week thoroughly investigating the status of the flora and fauna of the island and monitoring the impacts of feral goats and other non-native species.
They found, as expected, goats everywhere. And while they did find cypress, there were very few when compared with the old descriptions. They found hundreds of palms—but they were all elderly. In fact, there were virtually no young trees of any sort on the island. And they failed to find even one of the old California junipers described by Moran. Due primarily to soil erosion, many of the mature trees had exposed roots, and often both roots and bark had been damaged by goats. They noted that, save in the highest altitudes where the northwest winds drive clouds up and over the ridge as fog, the climate was drier than it had been originally. Pine trees capture moisture, which drips down the needles to keep the ground below watered; as the pine forests in the high altitudes receded, the ground dried out. In lower altitudes, they found only one main spring, whereas there were descriptions of many pools and springs in Moran’s writings.
Overall it was a bleak picture, with more than twenty of the island’s unique species apparently gone and others seeming on the brink of extinction. Unless something was urgently done, the island would be a “paradise lost.”
In 2002 Exequiel, who had returned to Mexico as head of the country’s National Institute of Ecology, started promoting the idea of restoring the island. Eventually, the Grupo de Ecología y Conservación de Islas, a Mexican and US conservation organization that specializes in the eradication of invasive animals, set off for Guadalupe under the leadership of Dr. Alfonso Aguirre. The team selected twelve areas to be surrounded by “exclusion” fences that would keep out goats. Once the fences were built, the biologists would begin to get some idea of what could happen if goats were eliminated.
This second survey of the island was an exciting time of discovery. In one exclosure built around nine endemic pines, the team found that after just one growing season, forty-seven seedlings had sprouted inside the fence. The following year, there were 231 seedlings of the tree in two exclosures, and in 2003 the number was up to 1,700. All were doing well.
But the really exciting 2002 discovery was of a little Ceanothus shrub growing inside one of the fenced area. A specimen from a similar plant, C. greggii var. perplexans, had been collected in the late 1800s but had not been seen since. It is possible that this little tree was a new, endemic, and not-yet-described species. Subsequently, four more juveniles of the same species were found.
That was the first of several exciting discoveries made between 2001 and 2004. Five species that had been written off as extinct were found. One of these was the white sage (Senecio palmeri), a beautiful tree endemic to Guadalupe that had once been plentiful but had not been seen since 1974. Other highly endangered endemic plants were also recorded, protected, and now have chance to grow. Finally, on a remote beach, they found a population of the giant coreopsis (Coreopsis gigantea), known to exist on other offshore islets but never before recorded on Guadalupe.
One thing that absolutely delighted the botanists was finding that, in a good year, native species like island poppies (Escholtzia spp.) and blue dicks (Dichelostemma capitatum) still flourished and even triumphed as the dominant species, covering the land with their beautiful colors.
I find this story extraordinarily exciting, for it illustrates in a very striking way the resilience of nature. Many of the plants on Guadalupe Island have weathered years of a very hostile environment and somehow survived.
During 2004, there was a major effort to remove the goats; by the end of the year, only a few remained in the most inaccessible places. As the goats vanished, the recovery of vegetation across most of the island was dramatic. Three years later, on February 22, 2007, Alfonso Aguirre announced that the island was totally free of feral goats. Now the native annual plants, almost gone in previous decades, bounced back in large enough numbers to go to seed—and Exequiel says that their numbers are skyrocketing. The California junipers amazingly sprouted from their old stumps and are now green and lush. And tree seedlings, which previously never survived the first year, are springing up all over the place.
One of the first cypresses to germinate after the program started in 2004 has already produced fertile seed, so the century-old trees that survived the goat devastation are now having grandchildren! The situation is being closely monitored, and the importance of the restoration effort was underlined when, in 2005, the Guadalupe Island Biosphere Reserve was created by the Mexican government.
In his book on Guadalupe Island, Reid Moran wrote: “It is particularly important to save the unique endemics. Some, like the pine, have great economic importance, but all have scientific and even spiritual value because of their uniqueness . . . Guadalupe Island with its unique flora is a Mexican treasure that urgently needs protection.”
Sixty years after Moran’s first explorations of the island, his dream has been realized.
