planet. “We have some unique vegetation growing on this point here,”
Mussington continues, “and we’re already losing it to the Caribbean. In
some cases we don’t even know what we’re losing, because many of the
plants have not been catalogued yet. This, for example, is called torch-
wood. It has so much resin in it, that it’s believed the Indians who used
to live here would tie a pile of this wood together and light it to form a
torch. We also have mauby. The bark can be used to make a drink that
has medicinal qualities as a diuretic. Anything the doctor would pre-
scribe to allow your body to lose more water, this would do naturally, as
well as increasing appetite. But as sea level continues to rise, we will lose
the torchwood, the mauby, all of this.”
As on Antigua, Mussington has witnessed a steady decline in the
health of Barbuda’s coral reefs. “When I started working here in 1983,
you had a lot of living coral, fringing the western side and especially on
the northern side of the island. Today, those same reefs are almost
totally dead.” He ticks off the same reasons I had heard from
Antiguans: overfishing of the parrotfish and die-off of the spiny sea
urchins that grazed on the algae, combined with damage from hurri-
canes and “bleaching” from warmer water temperatures.
It is the reef system, along with the lagoon, that has provided
Barbuda with its main industry—a historically thriving lobster fishery.
The island’s lobsters are exported to Antigua, Martinique, Guadalupe,
and other spots in the Caribbean. They used to weigh as much as 12
pounds. “Now you don’t get many of those,” Mussington says,
“because as with everything else, the fishery has been decreasing.”
After a drive into the highlands (at 100 feet, Barbuda’s apex),
Mussington is anxious to show me the Codrington Lagoon Bird
Sanctuary, where the largest colony of Magnificent Frigatebirds in the
Western Hemisphere comes during breeding season. Black birds with
tiny feet and chicken-sized bodies, but with massive wing-spans of up
to 8 feet, these have been termed nature’s most perfect flying machine.
Mussington recalls doing a count in 1998 that detected as many as five
thousand nesting pairs.
It is indeed stirring to watch a frigatebird soaring effortlessly above
a pond, then swooping suddenly into the water to spear a fish. But do
I detect a plaintive sound in the male’s warbling cry?
Antigua and Barbuda 73