Our man (Andy Scholfield) writes:
Breadfruit, ripe and ready for shooting
I didn’t know what to think when Pawl, known on Pitcairn as “Pawl the Pirate”, knocked on my door and said “fancy shooting some breadfruit today?”, It reminded me of the moment when I lived on the Isle of Islay and one of the neighbouring gamekeepers was trying to hoodwink my kids into thinking that he had been out on the fells all day shooting haggis’s, of which they were having none of it, my facial expression must have looked like theirs did that day. But, he had a rifle in his hand and looked fairly serious, so I thought I’d go along with it, at the risk of great ridicule at my expense to come.
Breadfruit trees can be very large and the ripest fruit always seems to be right at the top! The branches are very thin and brittle making them quite dangerous to climb, many unsuspecting visitors to the island wanting to take away or try the near mythical breadfruit, made famous by the events of “The Mutiny on the Bounty” have come to be in a painful and embarrassed heap below a breadfruit tree Pawl explains. “The only way to get them down, is to shoot them down” he whispers quietly, as though the bright green fruit is going to be spooked by what he just said and flee to the other side of the tree and hide!
One radio announcement of “shooting breadfruit at Andy’s”, presumably so everyone can take cover and three shots later there was two breadfruits lying on the floor ready to be collected. There stalks expertly shot with unerring precision! Sending the plummeting to the ground!
Once “shot”, you can treat them a bit like a potato, you can boil them in pieces or mash them or even make them in to chips but my favourite way I have had them so far is having them sliced very thinly and deep fried like crisps and use them to scoop up your chilli and guacamole. I wish I could grow them at home as like this they are truly scrumptious! Although harvesting them in a suburban garden in Cambridgeshire maybe a little controversial.
On a more “birdy note” I managed to take the opportunity to venture up on to “Garnet or Gannet Ridge” above the famous “Christians Cave”, the place where I had seen the Kermadec Petrels wheeling around. To my great excitement I managed to find five birds incubating single eggs. Sadly they were in quite dangerous terrain, on grassy terraces with small scattered Cabbage Trees which made getting close to them to photograph or take any biometrics almost impossible, but it did give me great enjoyment to be able to watch them through my binoculars. It’s a great privilege to be able to really sit, watch and draw a species that you only normally see for a few fleeting moments if you are lucky as it passes by you on a headland or a ship. As the darkness grew, and here it gets really dark if there is no moon! More petrels started to fly around calling and to my complete astonishment I almost ended up with a Phoenix Petrel in my lap! Named after the Phoenix Islands this is a beautiful petrel with a bright white chest and belly, it landed no more than a metre away from me, looked at me for a few moments and then very ungainly waddled off into the darkness. I was still smiling when I got home.
The Petrel site with Christian’s cave bottom right as seen from my garden.
We've been working with the UK's amazing Overseas Territories for almost 20 years, but are still only scratching the surface of understanding their wonderful wildlife. One of the most remote and little known Territory environments is found in the Pitcairn Islands, the last remaining British Territory in the Pacific. Home to the extremely friendly descendants of the Mutiny on the Bounty, the Territory is made up of one inhabited island (Pitcairn) and three uninhabited ones.
We have a longstanding programme underway to restore one of these off-islands (Henderson Island World Heritage Site), but were conscious that the environment of Pitcairn itself is in many ways less studied than that of its uninhabited neighbours. Staff members have spent ten days on Pitcairn in consultation with the local community in 2010 and 2012, but as far as we are aware almost no general terrestrial conservationists have spent more than a week or two on the island. No one therefore really has any idea how big or threatened the population of the unique local bird, the Pitcairn reed-warbler, is, several of the island's unique plant species may be down to just a few individuals, and what invertebrate species exist on this fertile volcanic pinnacle is an almost untouched world still awaiting exploration and discovery.
We've therefore sent our new Overseas Territories Officer, Andy Schofield, to Pitcairn for three months to work alongside the Pitcairners and try to answer some of these questions. We're very excited to see what he may find!