throughout this season of rediscover St. Croix we've taken a new look at the beauty that's the big island we've uncovered hidden jewels and even got close and personal with some endangered species but today we're stepping off the big island and traveling to buck island in national park, Buck Island is known by many residents and visitors for its gorgeous beaches and great underwater trails but like the big island buck island has many untold stories and secret areas and today with help from the national park service we're going to venture off to these areas and find out what makes Buck Island so special so gear up and get ready Buck Island here we come good day superintendent how are you good day Zandy how are you good morning so what are we doing today we're going to Buck Island, Buck Island reef national monument you ready yes i'm ready let's go right now we're on the Apollo the National Park service boat and we're heading to Buck Island not quite there is something i forgot to do now i'm ready with my life vest on we can now get this ranger boat moving the trip from the green key marina to buck island doesn't take long with superintendent sunshine at the helm the Apollo zips across the water on this beautiful day in no time at all we entered the site of the national monument established in 1961 by congress the Buck Island national monument attracts thousands of visitors to san croix each year and i'm included in that group but although i've been to the island on several occasions i've never gone on an island tour with the national park service Janeisha to buckingham reef national monument and you can take off your life jacket because we're inside the underwater trail lagoon okay all right so let me take that from you the water is so beautiful i want to jump in i know it's absolutely gorgeous but here here in the lagoon at buck island we're in about 8 to 10 feet of water and what you're seeing now is just the sunlight going down through the water and turning it into these beautiful tropical turquoises that we are so used to and that's what you see at Buck Island you'll see all the different shades of blue out here so amazing this is the first thing that people see when they come to buck island what do you think i think it's amazing i've never been to this part of the island before i mean about how large is the island Buck Island is 176 acres so it's not very big when you compare it to our St. Croix but for a small island in the caribbean it has one of the most amazing unique features which is the coral barrier reef and that reef actually has grown starting about 10,000 years ago grew around the island so you know we're all concerned about climate change and sea level rise well sea level had to rise to just the right point ten thousand years ago for the coral reef to start growing around this island because this island was here many many eons before the reef okay and so once sea level got to that point where sunlight and wave energy made it just perfect for corals to start growing that's how Buck Island got the reef in its name okay so the Buck Island reef national monument national monument and you know why it's a national monument instead of a national park and this goes along with a couple other national monuments like washington monument in dc is a national monument mount rushmore is a national monument those are unique features Buck Island's unique feature is the reef and that's how we see borders and that's what we're seeing that's amazing and that's also worth making it's so calm i mean you and i are just standing here totally calm right now because that reef is is doing so many things it's creating a very intricate home for the all the fishes and the invertebrates the urchins and the sea fins and crabs and all those kind of critters um but it's also taking the wave energy from the ocean and slowing it down and protecting the islands what what else does the reef do in terms of like natural storms than oh yeah i can tell you a perfect story um that reef right there that we're looking at you can see a bunch of the coral not stone because it's all made by a living marine invertebrate it's sticking up in funny positions when hurricane hugo hits in croy in 1989 just imagine like 500 of the biggest bulldozers you could imagine plowing that reef up starting at 25 feet deep in the water and pushing that coral reef towards the island and the reef was standing strong but not strong enough we actually measured a change in the width of this lagoon that where the reef was before hugo and where the reef was after hugo was 90 feet closer to the islands wow and even our sailboat captains have told us you know man we got attacked many more times to come up the lagoon now because it's so much narrower but mother nature is an incredibly powerful force but that's probably the biggest story for this reef besides its age it's one of the longest living organisms okay continuously living in place like could you imagine being ten thousand years old now and you know there it is and it keeps replenishing itself but it has a lot of things against it um and we as managers are working you know to to see how we can make things keep things as good as we can out here it has held on and created this lagoon so that where we're going now is up to the underwater trail where our first time visitors oftentimes to the caribbean make their first visit to the caribbean sea at the underwater trail the underwater trail at buck island is a world famous trail it's a part of the monument aside from the beach that many people know about and have experienced unfortunately i didn't bring my snorkeling gear so i'll have to experience this part of the monument another time this is the underwater trail this is the world famous underwater snorkel trail okay the park was established in 1961 and actually people have been coming here commercially since 1931. wow but this is um uh when you talk about the number one tourist destination on st croix and now travelocity has rated us number one in the world as far as eco travel the underwater snorkel trail is a guided the self-guided tour that has signed underwater next to the coral that it's referenced and it's a marked trail it's a couple hundred yards long okay and it takes um uh a beginning snorkeler a beginner about 15 to 20 minutes to do okay uh it's it's really beautiful you're gonna see the various coral elkhorn staghorn a lot of brain coral when you look down here you can see some elkhorn coral mixed in with with brain coral so it's um as andy stated it's a it's a living reef it's almost like being in an aquarium the underwater scenery is breathtaking in addition to swimming in clear warm waters snorkelers are taken into a forest of coral where they can come close enough to almost touch the underwater sea life what they'll do is they'll go through as a group one guide and six people and they're going through the grottos these are sort of like um oh little secret coves where the coral is grown from the bottom up to the surface and they swim into the middle of these and they have about you know 15 20 feet apart and so they're all kind of following the guide along and you know looking into the corals and looking up at the waves coming over and sometimes you know lots of fish and ledges and those fish a lot of the the mahogany snappers and yellowtail snappers will cluster underneath the ledges so you pass through several grottos like this and then if they're a little bit more experienced group they go out into the deep grotto and that takes them like joelle said out to the outside of the reef where it actually looks like you know you're seeing this wall of coral with this intricate lattice where coming up from 30 feet you know darker blue right out there we're looking in the darker blue i'm out towards where the white buoy is that's a coral reef marker and they get to be out there and you're still on the surface and looking down and experiencing this incredible structure that was built by little tiny marine organisms the average depth here is about eight feet okay but then as you go out beyond the reef it drops off to about 25 feet and that's where you see the the larger sea life like the uh the hawksbill turtle or uh the uh reef sharks you know it's um the barracudas are very prominent here but not to worry they we haven't lost anybody yet yes oh i hope not ever okay so what are some ways you guys protect this area so that tourists will forever have some place to visit well one of the things that we we did you know um i've been working here for over 30 years and before that my father and i and my brothers used to bring tourists here in the old days when you sailed up here you used to throw an anchor and we usually aim for the big brain coral because we didn't know any better you know so we anchored here at the underwater trail and when the park service finally started active management we started to put in what we call mooring pins okay those mooring pins allow us to as you saw us drive up pick up a mooring and we're secure so we don't have to anchor that's permanently in the bottom we also limit the amount of boats that could be here at any given time which is 11. so what we do is we regulate our concessions those are the people who are bringing people our visitors commercially to an hour and a half they can only be on the morning for an hour and a half and after they're finished then they have to go and give somebody else a chance so what else do you gotta start for us well we'd like to take you down the back side of the island which uh where a lot of people have not never gone i've never been home and you know on this side of the island um you have uh healthier reef the the resistance continues all the way down uh we even suspect that there's some shipwrecks on this side but you won't be able to see that today we keep those uh secrets buried deep in our archives although we won't see any shipwrecks the north side of the island in itself is somewhat a secret the complex coral formation here makes it extremely difficult for motor vessels to navigate so to prevent disasters the area is restricted we're coming up on a part of the reef that we call the dog leg the dog why is it called dog like well you know because you know it's kind of shaped like a dog okay okay we can't keep going straight because the reef comes in and it's going to make us take a turn towards the island okay and then we're going to go in a very sort of secret passageway very close to the shoreline and and then we'll sneak out through the coral this overhead view shows exactly what zandi is talking about and something about this area buck island and as we're going through our new planning strategy for the larger park is that this area is going to remain very protected because as you can see if you just look out over here look how close the coral is now that coral is coming from four and five feet deep right up to the surface so if you do not know how to maneuver your boat back here you could very easily end up damaging your boat and seriously damaging a living coral reef other secrets of the north side are the loafing areas and nesting site of several bird species you see the white on the rock there yeah that's where the frigate birds will roost during the daytime okay you know the frigate bird you know the big black wing bandit of the sky they call it the one that was just flying around here uh if well they kind of look like a a w when they fly in the sky yeah okay and they have the white breast but their wings are like six feet across and they call them the bandit of the sky because if another bird has caught a fish and is flying with it they'll swoop down attack it and steal the fish and lucky for us our cameras were able to catch this crime in progress those are the frigates yeah and the white you know what that is that's the guano moana that's right also on the north side here we have a brown pelican rookery the brown pelican has been listed as endangered for a very long time over 30 years and currently the populations in the states they're looking at them to take them off of the endangered list because they're doing very well they were pushed to the brink of extinction because of ddt and pesticides that made their eggshells very thin and we tend to forget that because it's something that we stopped doing so long ago you know putting that kind of chemical in our environment um and so now the populations are are coming back like the bald eagle but this is kind of like our bald eagle and for the 20 years that i've been working here i've been watching the pelicans and it's just so cool during the winter months that the the parents begin the nest building right here on down in the low part here in the trees um but our pelicans will be right up here and pelicans are something that we share with puerto rico our virgin island young pelicans will fly to puerto rico to live for two and three years they grow up there and then they come back here to nest virgin islanders always come home they love home now what we see here is a nesting site for brown pelicans the birds you see with the white tip heads those are the baby pelicans when the adult birds swoop in the fledglings will bang their beaks together as a means of asking for food if the parent has a catch the young pelican will literally go down the goal of the adult and feed that's what you're seeing here it looks painful but i'm sure they're fine with it do you guys carry groups out here to witness this because this is amazing no not actually what we did was a little bit disturbing to the colony um what we we come out and do monthly monitoring so that we're counting how many nests how many adults how many chicks and then it's most important especially for these protected species is how well they're doing how successful was their young how many little pelicans are getting off buck island and that's a critical thing so this year we had about 30 35 nests with maybe two chicks successfully fledging out of each one of those so it's a very very good year for them some some of this were attributing to a better food source for these guys when the park became a marine protected area in 2001 and then we put the regulations in place in 2003 you know that left a lot more of the little tiny minnows for the pelicans to forage and then to bring back and feed the young so we're hoping that as we continue you know there's a lot of space for a good sized colony here we've had up to a hundred nests in the past so we're hoping to see that trend keep going we're now making our way back to the south side where visitors enjoyed the white sandy beaches we've seen and learned a whole lot from our boat tour but now it's time to go online and explore the islands it seems that the best way to explore certain places is to go on a hike so up the trail we go so we've done a little bit of hiking and we have to stop because there's something that's so intriguing behind of us we have a salt pond and mr tusan how did this pond end up here well it's it's natural um it was a salt pond uh for many years while buck island was farming it got closed off from the sea so it's uh it's completely encased it's a freshwater fed and um how big is that andy well south pond is is only about uh two to three acres and it's getting smaller there's been a couple of changes in our time frame just in the last 20 to 30 years with the salt pond where we used to have red mangroves and we lost those in hurricane hugo those are the big tall mangroves that grow with the big red prop roots we still have them down at salt river but they're no longer here we lost them all in hugo with closing off from the sea it stays dry most of the time but what it right now you can see that it's wet we had a couple of days of rain evening rains and it really catches and holds it we get a lot of fantastic birds here the white cheek bahama pintail beautiful duck the male has a blue beak we have a lot of turns and stilts that will come and they'll forage in the sediments we were informed through some very old maps from the 1700s maps of buck island that the salt pond could actually help us verify that map said that Buck Island was called ils Vert in french uh that is Green Island and it was green island because it was supposedly covered with the tropical hardwood tree ligna veidy which we treasure on saint croix the one that has a beautiful blue flower so we don't have very many of them slow growing evergreen but the french said buck island was covered in lignum so we're planning a new study to look at the sediments in the salt pond take actually take cores of the sediments and go back two and three thousand years and have the salt pond tell us verify for us was this island truly covered in lignum vitae by looking at the pollen sample wow so we're looking forward to that so the salt pond is a story itself about how it's catching the rain water protecting that island dirt from not washing out into the reef but at the same time while it was catching that dirt it was holding a story for us to investigate boy am i getting a workout another small treasure on the trail this fragrant plant you ready oh that smells so good isn't that amazing it smells really good it's called semita it's a native plant and it is soft to the touch it's one of the few plants on buck island that won't bite you or scratch you or sting you and samada blooms when it's dry and hot and it's a wonderful bush it's slow growing like most of our tropical plants but my it's the most amazing smell it's like a cross between jasmine and orange yeah isn't it that's the crazy desert it is so soft to the touch well sandy i heard you guys were working on a project up here could you tell us a little bit about it yeah we've actually been working all over the island we affectionately call it the non-native invasive plant project which means plants that aren't supposed to be here that have been brought by humans over the years a lot of them from Africa from the South Pacific believe it or not you know people like to bring the things they like with them and they've gotten made their way to buck island and about eight years ago the park service has started a national program not just Buck Island but this is the across the U.S to start to control these invasive plants so we have plants that are non-native but they're okay invasive plants are pushing out the natives all right so they don't let them grow they don't let them seed they don't let them exist get out right so what we've done is on the 176 acre on buck island we've come in with a team a contract team and a park service oversight project manager and they actually uh have worked the entire island treating 10 target plants and one of the biggest ones we've been aggressively treating is the tantan tantan is an African plant and we know that if you clear property or if you have a fire what are the first plants that are going to come in guinea grass and tantalum that's right now we've got uses for them okay we put out our goats and and our horses and they graze the guinea grass and the tantan we use for a variety of things but there are no natives in that mix they're gone and our natives like we're talking about the samada they are used to our tropical sun and our heat and our lack of rain or our heavy rains okay but when you get these plants from elsewhere they just take over and all of a sudden all you have is tantan and guinea grass and so one of the coolest things for me and there's so many of these stories is right here for example when we treated the tan tan it was intermixed with these beautiful cactus i think look who got a chance to grow up it's a little turpentine tree and when the when the tantan was cleared away from here this guy was no bigger around than my finger and he stood this tall so in three years he's becoming a specimen tree really outstanding and of course the last thing we experience the Buck Island view okay dania about how high are we you know well the the total island height is about 330 feet at the very highest we're about 200 here over the reef and this island is unusual geographic geologically because it is uplifted continental shelf so which also instead of being like a coral atoll which is really low and flat like Anagada this island is sitting on the edge of our continental shelf of the caribbean and so as um two things were happening at once the Atlantic plate was moving over and the caribbean plate was being pushed up so when we looked at those rocks and they were all in that sort of vertical orientation like layers of a cake on an edge that's what we were seeing so here we are and we are still you know this land mass is all part of centroid it's all contiguous so we can actually you know there's certain places in town you can stand you can see the the connectedness of the islands so you've got sea level rising and the island on edge and through time and weather and rain you know it's wearing and producing soil which has allowed the plants to colonize but Buck Island is pretty unusual it's a very large island and it's very very tall and the other fantastic thing about saint croix in general is that you look right out there and it drops off into some blue water and it's right here in the park we believe at Buck Island we have some of the deepest water in the national park system it goes down to almost five thousand oh that's deep so again that edge of that continental shelf is right here right at the edge of St. Croix and which gives us a very limited shelf resource for fishing but also gives us amazing mineral uplifts and nutrient uplifts from the deep ocean water it's just right out there is five thousand feet of water the second deepest point in the world's ocean is halfway between us and st thomas that's pretty unique it is a very unique situation well as you can see we've learned a lot of interesting facts today and i want to thank you superintendent Tutein as well as you Zandy it was interesting amazing experience and you know now we're going back to the vote back to the big island 245 00:26:10,560 --> 00:26:13,360 now we're back on the big island and i must say even though i've been to Buck Island many times this is the first time that i've experienced something so special i had a truly amazing time so the next time you visit Buck Island be sure to take some time out to appreciate what makes Buck Island so special and a true national monument and always remember to cherish your home this beautiful island but most of all cherish each other i'll see you next time