forests are definitely an intriguing part of nature they contain fascinating plant and animal life and are a small glimpse of an untouched planet earth roughly 30 percent of the earth's land area is covered by forests some small others extremely large but unfortunately on an island that's only 84 square miles you wouldn't expect to see such large forest or any forest at all but believe it or not there are areas on saint croix that are designated as forests there's even an area that's classified as the virgin forest untouched barely explored and simply wild and that's where we're taking you today so join us as we explore a part of the island that's known and seen by only a few hey mr davis it's nice to see you again so what are we doing today and today we're going to the virgin virus a small section crisis that is remain that never been touched so we will be going there and seeing some of the rare plants and synchros what makes the virgin forest so special especially because it's part of the history of the maroons that live in this part of the island and the sacred store is a good area and feel the spirit of this individual how often do you do you visit the forest i was there in july o'reilly we did a rally he's a plant academy a back atlas she was looking for some plants there i know the last time it was like kids in the forest and we find out kind of interesting plants there anyone debating what they take people there not because those kind of we don't take people because it is pretty rare so how often do people visit there we don't take most people there because we want to protect it because there's a plan there that i want to discover this plan that is stolen and was planned in a federalist federal indian spiritualist and locally so we do you gonna have limit to people out there okay and i've heard it's untouched is untouched we're going up to the cliff and if you want we can go down but it's going to generate what you need to up because it's certainly going to move underneath your feet okay so in general what are some of the things we may see uh i will show you that's we call it spicy guava it's about 20 years old it's a huge tree okay there and you probably see some christmas ultras those trees are those plants there's very they are reconsidered being ground cover plants like you could see them licking carpets but they see those plants you have to hike down i doubt you'll go down there you never know we'll see how adventurous we feel once we get to our destination now the virgin forest stretches for about 200 acres it runs along the area between the hamps fluff watershed and davis bay more commonly known to virgin islanders as maroon ridge of course it's not an easy area to access there is hiking to do as with any tour led by mr davis lucky for us there is a beacon path to follow and lots of interesting plant species to see and learn about along the way what you have is mushroom you have a five thousand special mushrooms on the wall mushroom is very important for forest ecosystem and time of recycling though that we know that for example in the store those are edible this particular kind of spiciness but they recycle and forestries depend upon these organisms in order to survive so you either find mushroom in pretty wet or damp damp area so this one you could see is on the tree itself and come a couple of days ago i'm gonna go on the other side over here you see it's brown we get more mature on this side you see the color this one on this side over here and you see this one see eventually this one here turned from this color from white to orange to brown to a more darker color they have spurs and the i'm assuming that growth when they're going to come up and they're those that they cannot see with the naked eye so this is one of them so like they say for example as ecologists you can kind of estimate how many rainfall they get in a particular year there's certain there's certain plants what we call indicators as the ecologist can tell you the rainfall pattern what type of plants you find in those areas and how diverse the the virus is this is a good example this is a disturbed area here that we're working right now it's an old old world and this tree is called a tibet it's in very species they're giving a carbon name of the plant say the latin names and these mushrooms are found and this tree specifically can be no it could be any it could be any um any tree once it's able to receive a mark of rainfall in that site you won't find mushroom basically like in dessert even though they might be there they're microscopic okay but water is the key being what for them to go so you get mushroom you get um milk juice a lot you get more smart hours within that family it's a five thousand so when when the mushroom looks like that with is it like the rainfall abundant is there a lot of rainfall well as ecologists or even agronomists we know that most winning water means damp area so you have a high there the commercial will probably get okay in that area yeah so you could say this part of the island get a lot of rain it's interesting yeah so plants and organism is indicator of what taking place in the environment although the path we're walking on is surrounded by trees that doesn't necessarily mean we are in a forest most of the trees seen in this particular area are invasive species non-native and the fact that there is an underbrush in this case any grass and tantan trees makes this area nothing more than a brushed area we got less than one percent a true forest that is the northwest of the island it's kind of hard to comprehend because what they can have mostly is bush not virus so less than one percent so it's important to protect and of course today we should know better in time global warming there's so many issues worldwide about the environment are we not do enough in this island to protect areas like this there so what does this mean for the area commonly known to cruisians as the rainforest well if you apply the formula you'll see that it too is more a brush area than an actual forest in forest area in front of tantan you cannot compete because you need the sunlight so you probably stay there you know one spot and you produce the seed and everything they want to come up because like a sunlight because other plants you know have that uh competition but like in this it would disturb this camera force along with grass and take and then drop the seal and then more more plants come up and the rainfall didn't have any effect on how much you know well in a traffic plant go extremely far like for example with the old saying with a guinea grass they go overnight in inches you could go very fast in the traffic so you could have it'd be dry and they could get rain two days for the full day you totally agree and it kind of shocked the sea and when you clear land in the traffic and like within a year or two the whole thing is turned back into fires of grass so it responds pretty fast to the rain the gender cameras for and so um in the olden days i'm saying chris mostly rain starts to fall like in october is the highest peak of the rainfall so in eastern ireland to the west the general timers come out in mass production otherwise a lot of floors bloom and so the flowers will land until the following year they can carry a match they know they gotta go straight drink crap but now if ninety percent of flowers fall off the tree of course your game club this species of fire mostly in forest area in the north of the island the red one the fine most in urban areas and the green one urban areas and they have smaller species if you find in urban areas now this insect um they have natural iodine in it so we say as kitty don't play with them a car they can secrete the iodine if you're going oil you can go you can go blind so we call it bungalow and guess what the world gongolo is african bungalow so this we call it gongolo and this is much larger about how larger they grow i have seen them close to almost seven inches at eight inches long and that's just that that that the others is it's much smaller yeah so this guy you see mostly in the northwestern paris paris area we're about halfway to our destination but there are still a few interesting things to learn about for example this tire palm extremely rare um i wrote a article for poo months ago and i mentioned about it in this part of the island during the 1920s you see there was only two on the island and canton valley out in the east and it was planted and then later on they come back and they find couple more this plant they find now is in the northwest and they go very tall plant and in the olden days you will use dcf for making house make baskets and everything for this plant and very slow growing plants and so in our book the extremely rare plant so you want to find this other part of the island and this turned into the culture of the washington islands now in center of the sinjar much more of these that will find the same christmas this part of the island everything happened here in terms of the fireborn 1878 the northwest and time of 1848 emancipation the northwest and time of the maroon hiding the northwest and the connection to the other part of the world the northwest where columbus came in the northeast and other sides everything happening or not so that will tell you that it needs to be protected extremely rich in history and so other part of the silver right now is secondary forest this is the burden on powers that remain less than one percent and that's that's pretty sad for 84 square miles this is native white daisy it's a family today guess what mexico no it's a wild daisy sunflower sunflower look in your body you have the red blood cell and white what the red blood cell does in the body what pop about the function the red blood cells that help to fight the disease within plants no different they have certain mechanisms that fight up disease or pests so if you're going commercially if you're growing like sunflower in a particular disease that attack the plant so what scientists do is they get these take a certain chromosome or strains and then they inject it into the plant commercially so this is that can help save our industry but it must be for the same family you can use for example you can't use for example like the genitals okay if they use this so that's how important but again common people don't know that they don't know this there's some florida to eat that this plant can save the industry this is another native species we call it pasta fiddle it's edible um they bare berries and you can eat the berries and this other native species use them many years ago for making furniture and during the spring time and this will be loaded with a pretty pretty pretty fruit i took my orange and then turned to black and i see here this fan doesn't also like red beads this this is alternative plant they call it bristle that pretty pretty pretty flowers during the spring it's a little plant i see now this plant here gotta look for the one this one is spicy guava there's two in here all 20 years old i see if you look in the paris right now you see begin to change um as you come if you're looking down there you don't see a guinea grass or anything if you write up and then from there the firefly can totally change so that's native and the secretary right back then i got a huge big one in there 25 and they could take a picture of it so these are right in spicy guava spicy guava yeah any reason why they call it spicy guava they they they lift this almost like how's the product like cinnamon very spicy we'll take a closer look at this street in just a bit right now we're about to enter the region of the virgin forest right away you notice a change in the surrounding vegetation the underbrush has disappeared and all that can be seen are native plants and trees here's a better look at that spicy guava this one's much bigger and older than the one we saw earlier this tree is over 20 years old and if you're wondering how it got its name well it's because of its leaves once crushed the spicy guava's leaves give off an aroma similar to cinnamon as alaska explains its leaves are once used for flavoring cakes and for various medicinal purposes it's very hard to get into the heart of the virgin forest but if you look behind me here's an example of what it's like thick vegetation with enough space for you to walk through this is an overview of the virgin forest a magnificent site to get to it you have to go down the very steep slope it's a very dangerous climb down and because of safety concerns i didn't get a chance to descend into the virgin forest however several crew members stepped up to the plate and gave it a shot with helmets and rope crew members began making their way down and immediately realized why this area is still considered virgin whoa good thing i stayed above on solid ground now the crew was only able to go down as far as 300 feet it would take another six to seven hundred feet of room to reach the bottom nonetheless they were still able to capture a glimpse of the forest that once upon a time covered most of the island do so do now rare plants are not the only interesting things that can be found in this area according to mr davis the puerto rican owl makes its home in the virgin forest it's endemic to both puerto rico and sanchoroy but a sighting of this endangered bird is very rare the last time mr davis saw one in this area was 15 years ago and with another six to seven hundred feet to go down you can see our chances slipping away from a lush and touched area to a mahogany experiment we leave behind the virgin forest and travel to the middle of the island where we come across a four straight furman that dates back about 50 years once again we are joined by mr davis who takes us into the area known as the mahogany forest the area we're in is called estate thomas it lies in one of the more populated regions of st roy about 25 of the island's population lies immediately around this peaceful size of protected land here you have aborted parts of the northern part of the island it's not being touched by man and in this side here this fires with the white man when the first place that established mahogany was a state bellevue and for extended bellevue they came over to estate thomas we are today which is the estee tamas resort forest facility this was done during the late 1950s early 1960s where the usda established a holiday plus acres of land and where they grow from tick to different type of mahogany this right here is the tick tree it grows very straight and is described as a strong wood that's good for furniture making apparently the teak trees didn't do so well in this part of the island but the mahogany sure did and in this area there are several types the with 150 plus acres of land from the hillside from the hillside coming down you have the larger type of paris mahogany trees you know the trees in here magnet trees are not the same type you got different variety and one you saw earlier with the proficient mahogany and you had you have african mahogany for example you have many different type of mahogany and then you have the west indie mahogany in fact we developed the hybrid mahogany where they get the long-leaf mahogany charlotte mahogany and it creates a hybrid the hybrid now is grow and then it's spread out more like for urban setting you know driving for example this mahogany here you see they go straight up go right up you can go up to 60 70 feet tall depending on the variety so during one of the benefits of this during the 60s and the 50s they created other species we call it the hybrid mahogany tree which you have on synchros although the hybrid was developed in the 1960s the ability of the mahogany tree to adapt to the island was noticed over a century before when the danes inhabited the island the day basically was the last one the last european came to this part of the wall and as they came into the land they began to clear the forest and fires were like gold hundreds of tick trees huge trees and it was cut down to build sugar milk great house and a like and the woods were actually shipped off to especially to the british west indies and to europe as well thing gets so bad that their man passed a lot to protect the forest so during the 1770 they imported mahogany into the island that's why tourism all over um saint chris another interesting thing about this estate thomas site it's the only major public forest in the interior of saint croix yes it started off as an experiment but it has grown to become a secondary forest that is a woodland area that has regrown over a major disturbance this service this is not a true paris policy this is man-made if you leave it alone for the next 150 years then it becomes um from secondary paris and eventually how thing goes this could go right about 150 i don't have 100 years 200 years or 300 years and it began to establish itself so a lot of these trees in here you might not see in here you see all the species of trees in here because the fire is harvested changing all the time it is said that a healthy planet needs healthy forests thriving forest stabilized soils regulate water cycles and moderate climate by capturing and storing carbon dioxide in other words we need them more than they need us so until next time cherish your home this beautiful island but most of all cherish each other you