Adventures in the Wild

Baie d’Upi - Ballade en Pirogue

 After getting an overview of the island from the top of Pic N’ga I was no longer happy to spend the rest of my time at Baie Kuto as it was pretty clear that the eastern part of the island was nothing short of spectacular, so in the afternoon I booked myself on the Ballade en Pirogue, a tour that is almost de rigeur for anyone that comes to the Isle of Pines.

The tour starts at Baie de Saint Joseph just east of Vao. The pirogues, in the interests of efficiency, have been enhanced somewhat with outboard motors, so our skipper motored out into the Baie, the better to catch the wind. The pirogue then sails up the Baie d’Upi through a landscape that is made for postcards, tropical forest with coconuts coming down to the shore, turquoise water, turtles below, ospreys circling above.

Of course I focussed on the two most photogenic, and also easily photographed subjects, the skipper of our pirogue, and the amazing limestone formations mushrooming out of the bay, often in combination. I’m rather happy with the few photos that weren’t too blurry, too overexposed, or just a bit dull.

At the northern end of the bay we disembarked for a short walk through forest to the northern shore. This forest was one that I would have liked to photograph more, but I’d already exhausted my memory card on the pirogue. I did manage a few photos of the dominant impressions, an enormous species of tree which I haven’t identified as well as the occasional photogenic strangler fig.

 Finally the walk comes out at Baie d’Oro where a small inlet separates some islands from the mainland, all surrounded by those signature pines. Paradise.

Striping

The standard argument for striping in animals is that it acts as disruption colouration breaking up the animal’s outline and so making it hard to recognise and perhaps having the secondary benefit of making it hard to follow. I actually hadn’t thought about such things with respect to sea snakes, until I saw a few more sea kraits on another walk out on the shore. Sea kraits still lay eggs, and so they need to come back to land to lay them. Besides this, they still spend a lot of time on land even when not breeding which is why I seem to keep running into them on my walks along the coast on the Isle of Pines.

Sea kraits are almost all banded, which should make them very conspicuous in open water, and this seems curious, until one realises that these are snakes that spend very little time in open water. On the other hand they do spend significant time on the seashore where their colouration would be an advantage. Indeed the common sea krait that I keep seeing on Isle of Pines has a light brown head with the same colour often showing itself in the bands which in other sea kraits would be white. Looking at this photo, it is pretty easy to see how well this works as camouflage, whilst at the same time making it very difficult to see the snake as a whole animal. What a fitting tribute to the Isle of Pines, to have a sea krait whose colouration and scales perfectly match the fallen Araucaria columnaris branchlets. I understand that this particular sea krait is endemic to New Caledonia, and now that makes perfect sense, since Araucaria columnaris is is also limited to New Caledonia.

Pic N'ga

Pic N'ga, its flanks clothed in maquis minier with here and there the red ultrabasic rock showing through, is a reminder that Isle of Pines was once a part of Grand Terre. I must have been missing the maquis, because while I found it hard to find much of interest in the tropical forest that clothed the lowlands on the walk to the peak, as soon as the elevation started to climb, and the vegetation cover changed from forest to scrub, I felt my spirits lift. This is a familiar habitat now, with many familiar plants that I have seen elsewhere in the island, indeed Pic N'ga reminds me strikingly of Mont Yago at the other end of Grand Terre, and of course it is also in the maquis minier that the relationships between the New Caledonian flora and Australia are most striking.

Any Australian would be able to recognise this as a Grevillea. Grevillea gillivrayi is one of only three species of Grevillea found in the territory, although each of these is incredibly variable and a splitter could create more species in future. All of the Grevilleas I have seen seem to have a dual strategy in both their presentation of their leaves and their flowers. Grevilleas here generally have a compact bushy form, which may also produce flowers, above which sprout long, leggy canes carrying flowers and much reduced leaves. I’ve seen this sort of form in the Western Australian Grevilleas, such as Grevillea leucopteris, but in Western Australia the differentiation has usually gone further with leafless flowering canes rising above a dense leafy shrub. So the Grevilleas in New Caledonia would seem to be hedging their bets.

This feathery leaf just had to be a member of the Proteaceae, and on seeing its flowers, I could confirm its identity as Stenocarpus.

Stenocarpus is a rather small genus in Australia, consisting largely of rainforest trees, but with an odd outlier in the form of beefwood Stenocarpus salignus, a species of brigalow scrubs. But in New Caledonia, Stenocarpus is generally associated with the maquis. This species Stenocarpus milnei is endemic to New Caledonia, but found throughout the main island and obviously on the Isle of Pines.

One or perhaps two species of Scaevola. Scaevola is an enormous family of shrubs and groundcovers in Australia. The New Caledonian complement is equally speciose, although the flower type tends to be more uniform with all species that I have seen sporting white or creamy white flowers.

This species is curious. Although it is in the pea family, the standard construction of the pea flower has been essentially turned on its head with the flowers presented upside down in a remodelling of the standard insect attracting design of most peas to instead be serviced by birds.

The floral parts have been elongated, but unusually with the keel longer than both the wings and the standard, and in keeping with birds’ colour preferences the flowers are all red. It’s a good example of the changes that evolution can make to a basic design given enough time.

Pic N'ga is only 262m above sea level, but it’s the highest peak on the island, so unsurprisingly the views from the top are spectacular.

A viewing point halfway up provides stunning views of the bays around Kuto where I’m staying, while further up one has a view north across the entire island.

To my surprise, much of the island to the north of the range is clothed by pines. But not what you might expect, but rather a degraded savannah dotted with Carribean Pine Pinus caribea, so that I have now lost all inclination to explore those parts of the island off the tourist trail. It would appear that there is a very good reason that the tourist attractions are concentrated where they are. From the top of Pic N'ga it becomes clear that they are located on the most intact beaches and headlands with their dramatic populations of columnar pines.