Puerto Rico’s El Yunque National Forest is the only tropical forest in the US Forest Service system, a small (28,000 acres) but rich patch of land featuring hundreds of species of trees, ferns, orchids, and bromeliads along with impressive numbers of lizards and tree frogs. For well over a century, scientists have carried out investigations here, making El Yunque one of the most studied tracts of tropical rain forest in the world.
View to Mt. Britton Tower
Being the author of a book on El Yunque, I’ve been asked by many people about its condition following Hurricane Maria’s path of destruction across Puerto Rico in September, 2017. I give them a stock answer from the hurricane chapter in my book. Though these storms are devastating to manmade structures, they are just another event, a series of factors the forest grows up with and adjusts to, an ever-repeating cycle of life that aids in the grand diversity of a tropical rain forest.
However, when I returned to Puerto Rico in mid-March, several people intimately connected to El Yunque told me how much it has changed, how skeletal it looks compared to the forest of old, how sad it is to go there. I began to fear what I would find. One day I visited and saw for myself. Following are my observations:
Bamboo
El Yunque is still lush and green. Leafy shrubs, tall grasses, and liana vines intertwine close to the road. Creaking bamboo remain, but the perky pink impatiens have vanished. Sierra palms are everywhere. During a hurricane, they tend to lose their fronds, and the slender trunks stay anchored to the ground with fingerlike prop roots. Wherever I look, newly grown fronds up to twenty feet long tangle above the forest floor.
Most noticeable is the absence of the forest canopy, the leaves and upper branches of the tallest trees. All that remain are vine-covered trunks and severed branches pointing upward. In windward patches of ridge, gray branches of deadened trees predominate. The forest is more exposed, with wide expanses of sky and coastline and views to stone towers and massive rock formations. Light-loving pioneer tree saplings shoot up in the sunny openings.
The forest is quieter, with fewer bird chirps and frog chants. Only two of El Yunque’s 56 Puerto Rican parrots in the wild survived the hurricane (others survive in captivity and in another forest.) The grassland coqui frog species have fared better than their relatives who prefer shady forest. But the streams still ripple down the mountainside, and pools beckon sweaty hikers.
Visitors have returned to El Yunque. However, the manmade infrastructure – roads and visitor centers, trails and restrooms – is only partially ready for them.
El Yunque is starting out on a new cycle of growth. The pioneer tree species will mature, shading the forest and paving the way for more majestic canopy species to follow. Perhaps in twenty years those who become acquainted with El Yunque now will bemoan all the trees blocking farflung views to towers and coast. Who knows?
Sierra palms