On the drive in, our small group of birdwatchers passes young boys fetching the day’s water in plastic buckets and a woman soaping down a little girl standing in a bucket of water. People still bathe, wash and haul drinking water from the stream. Little has changed here in the last 100 years. The contrast between our lifestyles and standard of living distracts me. But I have trouble concentrating on the wildlife. Like Franklin’s home, we have neither electricity nor water.Īfter our brief conversation, Franklin strolls down the lane to begin his day, and I wind my way along a tangled forest trail in Jamaica to search for parrot nests.
I’m staying in Windsor Great House, a plantation home, built in 1795 from immense blocks of slave-quarried limestone.
Self-sustaining farmers spend their days laboring to uphold an uneasy truce between their postage-stamp fields of sugarcane, coffee, and root crops and the ever-encroaching jungle.įranklin sits by the road all day in a small wood-frame shack and sells snacks and directs tourists to the nearby bat-filled Windsor Cave, which has beautiful limestone formations. The mountains spring out of narrow valleys leaving little tillable ground for crops. Maintenance of the only road through the area was abandoned years ago. By Ron Knight from Seaford, East Sussex, United Kingdom By Ron Knight from Seaford, East Sussex, United Kingdom (Ring-tailed Pigeon) via Wikimedia Commons
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