IN the old days, pirates headed through the Hungry Bay mangroves on their way to pillage homes on Point Finger Road in Paget.

That's how the story goes, anyway, but real treasure lies in the mangroves. You don't have to dig to find the goods, you just have to look around. Bermuda's mangroves are one of the world's natural wonders.

Hungry Bay is Bermuda's largest mangrove habitat. Three years ago, Hungry Bay, and six other wetlands in Bermuda were added to the international list of wetlands under the Iran Ramsar Convention of 1971.

On Sunday, the Bermuda, Aquarium, Museum & Zoo (BAMZ) will offer a rare opportunity to tour the Hungry Bay mangroves. By press-ime 16 people had signed up for the 20-person tour. Space is limited and reservations must be made ahead of time.

The mangroves on the tour are located on private property and are rarely open to the public.

BAMZ offers similar guided tours of different areas of Bermuda throughout the year, but the tours are largely a missed opportunity by the general public. Often the tours have to be cancelled for lack of interest.

This week, the Mid-Ocean News met with Bobbii Cartwright, BAMZ interpretive tour co-ordinator, for a sneak peak at the Hungry Bay mangroves.

A TOUR through the mangroves with Bobbii Cartwright is as much a spiritual experience as a quest for natural treasure. "Be quiet," ordered Ms Cartwright. "Close your eyes and meditate."

Ms Cartwright led the way through a thick tangle of red mangroves around Hungry Bay. The going was rough. This is no place for expensive shoes. There was no clear path through the mangroves, just slippery rocks, hyperdermic saw grass, spiders and piles of ankle-twisting vegetative debris.

I wobbled on a slippery rock and tried to obey Ms Cartwright's command.

"Good," she whispered. "Now what do you hear?"

Nothing.

"No. No," said Ms Cartwright. "Listen again."

"The mangles", as Ms Cartwright calls them, weren't silent at all, merely peaceful. There was no distant roar of traffic, only surf pounding against the nearby South Shore. Water lapped gently in a hidden lagoon among the trees. A white-eyed vireo (chick-of-the-village) warbled and danced through the trees. Leaves rustled in the breeze. Mosquitos buzzed as they merrily fed off the reporter.

"I love the meditation exercise, because when people open their eyes, their faces are so different from when they closed them," said Ms Cartwright. "I tell them: 'You should try this on any nature trail, even if you are walking with your family and kids.'

"It helps you realise what is really around you. It is wonderful if you are stressed, or your phones have been ringing off the hook all week."

BERMUDA'S mangroves are the northernmost in the Atlantic Ocean. There are only about 44 acres of mangrove habitat left, distributed around 30 swamps. This is less than half the pre-colonial amount.

There are inland stands of mangroves unique to Bermuda. They were formed when the island was flooded after the ice ages and the earth warmed up. Mangroves established themselves once the climate stabilised.

Ms Cartwright pointed to another white-eyed vireo flitting in the trees. The birds are known for their "twitchy" personalities.

"That's another reason why this habitat is so important," said Ms Cartwright. "It is so undisturbed. That's a chick-of-the-village. There are also black and white warblers in the mangroves. There are Louisiana waterthrushes. But they have done their migration by now.

"There wouldn't be many of them except for a few stragglers. The chick-of-the-village or white-eyed vireo in Bermuda is almost totally flightless because it has no predators except cats. You wouldn't believe what we see in here when we're doing tours."

Ms Cartwright wore a brown hat with a cocky red feather in the side, making her seem like the Indiana Jones of Hungry Bay.

"People often say, 'How do you know that's there'?" she said after examining a native spider. "You study nature and you look for the slightest movement. I do snorkel tours, too. It's the same underwater. Any movement means a live animal."

Ms Cartwright said during high tide the water comes right up through the mangroves. She pointed to a still lagoon with an avenue of water leading away through the trees.

"That opening right there leads directly into Hungry Bay," she said. "That is a channel."

There were various species of fish swimming about in the shallow water.

"We are planning to do a fish survey up here," she said. "But we have to come at high tide so we can swim under the mangroves. You can see the fish in there. See the parrot fish down there? Those are stoplight parrot fish. They come right up in here to feed. There are damsel fish down there and sergeant majors.

"As part of my work at BAMZ, I have to count fish. We do surveys for the Reef Environmental Education Foundation of Florida. That is part of our biodiversity project. We have to identify and count every fish in Bermuda."

Although it sounds like a daunting task, Ms Cartwright said counting fish was easier than it sounded.

"You don't actually count 'one, two, three'," she said. "It sounds totally horrendous, but you have categories of 'few, many and abundant'. Few is anywhere from one to ten. Many is 11 to 100. Over 100 is abundant."

The focus of the BAMZ tour will be on mangroves and land crabs.

"This is the main habitat for the land crab, specifically the endangered giant land crab," she said. "Their territory is so threatened they have even wandered their way up to the hospital."

She led us further through the mangroves until we found ourselves on a sandy beach among the black mangroves. Distantly, there was the remains of a small fort built hundreds of years ago to protect the bay from the aforementioned pirates.

This is the home of the giant land crab. Some major excavations have been going on. Large piles of mud lay about next to holes. They more resembled gopher holes than crab holes.

The black mangroves are different from the red ones, because they must grow above the high-water mark. They also grow more land-ward. These trees have stubble like air-breathing roots called pneumatophores that take air into the mud. The seeds are smaller, bean-like and can float a long distance. The leaves secrete salt. In some countries the salt is harvested.

There are two species of mangrove trees, the red mangroves and the black mangroves.

Red mangroves are so called because inside their bark is blood red. They have prop-like roots that act as stilts to support the tree standing in the mud. The prop roots act as a reverse osmosis plant to remove salt. Salt is also secreted into dying leaves that take the salt with them when they fall. Little nodule-like bumps on the roots of the mangroves called lenticels move air to the roots.

Red mangroves have a large seed which germinates while still on the tree, called a propagule. It has a root that points downward. It falls off and spears itself into the mud or it floats before anchoring itself.

"Bermuda's mangroves have less diversity than mangroves to the south but are important, because they provide the coastline with shelter," said Ms Cartwright.

"They act as a nursery ground for young fish as the waters are quiet and protected. The mangrove provides a good example of the web of life. Decaying mangrove leaves provide food for plankton that in turn feed the juvenile fish."

Ms Cartwright says some of the problems in the mangrove swamps include trash that floats up under the mangroves, and invasive plant species such as Brazil pepper, Chinese fan palm and Suriname cherry.

"Endemic species such as buttonwood lives at the land-ward edge of the mangroves," she said.

"Both buttonwood, black mangrove and bay grape are out-competed on the land-ward edge of the mangroves by invasive species."

For more information about BAMZ tours call 293-2727.