A new reference book on Bermuda?s natural history hit bookshelves on Thursday evening.

?The Natural History of Bermuda? was written by Dr. Thomas Thomas who has worked with both the Bermuda Biological Station for Research and the Bermuda Zoological Society/Bermuda Aquarium Museum and Zoo.

Dr. Thomas, first came to the Island in 1970 from Canada ? although he was born in London ? to assist students at the BBSR and he has written several books on Bermuda over the years.

But ?The Natural History of Bermuda? is a book which encompasses all of the Island?s animals, marine life, amphibians and plants, he said.

?The information is there in lots of different places, but this is one book which will hold all the data for everyone.?

The book has been a long time coming, Dr. Thomas began the book in 1995, finished the writing process in 2000, but it has taken a further four years in the editing and publishing stages.

But it has been a labour of love as his fascination with Bermuda?s natural wonders has grown steadily since he arrived on the Island.

?When I got here I was teaching marine biology and then I got interested in everything, because it is so fantastically interesting and different,? he said. ?I gradually broadened until I was teaching Island ecology instead of marine ecology.

?And then I moved up here (BZS/BAMZ) in the end from the Biological Station and ran courses for teachers and one on Nonsuch Island for high school kids.?

He said the book has been distributed to all of the Island?s schools and will be used for educational purposes and a companion guide has also been developed.

?We go beyond (The Natural History of Bermuda) in a series called Project Nature where we offer specific field trips to each place,? he said. ?If I tell you about mangrove swamps, Project Nature will say go to such and such mangrove swamp and do this, that and the other.

?So, the kids then get first hand experience and are able to identify everything.

?In the book there are nice looking pictures, but in Project Nature there is a picture and a line drawing of every common thing that they could possibly see.

?We are just wrapping up with an overall one, which has the whole of Bermuda in one and has dozens of field trips and all the animals and plants illustrated.

?We think it will be really useful and an extension of the book.?

Dr. Thomas said the book was written for everyone.

?It is written for kids on up,? he said. ?But it is not necessarily complete if you were teaching about it.

?It gives the main principles and characteristics of animals and plants ? it doesn?t go into great detail.

?Where as the other series that we are doing goes into greater detail. I think together they will make a good combination.?

The idea for the book was an involuntary act, he said, as everything that he had done was leading to it.

?It was sort of automatic really,? Dr. Thomas said. ?If you come to Bermuda from somewhere else, it is really frustrating because you can?t find anything about anything.

?You look for a book on Bermuda and all you can find is a couple of touristy kind of books, but nothing on natural history or geology.

?So you immediately have to go to the libraries for that material, which is scattered through millions of documents.

?So I thought it was time somebody pulled all that together, so when I retired in 1995 then I started on the book.?

The Bermuda Zoological Society sponsored the publishing of the book.

?The proceeds from the book?s sale will go towards helping to support BZS/BAZMS,? he said.

?This is my eleventh book, I wrote three on Canadian subjects and the rest on Bermuda, but the other one I wrote on Bermuda was a scientific text that has been used in courses.

?It was co-authored by a geologist friend of mine and we put that together in 1982.

?The others are educational books.?

Dr. Thomas said a love for science was something that he always had.

?My whole family is science minded,? he said. ?I was born in London, England, just before the second world war and we were there for the first year of the war and a bomb landed right in our backyard, but it didn?t go off.

?It was a huge bomb sitting there and it was like ?I think we better move?.

?So we moved to the Midlands where we had more family and it was out in the country, in a little village, where my love for natural history really got going.

?And it has been biology all the way since then, which spread out within biology ? oceanography, marine biology and fishery science.?

The next question was what attracted Dr. Thomas on our Island shores.

?I think there are so many challenges here that the first is to make Bermuda better known to Bermudians and to visitors alike,? he said.

?The second one is, when you come here for ten years or more, you see what?s happening and it is not good on the whole.

?Losing unique species, losing the places where they live, more and more pollution, and although steps are being taken, it isn?t under control yet. You want to do what you can to at least slow that down ? you know you can never stop it in a place that is as densely populated as this, but you can slow it down and it is slowing down.

?The main worry for people like me is, ?can we do it on time to stop the loss?? Because we are finding new things all the time too, but they were here all the time. It?s not like they have been added. Well things are added, but not naturally and that is part of the trouble in Bermuda.

?There are things that people have brought in and if you look out on the land now and there is virtually nothing that is natural. You know we have no stretch of original woodland left ? nothing ? now they are all fiddlewoods, all introduced.?

Dr. Thomas said the Bermuda cedar blight was a good example of the havoc that can result from non-endemic species being introduced.

?Look at the Bermuda cedar, a Bermudian tree that evolved here and the wood is fantastic for furniture making and it was heavily exploited in the beginning for practical purposes. Then, when the place got affluent, somebody wanted other relatives of Bermuda cedar in the garden they bought those over.

?On those were diseases, which spread to the Bermuda cedar and because it evolved here in the absence of its natural diseases, it didn?t need any protection and it really clobbered it.

?It?s happened with lots of things.?

Although, Dr. Thomas pointed out that the cedar trees that had seemingly died out and are now sprouting branches are providing a new resource.

?You see that shows they probably had some resistance and someone has gathered seeds from them and propagated them and now they have more resistant ones,? he said. ?But they are not totally resistant, but the ones they are planting now are quite resistant.

?They won?t get killed, although they may get slowed down. So that is one of the good things, the cedars are coming back.?

But other natural treasures are being lost.

?One thing that isn?t coming back is the skink, said Dr. Thomas. ?There are just a few little pockets that are on the South Shore and they are not doing well.?

Dr. Thomas said there was some new legislation which has provided protection for the Island?s critically endangered species.

?Once they are put on that list, and the skink is on it, we have to come up with a plan to bring them back again,? he said. ?It is no good putting them on the list if you know nothing about them and you know you can?t bring them back.

?The next step is to work out a survival plan and then hopefully it will come back again.

?We are at the beginning of doing that. The law is passed, but the list is not complete ? that is ongoing.?

Just about everything killed off the skink, said Dr. Thomas.

?Habitat destruction would be number one and the second big problem with skinks is that they have pads instead of claws and the skink loves to crawl into bottles, but it can?t get out,? he said. ?So hundreds and hundreds have died in bottles, so certainly trash was a big problem.

?The other problem is that they are probably getting eaten by a variety of birds like the kiskadee and the yellow crown night heron, who mostly eats land crabs, but there is a suspicion that it is eating the odd skink too.

?Before man came, the yellow crown night heron was common and they ate only land crabs, then with the onslaught of man it died out. It was eradicated. It was bought back from somewhere in the Caribbean by Dr. David Wingate, but they are not identical to the ones that were exterminated, you see.

?And they have a wider diet, which has certainly decreased the land crab population. So maybe they are a bit over populated now and the balance is not perfect. Even a slight change like that coming from another place ? the balance is difficult to restore.

?They bought in the Jamaican anol to eat scale on the oranges and they bought in the kiskadee to eat them, but you hardly see a kiskadee eating an anol ? they eat the Bermuda skink ? obnoxious little bird.

?But sometimes you wonder if you can win, but you can win some.?

Dr. Thomas said another problem is with the terapin, little turtles, which people brought in.

?They were sold in pet stores and then people got tired of them and tipped them in the pond and now there are millions and millions of them and they are eating everything in the fresh water,? he said. ?The fresh water is in trouble here anyway and they have tipped the balance right over ? so we are losing some species in fresh water that are unique to Bermuda because of them. Somebody bought them in had them for a few years later you let them loose.

?Snakes fortunately have never made it.?

The book also covers Portuguese man of war, squids like the vampire squid, which is black, and reef squids.

?Most of the marine stuff is that way and very little of it is endemic because the seas are connected,? he said.

?Our own larvae from our lobsters gets carried away to the north where it doesn?t stand a chance and that is the same with the fish, they are constantly replenished.?