Antigua and Barbuda: a harbour offered in 1725, a 3,600 ha lobster-nursery lagoon and a snake back from about 50

UNESCO inscribed the Antigua Naval Dockyard and Related Archaeological Sites in 2016; the property covers 255 ha, with a buffer zone of 3,873 ha. The Antigua and Barbuda National Parks Authority dates the harbour’s naval story to 1725, when sugar planters offered it to the British Crown, and says most of the Dockyard’s buildings went up between 1780 and 1820. It adds that more than 75 per cent of the Dockyard’s workers were historically enslaved Africans, among them shipwrights, blacksmiths, carpenters, caulkers and sailmakers. UNESCO’s statement singles out how the buildings were adapted: the Officers’ Quarters and the Senior Officer’s House gained features such as storm shutters and verandas to suit the Caribbean climate, and Clarence House shows English Georgian architecture modified for the tropical heat and the threat of disease.[1][2]

The western and north-western side of Barbuda, beside Codrington, the island’s only town, forms Ramsar site no. 1488, designated in 2005 and about 3,600 ha in size. The 2006 Ramsar Information Sheet, compiled by the national Fisheries Division, describes mangroves, seagrass beds, algal mats, tidal and mud flats, beaches and coral reefs, and says the lagoon is known as a primary nursery site for the Caribbean spiny lobster, Panulirus argus: larvae can be carried for thousands of kilometres by currents before settling among seagrass and algae, and the lobsters move to offshore reefs as they mature. It reports that more than half of the working population regularly used the lagoon for some part of their fishing, that hawksbill, green and leatherback turtles nest on beaches within the site, and that tourism there is largely centred on the frigate bird nesting colony. The lagoon was declared the Lagoon National Park in 2004; the sheet notes that management plans had yet to be developed.[3][4]

Fauna & Flora says the Antiguan racer, Alsophis antiguae, is found only in Antigua and Barbuda, and that after rats and mongooses were introduced it declined until, by 1995, only about 50 survived on one offshore islet. A 2001 paper in the journal Oryx places those survivors on Great Bird Island, off Antigua’s north-east coast, and reports that the number of racers aged a year or more had fluctuated between 51 and 114 over five years. Fauna & Flora then describes the removal of rats from Great Bird Island and from 14 other islands around Antigua, followed by reintroductions to Rabbit, Green and York islands, and puts the wild population today at over 1,100 across four sites. It lists the snake as Critically Endangered, says it feeds on lizards and is harmless to people, and notes that it has twice been wrongly declared extinct, in 1936 and 2009.[5][6]