Analysis of information sources in references of the Wikipedia article "Juniperus bermudiana" in English language version.
When Bermuda was colonized in 1610 the islands were obviously very heavily wooded with Juniperus bermudiana. Great numbers of the trees were felled for shipbuilding, and much of it was used as fuel.
{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)Seymour's Pond Nature Reserve. Under the management of the Bermuda Audubon Society, this 1-hectare (2 1/2-acre) site attracts the occasional birder as well as romantic couples looking for a little privacy. Just past the pond, you'll spot pepper trees and old cedars that escaped the blight;
This tree-covered much of the island, but the forest was decimated first by settlers, and then later by an infestation of scale. It is an event known today as "the blight." This caused a variety of pollinators to become extinct and is a harrowing example of how unchecked human development can cause a catastrophe in the natural world.
Dark Bottom, a dense forest of cedar trees just below the lighthouse where he and his friends played.
"It was not scary by day, but at night if you had to cross that going somewhere you made time," the 75-year-old said. "There was no stopping."
He thinks the story was made up to ensure the neighbourhood children were home on time.
"We thought it was extraordinary that the beast had five fingers," he said.
The trees were killed by the cedar blight in the late early 1950s
Mr. Groves, who was made an Officer of the Order of the British Empire for his services to Bermuda and agriculture, was Assistant Director of Agriculture in the late 1940s when a blight decimated the Island's cedar forests.Sen. Walwyn Hughes, who would succeed Mr. Groves as Director of Agriculture in 1975, said Mr. Groves led the way in identifying trees to replace the dead cedars and went back and forth to the Caribbean to secure casuarinas and other trees."It fell to him and people like Jack King who were in the department then to virtually reforest the whole Island, Sen. Hughes said. 'He went back and forth bringing in the casuarinas and other trees.'
in the 1940s, two species of scale were accidentally introduced, and, unable to deal with this foreign pest, 95% of Bermuda's cedar trees were killed.
The 5% of trees who survived the blight were found to be resistant to the scale. These have been propagated since then, and the Bermuda cedar survives today.
Unfortunately the cedar was Bermuda's main tree cover up until the blight, with little diversity to fill the void when the trees died off. Thus, some species who depended on and thrived in its branches, such as bluebirds and white-eyed vireo became critically endangered along with it. Others, such as the endemic cicada went extinct without it.
An estimated 95 percent of the surviving population of native Bermuda cedar (Juniperus bermudiana) was destroyed between 1946 and 1951 (Rueger and von Wallmenich 1996), following the accidental introduction of two coccoid scale insects (Sterrer 1998a). Only an estimated one percent of the original cedar forest survived the blight (BBP 1997).