Passages taken from “A Botanical History of the Islands of Macaronesia” by Prof. Sir Mackenzie Fernsby, Fellow of the Royal Society. Published 1961.

 

The process by which islands are colonised with plant and animal life are by now well researched and, in places where new islands are born from the sea by volcanism, may be actively observed. For the islands of Macaronesia - the collective name for the archipelagos of Cape Verde, the Canary Islands, Madeira and the Savage Islands, the Azores, and the Papagaios – this process was undoubtedly the same, albeit having taken place in ages long past.

 

For those islands closer to the African coast, colonisation would have been faster than the mid-Atlantic Azores and Papagaios, and while the former share the majority of their species with the continental neighbour, the latter collected species from Africa, Europe, and in a few rare cases, the Americas.

 

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It would not have been long after the molten lava cooled into rock that the first seabirds roosted on Papagaios. There would have been no plants here at that time, but spores of mosses and other bryophytes, blown on the wind or stuck to the feathers of seabirds, would soon begin the long process of wearing down the rock and building up the first soils. As the soils grew deeper and richer then would ferns, grasses and sedges took root, creating vast grasslands in the drier areas, and misty fields of dense ferns in the wetter ones.

 

In time, the first trees grew. As with the previous species, they may have arrived on the wind or water, or carried by unsuspecting seabirds, but more likely is dispersal via the droppings of songbirds. The ancestral kingrays, believed to be an animal similar to the thrush. Hardy and adaptable birds, they would have eked out a living among the grasses and ferns, while the seeds deposited in the droppings on first arrival would begin the slow journey of growing into trees.

 

The presence of trees provided more opportunities for the kingrays and a partnership would have soon blossomed; the trees provide food and shelter for the birds who in turn spread their seeds across the islands. Of course, not all of the archipelago is suited to bear forests due to factors such as altitude, temperature, moisture and soil type, and so, in the fullness of time, the present biomes of Papagaios were formed.

 

Laurisilva forests, once common across the Mediterranean, dominated the misty lowlands and valleys. Species of laurel, viburnum, olive, holly and vaccinium, once indistinguishable from the mainland kin, became new species in their own right. Many of these species produced nuts, berries and fruits that encouraged the kingrays and native lizards to speciate further. Of the plant species endemic to the islands, some exploited niches rarely if ever seen elsewhere.

 

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Millennia of volcanism, earthquakes and erosion have left the Papaigos a land of mountains, cliffs and ravines. Most trees are not hardy enough to survive the bare stone and howling gales, but the cliff juniper (Juniperus papagaiica) has become master of the inhospitable.