WHEN FRED BURTON arrivedin the Cayman Islands from Cambridge University in 1979, the research assistant set his sights on one animal: the mosquito. But one day, while he conducted a mosquito-control survey, a completely different creature had its eye on Burton. "There was a red eye staring at me from underneath a tree," he says. "As I looked closer, I realized it was this big, spiky blue reptile. I wondered if I was hallucinating. I had no idea something like that even existed." That "something" was the blue iguana, a critically endangered lizard. The encounter was fascination at first sight for Burton, who has devoted his career to the protection and propagation of this iconic animal of the Cayman Islands. Feral dogs, cats and green iguanas had ravaged the blue iguana population to the point that by 2002, only 10 to 25 of the iguanas were thought to exist in the wild, a number that made them "functionally extinct." Burton spearheaded a conservation effort to restore the population to 1,000, starting with the hundreds of eggs he hatched in his home office. He also secured a protected inland preserve from the government and launched a conservation facility in Grand Cayman's Queen Elizabeth Ⅱ Botanic Park, where visitors can take a behind-the-scenes tour and see these exotic creatures up close.
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