Critics say proposed Caribbean launch pad a big booby trap

Web posted May 4, 1999

By James Anderson
Associated Press Writer

SOMBRERO ISLAND, Anguilla -- Critics say a plan to build a rocket-launch pad on a desolate Caribbean island is a big booby trap.

Their biggest objections concern an environmental report that says at least 70 percent of the nesting habitat of the masked booby could be destroyed.

Beal Aerospace commissioned the report from the U.S. consulting firm ICF Kaiser International in its bid to build a spaceport on a rock less than a half-mile square that belongs to the British territory of Anguilla.

The island is a key waystation and nesting ground for thousands of web-footed boobies as well as terns and other seabirds.

Sombrero also is the world's only home to a species of black lizard, and it is on the route of migrating humpback whales and sea turtles.

The environmental report says the project's impact on all but the bird life would be negligible, Beal vice president David Spoede said. None of the birds are endangered or even threatened, he added.

Ornithologists, however, argue that the masked booby is a ``high priority'' species, meaning less than 4,500 of the birds remain. And they say the roseate tern and the least tern, considered to be in decline, also could be affected.

Britain's Royal Society for the Protection of Birds says consultants who made the assessment for Beal did not spend enough time on Sombrero.

Spoede said Beal has offered to find another bird sanctuary.

``That's about as harebrained an idea as I've ever heard,'' said Sir Emile Gumbs, Anguilla's former chief minister. ``If there was another island nearby where you could move birds to, they'd be there already.''