Hurricane Hugo, a few photos from the aftermath of Hurricane Hugo in 1989.

This tree was defoliated and stripped of most of its smaller branches.  In this particular area most trees sustaine extensive damage but remained standing.

In this area the trees were stripped clean of leaves and lianas and only the hard woody stems remained.  Unfortunately it is not easy to get a perspective in this photo this makes trees with substantial sized look like twigs.  To get an idea of the size look at the lower left corner of the photo were the remains of a palm frond can be seen.

In this area the wind were so fierce even the bark was stripped of some trees.  The top of this was ripped away by the wind.

Seven days after the hurricane some roads were still impassable due to the massive tree fall.

This part of the forest had faced the full brunt of the wild and the main color was that of the bare trunks and surviving braches of the trees.  Leaves which usually covered everything are nowhere in sight.

Forest damage over El Verde Station.

Shattered tree trunk

The entrance to the Caribbean National Forest, blocked by massive tree fall

Tree trunk sheared off 

Making the best of a bad situation some college students from El Verde Station go out to do some research.

These photos were taken seven days after Hurricane Hugo hit the northwest corner of the Island of Puerto Rico.  I was able to take them because Hector Colon invited me and Sandra Moya to see the damage inflicted by the hurricane to the forest of the area around El Yunque mountain, then know as the Caribbean National Forest.  We were shocked by the tremendous damage that the high wind inflicted to the forest.  In some parts it looked like someone had bombed the forest.  Bird mortality was high, as I recall half of all the Puerto Rican parrots in the forest perished as a result of the hurricane.  Other species were similarly affected. We traveled around the El Verde area.  We narrowly avoided being in the middle of a shoot out between cars that left several cars riddled with bullets by the side of the Espiritu Santo river bridge.  We were unnerved because we heard the shooting from the spot we were inside the forest a few hundred feet away from the bridge.  Although in some parts of the forest the damage was severe, in some sheltered parts the forest suffered much less damage.  But huge parts of the forest were defoliated in a way that I had never thought possible.  I took these photos and forgot about them for decades.  Due to poor storage they degraded considerably and some became damaged.  But even in their decay they give a powerful testimony of the awesome and frightful power of a tropical cyclone.

Pleurothallis ruscifolia a common but rarely noticed rainforest orchid

The flowers of Pleurothallis ruscifolia are small. green and translucid.

Pleuth. ruscifolia plants can be very common in their favored habitat

Pleurothallis ruscifolia is a small epiphytic orchid that is fairly easy to find in the upper eaches of the Sierra de Luquillo.   Because of its inconspicuous and small flowers it is not a subject of horticultural interest except for an extremely small number of orchidist whose focus is on orchids native of PR.  Even among those orchidists this species doesn't seem to be in favor as I have yet to see one of those even among the educational orchid displays that are specifically made to present a selection of native orchid species.

An extremely rare photo of a Triphora orchid from Puerto Rico

The photo was taken by Dr. Thomas White in the Sierra de Luquillo

A friend of mine Dr. Thomas White was hiking in the depths of one of the largest patches of primeval forest left in the island of Puerto Rico when he saw this flower. He took this photo and went on to do his work searching for rare endangered birds. It turns out to be a tropical Tripora. Photos of Triphora blooming in PR are unheard of as far as I am concerned. My botanists friends in the island are unfamiliar with this plant. It turns out that there are three species of Triphora in the island and this plant doesn't seem to quite fit any of them. Compounding the problem is the fact that reports say that one of the species has never been found with flowers. So with my friends permision I am posting the photo here to see if anyone can ID it. This photo is all we have as the plant appears to have vanished.

This plant was found by chance and the person who took the photo knew it was an orchid but didn't know how rare it is to see photos of this one. There are four species of Triphora reported from PR, trianthophora, hassleriana, surinamensis and lateralis. The specimens labeled trianthophora were reassesed as lateralis. However since lateralis has never been found in PR with flowers this ID is to a certain extent tentative. But the unusual disjunct range extension for trianthophora from Florida to PR, to quote Ackermann, may mean that it is not trianthophora.

Note:  It may be trianthophora after all.  The area where this plant grows was severely damaged by hurricane Maria.  It was an area with very old growth trees.  Hopefully the plant survived.



Lepanthes caritensis a rare Puerto Rican endemic orchid

Lepanthes caritensis

This orchid is rarely seen and even less often photographed.   Found only in particular mountains of the east of Puerto Rico this orchid is quite tiny and often overlook.  At one time they were thought to ocurr in a very restricted area where only 196 individuals were known to ocurr.  Amazingly half of the plants of the species were found in a single tree!  But it now appears to have a wider distribution than was realized.  I found a few plants but sadly after hurricane Earl thinned the canopy in the area where they grew they dissapeared.   Hopefully one day I will find more plants to photograph.  This plant is not in circulation in the orchid growing circles, I know of just a single plant in captivity.  The photo I saw of the plant is apparently being cared by a particularly skilled orchidist as shows it thriving under cultivation.  However I ask you not to remove these plants from the wild as keeping them healthy and alive away from their natural habitat is not and endeavour for the casual orchidist and most likely will result in the death of the plant.

Dichaea hystricina an orchid native of Puerto Rico

The anchor shaped lip is shown to great advantage in this photo

These flowers are tiny and hard to see, the casual observer can easily miss them in the tangle of stems of the plant.

A young plant

A clump of stems

This small orchid is interesting because of its distinctive growth habit and its peculiar flowers. The stems are flattened and have monopodial distichous stems that vaguely resemble centipedes. The flowers are peculiar in the sense that they are build to be pollinated by euglossine bees, their distinctive lips look like tiny anchors. The last point is the notable because there are no euglossine bees in the the Greater Antilles. There were euglossine bees in the Caribbean in the distant past as evidenced on their presence on the amber found in the deposits in the Dominican Republic. But if there were any in Puerto Rico they are now extinct in here as well as in the other Greater Antilles. So what pollinates this flower in the wild in PR is something of a mystery although it would not be surprising if they turned out to be cleistogamic, that is that they self pollinate. I am fairly confident this plant is hystricina because the margins of the leaves are ciliate, a characteristic of this species.


This orchid has a wide distribution in the tropics in America and the West Indies. Given this huge distribution area that covers many islands and mountain ranges I wonder if in the future this species might get split into several species like they did with Epidendrum difforme. However that is for the taxonomist to decide, for the moment it is considered a single species with a large geographical distribution. Its preferred habitat is in the rain forest of the high mountains of Puerto Rico it is locally abundant and, st least for me, relatively easy to find. Finding the flowers is a matter of timing your visit to their native haunts to their blooming season. I have seen plants blooming here in August and September. It is reported that they bloom from August to November in PR. I have had a difficult time finding and photographing the flowers of this plant mainly due to the rainy nature of its favored haunts. In the Luquillo highlands it can rain at any time of the day almost every single day during the blooming season of this plant. High humidity being inimical to the good functioning and survival of cameras it is not without trepidation that one takes an expensive camera into the sopping wet habitat of this orchid. Of course there are dry days on these forests but often they don’t align well with those weekends and holidays on which I can travel to their area of the forest.

I have seen many plants of this species, including some respectable sized clumps of stems, but so far have been able to take a photo of just a single flower. I found this single flower on an August visit to the forest that happened to allow for a brief respite from the constant rain. Hopefully in the future I will be able to return to their habitat to search for more plants on bloom. I am strongly against collecting this plant as its cultural needs condemn it to a sure death when placed in the hands of the casual orchid grower. Plants removed from its highland habitat and brought into the coastal lowland will slowly die from dehydration even when given a lot of watering mainly because it is so hard to replicate in captivity the combination of high humidity, moderate temperatures and breezy environment that occur in this plant favored locations. That doesn’t mean that given the proper care it can’t grow or even thrive in captivity, is just that the time and equipment investment needed to properly grow this plant away from its rain forest habitat is larger than what a vast majority of orchidists are willing to spend in time and money.