The Daily Herald Bird Watch SXM column for this week explains a little bit more about the upcoming Migratory Bird Festival, why these birds are worth celebrating and the site where the festival will be held: http://www.thedailyherald.com/index.php/supplements/weekender/42702-migratory-birds-deserve-celebration.html Join the event and invite your friends and family here: https://www.facebook.com/events/518285941588370/
Spittlebugs are true bugs (hemipterans) related to planthoppers and cicadas. The nymphs (immature spittlebugs) hide inside a foam they make. Here you can see the adult and nymph of the species that lives on St. Martin. I almost always find them on Silver Buttonwood, a native plant that is also used extensively in ornamental landscaping.
Yesterday afternoon we had another session for the Be the Change SXM/Nature Foundation SXM wildlife education and ranger training program. The order of business for the day was to conduct a census of Anolis lizards in an area where one introduced species has become established. The kids were great at spotting the lizards and identifying them by species. In two […]
Here’s a photo of one of the amblypygids (also known as whipspiders or tailless whipscorpions) that I saw at Loterie Farm with the kids from the Be the Change/Nature Foundation program. When I saw it, and even when I was posting the photos, I assumed it was Phrynus goesii, the species we usually see here. However, Karl Questel pointed out […]
The images from this week’s Bird Watch column were not included online, so here’s a scan so you can see the black-bellied plover in its breeding and basic plumage.
Here are some photos from this morning, taken at the mangrove discovery trail where we will be having the migratory bird event on September 29th (https://www.facebook.com/events/518285941588370/518938524856445/ feel free to join and invite your friends). There were a couple whimbrels there this morning and a whole bunch of smaller shorebirds. The last few photos were taken on the beach right by […]
We went up to Loterie Farm today as part of the Be the Change SXM/Nature Foundation SXM ranger training and wildlife education program. Here are some of the things we saw in the forest. Some of these photos are mine and some were taken by the kids. I was going through them this evening and I’m honestly not sure who […]
Get ready for the biggest birding event of the year! We will be hosting a special event in honor of the birds that fly thousands of miles to visit St. Martin each fall. Part of International Migratory Bird Day, there will be plenty of activities and guided tours of the mangrove discovery trail at Étang de la Barrière right next […]
If you liked the photos I posted of seabirds at Dog Island, you might enjoy this video from CaribinTV, with some nice footage from the same visit. http://www.caribintv.com/dog-island The yellow subtitles make it look even more like lost footage from a Cousteau expedition. I think a couple of the figures I give for the number of nesting pairs of birds […]
Shorebirds are starting to show up everywhere on St. Martin as they arrive for the winter and stop by during their migration. I snapped a few photos when I was crossing the drainage canal in Philipsburg after a meeting yesterday. I think we have the solitary sandpiper, killdeer, semipalmated sandpiper and pectoral sandpiper, but some of the sandpipers look alike, […]