I wrapped up a week of wildlife presentations at local schools at Sister Borgia Primary School today. I even got a special certificate of appreciation! This week I visited 14 classes and presented to over 350 students about how various animals arrived on St. Martin. The presentation covered a bunch of important topics, including seabird nesting, migration, overwater colonization by […]

We’ve been starting and finishing most of the wildlife presentations with a series of questions about St. Martin’s wildlife. The idea is to see if there are some things that the kids here need to learn about local wildlife and if they are learning it from the presentation. We will share the results at the end of the week, but […]

When it’s hot in the afternoon, the whimbrel does basically the same thing we would do…go for a dip!

This morning we were at Learning Unlimited to give presentations to 5th and 8th grade students. Another great morning with great kids. The 5th graders were writing letters to Governor Holiday asking for changes to prevent future fish die-offs in the Great Salt Pond and we got to read a few while we were there.

There’s one particular tree on the road in Grand Case that has been heavily decimated by the mottled tortoise beetle. Previously, I had seen two variants of this species, one was yellow and black with no iridescence, one was bright, iridescent green, and now this one, which resembles the yellow and black variant, but has iridescent red/purple on the wing […]

Learn more about the American oystercatcher, one of my favorite local birds, in this week’s Bird Watch SXM column in The Daily Herald’s Weekender section.

The mimic is a butterfly native to Africa, but it has had an irregular distribution in the Caribbean for quite some time, perhaps since the era of the slave trade. Previously I had only seen it once, several years ago, but this year I have seen them a number of times and others have been noticing it on St. Martin […]

When we were walking in the forest at Loterie during the macro-photography workshop I managed to find a pseudoscorpion, the first time I’ve seen one on St. Martin. It was hiding in some tree bark. There are probably lots of them here, but they are very small. This one was probably about 2mm long. Pseudoscorpions are arachnids, like spiders and […]

I finally saw one of the glossy ibises that have decided to come here this year. This one was at the small livestock pond on the road to Cul-de-Sac. Unfortunately, it has a very nasty wound on its neck. Hopefully it’s something that will heal naturally, but I do wonder what happened to it. Perhaps it was attacked by a […]

There’s nothing like spending a lazy Sunday on the beach with friends: the crab spider, syrphid fly larva, oleander aphid and other old pals. Yeserday, I did some experimenting with light for macro insect portraits. On my camera, I was using a speedlight with a ring flash attachment, and behind the insects, I was using an optically-triggered underwater strobe for […]