Wednesday April 8 found us anchored off St. Thomas in the British Virgin Islands. St. Thomas, unlike Grand Turk but like Puerto Rico, is a high island, but one that is not high enough to capture and hold the trade winds that bring rain to Puerto Rico. As a result, St. Thomas (like the other Virgin Islands) is covered in dry scrub. There are no endemic birds here.
Pearly-eyed Thrashers (Margarops fuscatus) penetrate right into the town of Charlotte Amalie; this one was singing in a suburban garden.
After a stroll through Charlotte Amalie, Eileen and I decided to take a minibus tour around the island. This gave us a chance to see the native vegetation. the picture above gives you a pretty good idea of what it looks like: the trees are short and scraggly, and with water loss a real problem their leaves are quite small. The large leaves of the ground vegetation are stiff and thick (and often sharp-pointed, spiky and otherwise miserable to walk through), and may reduce water loss with waxy, more or less waterproof coatings.
Closer looks at a few roadside plants (note the smallish leaves on the upper photo -- the technical term for this is microphyllous, which simply means "small-leaved").
Seagrape (Coccoloba uvifera) is a common coastal tree everywhere in the Caribbean. What's more, its broad, thick leaves make it easy to identify. It is extremely salt-tolerant, withstanding both salty soil and sea spray with ease. Its fruits, when ripe, do look a lot like concord grapes (and are used to make jam), but the plant belongs to the buckwheat family (Polygonaceae), so it is a grape only in name.
Green Iguanas (Iguana iguana), an introduced species, are everywhere in the countryside. At almost any place we stopped in roadside scrub, a bit if peering into the brush would turn up an iguana or two, ranging from bright green babies to hulking moss-grey adults.
We didn't see a lot of birds on our drive around the island -- and the birds we did see, or hear, almost always turned out to be Bananaquits (Coereba flaveola). Being common, though, doesn't make Bananaquits any less fascinating. Why are these birds so phenomenally successful, particularly in the West Indies (they range from Mexico to Argentina)? Why is there only one species (though in a number of subspecies) across its huge range (a point I'll raise again in my next entry)? And just what are Bananaquits in the first place? The species is currently placed in a family of its own, the Coerebidae, and its relationships -- which surely lie somewhere in the tanager/warbler/American finch assemblage, but given that assemblage's vast size this isn't saying much -- are still an open question.
Dry, scrubby, and, perhaps, not as biodiverse as a greedy naturalist might wish (at least on land), St. Thomas still has its beauties. I'm glad to have seen it.
If any birder reading this is, or is planning to be, or might be able to be, in the vicinity of Kuching, Sarawak, Malaysia on October 4, I hope that you will have a look at the following link. It will give you all the details of a Mini Bird Race being held at the lovely Borneo Highlands Resort, only a short drive from Kuching:http://www.borneohighlands.com.my/birdrace2009.htmlThis is a chance to visit one of my favourite places in Borneo, see some great birds and help the causes of birding and conservation in Sarawak. Borneo Highlands Resort provides the easiest access point to the Penrissen Highlands in western Sarawak. The Penrissen Range is not as high, and certainly not as well-known, as Mount Kinabalu (at the other end of Malaysian Borneo in Sabah), but it provides the chance of seeing some Bornean endemics that are hard to get at better-known sites. Bornean Barbets are everywhere, and the resort may be the best place on the island to see the peculiar Pygmy White-Eye. When I was last there, in March of this year, Blue-banded Pittas were singing right next to the road (though I admit seeing them was another matter!).Sarawak is far less developed as a birding destination than either West Malaysia or Sabah. This bird race, organized by the Malaysian Nature Society (Kuching Branch), deserves your support -- not just for their efforts, but because birding in Sarawak should be encouraged, not just for the pleasure of it but because it can contribute so much to conservation.I, unfortunately, will be in Canada and cannot be there (if I were in Malaysia I surely would be!). So please go if you can, and while you are there, see a bird for me!
Our next stop, on Tuesday April 7, could not have been more different (at least within the Caribbean) from the flat, scrubby terrain of Grand Turk. Puerto Rico, easternmost of the Greater Antilles, is large enough, and high enough, to capture the moisture-laden trade winds blowing off the Atlantic. The trades blow in from the east, and so eastern Puerto Rico is humid; in the Luquillo Mountains of its northeastern corner, surprisingly close to the large, American-style capital city of San Juan, is the only truly tropical rainforest in the United States. 
Much of it is protected as the El Yunque National Forest (pronounced something like 'El Joon'-kway').
Unlike the other islands on our itinerary, Puerto Rico has endemic birds - some thirteen species, depending on your ideas about avian systematics. Our ship did not arrive until 10AM (the cruise directors obviously did not have birders in mind), but I hoped to make the best use of my time on shore to see some of the island's special birds.
El Yunque is a lovely place, lush and green after the dry scrub of Grand Turk, its trees festooned with bromeliads and other epiphytes. A note to my Malaysian friends: if you are in a rainforest, but are not sure which hemisphere you are in (an admittedly unlikely event), check for bromeliads (other than domestic pineapples, of course). If you find them, you are in the Americas - they ocur nowhere else.
The forest is graced with the delicate sprays of tree ferns. There are a number of species of tree ferns in the Puerto Rican rainforest, mostly members of the genus Cyathea (including, I think, the ones in this photograph, which are probably the widespread C. arborea). I am very fond of tree ferns -- I they are among the world's most beautiful and evocative plants -- and I am very glad that so many of them have had the decency to hang around for the last few hundred million years so that I could, eventually, enjoy them. 
This strange-looking object if the inflorescence of a forest palm - or, at least, the stalks supporting the inflorescence, spectacular even without the flowers (palm flowers are not too exciting at the best of times, of course).
Birding rainforests can be hard on the neck. Eileen, who is not really a birder (she describes herself as a birdwatcher-watcher), prefers to enjoy the forest without risking injury to her cervical vertebrae.Fortunately for us, considering the time of day, birds were vocal and active (though usually well out of camera range). We even heard (but, alas, did not see) the elusive Elfin Woods Warbler (Dendroica angelae), a bird only discovered in the 1970s. 
This is a much commoner (and non-endemic) bird, a Pearly-eyed Thrasher (Margarops fuscatus), one of a number of interesting thrashers endemic to the West Indies (including, for this species, Bonaire, where I first met it a few years ago). This is a highly aggressive species, and has been a source of trouble for Puerto Rico's rarest bird, the Puerto Rican Parrot (Amazona vittata).
The parrots are almost impossible to see, but we did see this nest box, now abandoned, that had been erected for their use near the edge of the elfin forest.
Puerto Rico's most distinctive bird (at least taxonomically) is the Puerto Rican Tanager (Nesospingus speculiferus). It is the only member of its genus, and its affinities (like those of many other birds traditionally considered "tanagers" but which have turned out to be something else) remain unclear. Is it a tanager (it doesn't seem much like one)? I have no idea, but I was pleased to find that it is common, noisy and relatively tame at El Yunque.
The Scaly-naped Pigeon (Patagioenas squamosa), unlike the tanager, is widespread in the West Indies, but is not always easy to see. We saw several flying over the forest at El Yunque, and this one was considerate enough to pose at a reasonable (if not close) distance.
Both the Pigeon and the Tanager seemed attracted to cecropia trees, though perhaps not for the same reasons. The pigeons, presumably, seek out the fruits; the tanager, a generalist omnivore, might be seeking fruit, hunting insects, or just hoping for a good view of the sky.
On our way back to the boat we took a detour to the beach at Luquillo....
...Where the beachfront birds included common (and tame) Caribbean species including this Zenaida Dove (Zenaida aurita)....
... A Loggerhead Kingbird (Tyrannus caudifasciatus)...
...And several very bold Greater Antillean Grackles (Quiscalus niger), the bird Jamaicans call "kling-kling" in imitation of its bell-like calls.
Two months may seem like a long time between two entries on the same day's activities, but I have to plead (now that I'm back in Canada) the pressure of actual work! Anyway, in my last post I mentioned that the real wealth of Grand Turk (at least as far as wildlife is concerned) lay not above the sea but under it. I'm hardly an underwater photographer, and my "equipment" consisted of a plastic disposable waterproof camera, but I thought that I should at least try to devote one entry to proving my point.
So, here are my wife Eileen and I waiting to go on our Grand Turk snorkeling trip. Whether it was "ultimate" or not I leave for you, dear reader, to decide, but it persuaded Eileen (who is no lover of the water) that she might just want to do it again sometime - a signal triumph, as far as I am concerned.
So it's off the western end of Grand Turk, over the reef and into the water...
...where we are greeted by a large, fierce-looking but quite inoffensive Great Barracuda (Sphyraena barracuda) and a school of what I think are young Grey Snappers (Lutjanus griseus), hanging around for a possible handout.
Caribbean reefs are (at least to my eye) quite different-looking from reefs in the Pacific -- more massively built, dominated by the spreading orange-rusty tines of elkhorn coral (Acropora palmata), so-called because of its resemblance to a giant stony set of moose antlers.[Moose are called elk in Europe. We in North America call our own wapiti, a close relative of the European red deer, elk, just to keep everyone confused -- all of which has nothing to do with coral reefs, of course.]
Also massive, but entirely different in growth form, is brain coral (family Faviidae). This colony would appear to be grooved brain coral (Diploria labyrinthiformis). Notice the groove running down the middle of the ridges (the polyps grow in the "valleys" between the ridges, so I have no idea what the groves are for). If you want to know more about it, there's a nice writeup here.
The beauty of this particular patch of reef owed a lot to the soft corals, including these sea fans. The yellow one at the top is probably a Venus sea fan (Gorgonia flabellum), while the lovely purple specimen at the bottom is more likely a common sea fan (G. ventalina). I would have had to examine details of the stem structure to be sure, and I didn't. The bushy dark brown candelabras in the background are soft corals too, some sort of sea whip (but I have no idea which one).
Fishwatching on a coral reef is the underwater equivalent of birding, except that you can't use binoculars and the field guides tend to get soggy. However, photographing reef fishes with a plastic flashless disposable camera can be a bit trying, and I won't bore you with most of my hapless efforts. This supermale stoplight parrotfish (Sparisoma viride), however, makes for a good segue from my coral photographs, because parrotfishes eat coral. Notice the yellow "stoplights" on his tail.
The term "supermale" refers to the rather weird life history strategy of parrotfishes and at least some of their close cousins, the wrasses, in which females and, sometimes, young males can change into a new form, the supermale, differing in size, colour and often shape from its underlings. Supermales get to do most of the mating, and in some species take over "harems". If anything happens to the supermale, the dominant female in the harem turns into a supermale herself, and takes over.
Away from the coral, on the sandy bottom, we found a few southern stingrays (Dasyatis americana). With a few unfortunate exceptions (the late Steve Irwin, for one), there are very few cases of stingrays injuring swimmers; as long as you don't actually step on them, rays won't normally bother you (in fact, in some places in the Caribbean stingray-petting sessions have become major tourist attractions). It never hurts, though, to keep a respectful distance.
My one regret after our morning's snorkeling is that we only got a distant look at this little islet. It is apparently one of the homes of the Turks and Caicos Rock Iguana (Cyclura carinata carinata), a reare and eclining species confined to small islets fee of introduced mammals. There may be some 30,000 of them, but they are confined to a total land area of only 28 square kilometres, and a number of colonies have disappeared over the past few decades. They are a potent symbol of the islands (see here), and I would have loved to have seen one.
From the East Indies (if anyone still calls them that) to the West Indies!After our return from Borneo and Hong Kong, Eileen and I flew to Florida to join my parents on a short cruise through the Caribbean. Our first stop, on Monday April 6, was the tiny, flat island of Grand Turk, near the eastern end of the Turks and Caicos Islands. The Turks and Caicos, though politically distinct, are biologically the southeasternmost part of the Bahamas, and their flora and fauna (with a few exceptions) are related to the rest of the Bahamian chain.
Mind you, not much of that biology was on view, at least above sea level, on the day we were there. Other than a few doves, there were no land birds in sight at all. Cruise stops, of course, are not ideal for wildlife-watching. You can rarely get off the boat until fairly late in the morning. On the other hand, what I saw may reflect the real situation. Only last September, Grand Turk lay directly in the path of Hurricane Ike. 80% of the island's homes were damaged, and the effect on its wildlife may well have been considerable.
Other than wildlife, one of the chief points of interest above the waterline is, of all things, a replica of John Glenn's original space capsule Friendship 7, which splashed down near the island in 1962. The original is in Washington, DC at the National Aeronautics and Space Museum (though our taxi driver cheerfully claimed that this roadside monument was, in fact, the original capsule. Credulous tourists beware!).
The only real town on Grand Turk, and the capital of the Turks and Caicos generally, is Cockburn Town. Like many another Caribbean city, its streets are lined with flowering trees. Unlike some others, though, the commonest flowering tree in Cockburn Town is a native species, the Geiger Tree (Cordia sebestena). Geiger Trees, though beautiful, are perhaps not as flashy as some of the exotics so widely planed in the tropics, but it is nice to see a town decorated with flowers that actually belong there.
This little tree, however, is an exotic - the giant milkweed or bowstring hemp (Calotropis gigantea) from eastern Asia. It was being visited by numbers of visiting monarch butterflies, happy to find a local milkweed and apparently unconcerned by its alien origin.
This is another common native plant, Yellow Trumpetbush or ginger-thomas (Tecoma stans). Its range goes well beyond the Turks, to the southwestern United States south to Central and South America, and it has become an exotic nuisance weed in the south Pacific.
However diminished the wildlife of Grand Turk may be above the water, the situation beneath the waves is another matter altogether. Grand Turk is exceedingly fortunately situated as far as wealth of marine life is concerned. Only a few hundred metres off its eastern shore, the sea floor becomes a sheer wall plunging to over 2000 metres depth in places. In the photograph above you can see the edge of the wall, marked by the sudden change from azure to cobalt blue as the bottom drops away beneath the surface. The wall is rich in reef life (and is a magnet for scuba divers).
What's good for life below the water is good for seabirds above it. While land birds proved hard to find on Grand Turk, Laughing Gulls (Larus atricilla) remained numerous, obvious, and, as far as this group outside Cockburn Town was concerned, easily approachable.
So, of course, are the people of Grand Turk. These two little girls seemed to find me most entertaining (I guess not every tourist in Cockburn Town takes pictures of Geiger Trees)!
There is no question that the premier birding site in Hong Kong - indeed, one of the finest and most famous sites in the world - is Mai Po. The Mai Po Marshes and the nearby shores of Deep Bay are vital staging areas for migratory birds, including the increasingly rare Black-faced Spoonbill (Platalea minor) and thousands of shorebirds. Any naturalist in Hong Kong wants to get to Mai Po, even if (like me) they have been there before (in my case, in 1992).
However, you can't just go to Mai Po. The site is managed and carefully controlled by WWF-Hong Kong. Access is limited, and if you don't go on an organized outing you have to submit a form - only available to visiting naturalists - well in advance (see http://www.wwf.org.hk/eng/maipo/publicvisit/. I was late in getting my form in, so many thanks to WWF-HK for bending the rules a bit on my behalf!
Anyway, I spent a whole day wandering around Mai Po on Monday March 23, the only other visitors being a few parties of high school students on excursion. After my thanks above, it may be churlish to say that from a birding point of view the trip was a disappointment; there were no land bird migrants about, and the vast majority of waterbirds kept themselves at an unidentifiable distance far out over the mud flats on Deep Bay (I was the victim of unfriendly tide tables).
Nonetheless, you don't have to be swamped with rare birds (if you'll pardon the expression) to find delight in a day at Mai Po. After the bustle of Hong Kong it is a place of stillness and quiet, and there is still a great deal to see.
Mai Po is in two main sections. The most accessible is a series of enclosed ponds, or gei wai, established long ago for traditional shrimp farming and still used, under the eye of wetland managers, for that purpose. They are popular with egrets and other water birds, including the Great Egret (Egretta alba) above - a black-billed, black-legged, breeding-plumage bird that looks quite unlike the Great Egrets I am familiar with from other parts of the world.
Little Egrets (Egretta garzetta) were abundant in the gei wai...
...and there were a few Intermediate Egrets (Egretta intermedia) about, including this lone bird in a pond full of Black-winged Stilts (Himantopus himantopus).
Stilts are beautiful, if aggressively noisy, birds! 
Mai Po is also a site for raptor migration, but most of the raptors I identified were Black Kites (Milvus migrans), abundant residents in Hong Kong. The only exceptions were some very distant eagles (?) on Deep Bay, and the two birds in the much enlarged and enhanced photo above. I think, based on what appears to be a broad dark bar on the underwing, that these are Bonelli's Eagles (Hieraaetus fasciatus); compare my poor shot with the much better photo at http://orientalbirdimages.org/search.php?action=searchresult&Bird_ID=897.
Birds, of course, are not the only creatures that fly at Mai Po. This dragonfly is, I believe, an Asian Amberwing (Brachythemis contaminata - Libellulidae), presumably a female.
And this beauty is a Variegated Flutterer (Rhyothemis variegata - Libellulidae), certainly one of the most striking dragonflies I have seen, and a very common animal at Mai Po.
It took me a while to realize that this stunning insect, common at Mai Po wherever there were mangroves, was a moth and not a butterfly. It is easy to see in flight, but it seems always to land on the underside of a leaf where it can be surprisingly hard to spot. It turns out to be Dysphania militaris, one of the False Tiger Moths in the family Geometridae. I'm not too sure what is false about it, but the bold stripes on the abdomen certainly justify the tiger part!
Back to the birds -- land birds this time. This photo and the next were not taken at Mai Po itself, but I certainly saw enough of the birds they show on my day there. This one is a Light-vented or Chinese Bulbul (Pycnonotus sinensis), one of the commonest and most obvious birds at Mai Po and indeed everywhere else in Hong Kong, even in in the midst of the city.
Not as common, but quite a bird when it does show up, is the Masked Laughingthrush (Garrulax perspicillatus). Laughingthrushes travel in noisy gangs like jays, though they are more likely to stick to the shrubbery. The Masked is far from being the most colourful of the laughingthrushes - there are some really stunning ones in China and Viet Nam, for example - but they have lots of character, and they certainly livened up my day.
The Azure-winged Magpie (Cyanopica cyana), a much more softly beautiful bird than this photo indicates, is native to China but is introduced in Hong Kong, probably as the result of captures for the bird trade. This was one of a group hanging about at the reserve entrance.
On the basis of call alone, the most abundant land bird on the Mai Po reserve may be the Yellow-bellied Prinia (Prinia flaviventris). Not only are there lots of them in the reeds, but they are remarkably persistent singers, repeating their short songs over and over again well into the heat of the day. My birding friends in Sarawak may be surprised to see how different this bird looks from the equally common and noisy, but far less yellow, Yellow-bellied Prinias on Borneo.
During migration, a number of rather plain warbler species may pass through Mai Po. This Dusky Warbler (Phylloscopus fuscatus), however, is probably a wintering bird. Unlike most leaf warblers, it tends to stay fairly close to the ground; this bird, working its way through the scrub separating two of the gei wais, even foraged on the ground at times.
Eventually, after wandering among the gei wais, I came to this rather fearsome-looking fence (complete with a guard tower and rolls of barbed wire) separating the territory of Hong Kong from the rest of China. On the other side, accessible through a small gate, is the second part of the reserve: the mangrove swamps and mud flats lining the eastern shore of Deep Bay.
To reach the mud flats, I had to cross a long, narrow and rather unsteady boardwalk threading its way through the mangroves over a series of floating oil drums.
As soon as I passed through the border gate I found myself looking down at numbers of fiddler crabs scuttling over the mud flats or waving their enormous claws in display. There are, apparently, six species of fiddler crab at Mai Po (for details, with lots of pictures, see www.afcd.gov.hk/english/publications/publications_con/files/12.pdf). This one appears to be Uca arcuata.
Fiddlers were not the only crabs under the boardwalk or out on the mud flats. This is Parasesarma plicata, a common mangrove crab of the family Grapsidae and a feeder on bits of leaf litter and other detritus in the mud.
Eventually I came to the end of the boardwalk, and a hide (or, rather, two of them, on different spurs of the trail) looking out across Deep Bay itself towards the city of Shenzhen in Guangdong Province, China. The hide is supposed to allow you close views of the huge numbers of shorebirds, gulls and other things that throng Deep Bay in winter. Of course, to enjoy close views the birds have to be close, and they decidedly weren't. I could see clouds of them in the distance, but except for a few egrets there was practically nothing within identifiable reach.
This immature or winter-plumage Chinese Pond-Heron (Ardeola bacchus) came closest -- but it was still a fair ways off...
That doesn't mean there was nothing to see. I had an entertaining hour being amused by the antics of mudskippers, semiterrestrial froglike fishes that spend their days hopping about out of water (but which are otherwise typical gobies, having nothing to do wit those other fishes, our ancestors, that crawled out onto the land in the Devonian). There are three species at Mai Po.
This is the largest, Boleophthalmus pectinirostris. Males have huge sail-like dorsal fins that they show off in display, but I only saw a little of this. To get a better idea of how spectacular this fish can be (and for lots of information about mudskippers in general) see themudskipper.org.
This is the smallest, Periophthalmus modestus (formerly known as P. cantonensis), the Chinese Mudskipper. There is a third species, Scartelaos histophorus, but I am not sure that I saw it; there were a lot of quite small and slender mudskippers about that could have been the young of any of the three.
The two species I saw look, and act, very much alike at first blush, but apparently they have some pretty striking differences. According to a thesis by Phoebe Chan Ka Yi at Hong Kong University, for example, while P. modestus is a carnivore catching and eating a wide range of small invertebrates, B. pectinirostris is a specialized vegetarian that eats practically nothing but algae and diatoms. 
I had to leave before the tide came in, so I never saw the birds swarm up to the hide - but occasionally a few Great Cormorants (Phalacrocorax carbo) flew over on their way inland, a taste of what I might have seen had the tide come in. I'll just have to go back one day -- and I hope, one day, that I will.
Wednesday April 8 found us anchored off St. Thomas in the British Virgin Islands. St. Thomas, unlike Grand Turk but like Puerto Rico, is a high island, but one that is not high enough to capture and hold the trade winds that bring rain to Puerto Rico. As a result, St. Thomas (like the other Virgin Islands) is covered in dry scrub. There are no endemic birds here.
Pearly-eyed Thrashers (Margarops fuscatus) penetrate right into the town of Charlotte Amalie; this one was singing in a suburban garden.
After a stroll through Charlotte Amalie, Eileen and I decided to take a minibus tour around the island. This gave us a chance to see the native vegetation. the picture above gives you a pretty good idea of what it looks like: the trees are short and scraggly, and with water loss a real problem their leaves are quite small. The large leaves of the ground vegetation are stiff and thick (and often sharp-pointed, spiky and otherwise miserable to walk through), and may reduce water loss with waxy, more or less waterproof coatings.
Closer looks at a few roadside plants (note the smallish leaves on the upper photo -- the technical term for this is microphyllous, which simply means "small-leaved").
Seagrape (Coccoloba uvifera) is a common coastal tree everywhere in the Caribbean. What's more, its broad, thick leaves make it easy to identify. It is extremely salt-tolerant, withstanding both salty soil and sea spray with ease. Its fruits, when ripe, do look a lot like concord grapes (and are used to make jam), but the plant belongs to the buckwheat family (Polygonaceae), so it is a grape only in name.
Green Iguanas (Iguana iguana), an introduced species, are everywhere in the countryside. At almost any place we stopped in roadside scrub, a bit if peering into the brush would turn up an iguana or two, ranging from bright green babies to hulking moss-grey adults.
We didn't see a lot of birds on our drive around the island -- and the birds we did see, or hear, almost always turned out to be Bananaquits (Coereba flaveola). Being common, though, doesn't make Bananaquits any less fascinating. 
Dry, scrubby, and, perhaps, not as biodiverse as a greedy naturalist might wish (at least on land), St. Thomas still has its beauties. I'm glad to have seen it.
