If you want to see a wide variety of birds on St. Martin, a trip to Le Galion and the nearby Salines d’Orient may be your best choice. It may not be more diverse than other wetland areas on the island, but it has many areas where you can approach the pond and get clear views of the birds that are foraging there. On my most recent visit, I had gone to survey for sea turtle nests and only spent a few minutes near the pond, but still saw more than a dozen birds, including a couple species that I hadn’t photographed before.

As a side note, I’ll be uploading some of my sightings to the Saint Martin page at Observado.org. Observado is a site where you can post any sightings of animals (and even plants and fungi) and upload photos if you have them. It is mostly used by birders, and it’s a great resource to see what birds are on the island, where they are found and what time of year they are seen. It even allows users to specify things like whether the birds are mature, immature, in breeding plumage, etc. Even if you’re not certain what you’ve seen, you can upload a sighting and have it identified by a local expert. Definitely check it out and add some sightings. The more data that is available there, the better picture we have of the local wildlife.

This entry was posted on Sunday, August 28th, 2011 at 9:21 am and is filed under Explorations, Les Fruits sur la Terre. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.