I have a couple follow-ups to previous posts. The first involves the ruddy turnstone with the banded leg. I heard back from bandedbirds.org, which is indeed still active and receives resightings pretty much daily. I also got a response from reportband.gov. This bird had hatched in 2007 or earlier, and was banded on May 14th, 2009 in Cape May County, NJ. Also, instead of just sending the info, they build it into a certificate of of appreciation awarded to the person who reported the sighting. If this isn’t a great way to encourage people to go out and check for banded birds, I don’t know what is.

My other follow-up concerns the very beautiful wolf spider I saw two days ago, which is in the last photo in this post. I was consulting Mark de Silva’s book on spiders of St. Vincent and the Grenadines and noticed that my spider was strikingly similar to Hogna sanctivincenti, which was thought to be endemic to (only found in) St. Vincent. I emailed Mark, and he agreed that it is probably the same spider, noting that so little is known about the spiders of the Caribbean we really don’t have a good idea of their ranges. In the case of this spider, the sighting here is probably a pretty strong indicator that this species may also live on many of the islands between here and St. Vincent. Think about how much there is to be learned about the creatures on this island and our neighbors in the Caribbean.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 14th, 2011 at 2:07 pm and is filed under Pour les Sciences. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.