The gray kingbird (Tyrannus dominicensis) can easily be seen all over the island, although it seems to prefer open areas, perching on trees and telephone lines and taking short flights to nab flying insects. It’s a talkative, graceful bird from the family known as tyrant flycatchers.

Today I saw a bunch of them while walking from Bellevue to Mont Fortune. I also learned what they do when they catch a large, feisty insect like a katydid. They hold it in their beak and bash it against a branch until it is easier to swallow. Check it out in the photos below.

Most of the mangroves on St. Martin live at the edge of ponds, the lagoon or occasionally the sea. They’re uniquely developed to survive even when their roots are under water, often salty water at that. The mangrove below surprised me because it was one of a few that were growing in the shallow end of an abandoned swimming pool by Happy Bay.

Even though man has decimated the mangroves that historically covered much more of St. Martin, every once in a while I guess they get the last laugh. At least until the Happy Bay development gets rebuilt.

There’s a mangrove tree in Étang de Cimetière in Grand Case that has been a home to countless iguanas and egrets over the last couple years, but is sadly dead or nearly so today. Below you can see the radical transformation over the last couple years.

April 2010 – Healthy Mangrove Hosting Egrets

January 2011 – Loads of Egrets, Lower Branches Bare

September 2011 – Nesting Over, Few Leaves Remain

December 2011 – No Birds, No Leaves, Fifteen Iguanas

January 2012 – The Egrets Return to Nest in the Bare Mangrove

It’s a pretty amazing progression, and I was surprised to see the egrets coming back to the bare tree. Of course, if the mangrove is totally dead, it will start rotting and probably collapse into the pond within another year or two. Probably there is a lesson in there for the humans of St. Martin, too.

Karl Questel from Alsophis Antilles had told me they were here, but only in the last few days did I see them myself. While attending the Nature Foundation’s Rockstars for Nature event at Port de Plaisance on Sunday, I noticed a couple strange looking anoles. Today, I went back to confirm that they are Puerto Rican crested anoles (Anolis cristatellus).

The population seems to be fairly localized around a stand of ficus trees, but it’s impossible to be sure without surveying a broader area. For now, it’s the only place I know of on St. Martin where you can see three species of Anolis in one area. I doubt there’s a way to tell how they got here, but since it is a marina, it’s plausible that they arrived by boat. Here are a few photos.

While it’s exciting to see a new species here, the real question in the long term is how the newcomers might impact our native anoles. This is a particular concern because Anolis gingivinus lives only in the Anguilla bank (Anguilla, St. Martin and St. Barths) and Anolis pogus lives only on St. Martin. In the near-term, it could be an interesting opportunity to see how the three species interact. Caribbean anoles have been the subject of much study as an example of adaptive radiation. On islands with multiple species, each species will typically a slightly different ecological niche. Here on St. Martin, A. gingivinus is larger and tends to prefer more open areas, while A. pogus is smaller and prefers shadier locales.

For reference, here are photos of our native anoles from the same location:

After a rainstorm creates a small pool of water on the surface of a cow pie, you drown in it. Major bummer.

The Great Salt Pond was, at one time, perhaps the defining feature of Sint Maarten. Salt harvesting was the main industry of the island, and Philipsburg, the capital of the Dutch side was built between the Great Salt Pond, the source of the island’s most valuable resource, and the sea, its connection with the rest of the world. Today, the Great Salt Pond is greatly diminished: made smaller by landfill, severely polluted and the site of an overflowing and often smoldering dump. It’s a sad sight, and in many ways a microcosm showing how “progress” has destroyed much of the island.

On a recent visit to the Great Salt Pond, I was appalled by many things: the trash, the smell, the algae and bacteria filled water and the dead fish unable to survive the pollution and lack of oxygen. The photos below show tell some of the story, but don’t even come close to sickness and sadness of the pond today.

Of course, despite our best efforts, nature is resilient. Though battered and bruised, the pond is still alive. Below are just a few of the animals that still call the pond their home, including cattle egrets sporting their breeding coloration, greater and lesser yellowlegs and a laughing gull. There are also people working hard to help the Great Salt Pond, notably the St. Maarten PRIDE Foundation and House of Nehesi Publishers. Whether their efforts are recognized by local government is, of course, another matter.

EPIC has been banding songbirds for about twelve years on St. Martin, making it a pretty unique long-term study for the Eastern Caribbean. The birds they study are primarily songbirds, and they include both year-round residents and winter migrants. The banding took place at Loterie Farm, at a stream flowing down the slope of Pic Paradis.

Each year, mist nets are placed in the same locations, and the data about captured birds includes weight, measurements, sex, age, presence of parasites and fat and muscle accumulation. Migrating birds, for example, accumulate fat and muscle before migration which is depleted over the course of migration. For local birds, size measurements can point to small differences in bird populations on different islands, or help establish the basic morphology of birds that have not been studied extensively.

Banding the birds can help establish migratory routes when the birds are recaptured either in the Caribbean or in their summer homes in North America. It can also give clues about the habits of birds, for example, catching the same bird in the exact same spot can indicate that birds maintain a very specific territory.

A long-term study, like this one, can also show patterns year-to-year or over longer periods of time that can illustrate the impacts of weather or the overall health of the ecosystem. This year, for example, water is very abundant in the survey area, which greatly reduced the number of birds captured. In a dry year, the nets are located at one of the few local sources of water. This year, with water everywhere, far fewer birds were visiting this particular stream.

On the first day I was there, I was able to help set up the nets, and Adam from EPIC explained the capture and data collection process. With few birds captured, only a single Antillean crested hummingbird while I was there, I also had some time to scout the forest for some interesting invertebrates, including a large katydid nymph, some tiny barklice and a variety of flies.

On my next day of banding, captures included a bananaquit (local) and an American redstart (migratory). Once again, there was plenty of time to look for interesting creatures in the forest and I found some beautiful green jumping spiders and a very well-camoflauged spider eating a caterpillar.

Molossus molossus keeps the mosquito levels of our apartment lower than they would be otherwise, as a number of them live under the roof of the building next door. It is also known as the velvety free-tailed bat or Pallas’s mastiff bat. The one that I found on our veranda was small, about the size of my thumb, and a very dark brown, almost black. On St. Martin, the bats that live in buildings and you see in towns are usually this species.

I’m not sure why this one ended up on our veranda, but I took a few photos before leaving him on the ledge of our balcony. After a couple minutes, he climbed to the edge, then hung off the edge and then flew off back to the building where he lives.

In case you didn’t already know, bats are the only native mammals on the island, and there are currently thought to be eight species residing here. After this guy came to visit, I have taken photos of four of the species.

Today I’m sharing some photos from a couple walks around Bell Point. The first was with the SXM Trails hiking club a little bit before Christmas. It was an overcast morning, so I headed out with my macro lens to see what was there. All my photos ended up being insects and spiders, but there’s a whole world of wonder to be seen in just those two groups of animals.

If I were the size of an aphid, a syrphid fly larva would be about the most terrifying thing I can imagine, and you can see why in a couple photos below. I also saw two species of fruit flies with intricately patterned wings and a number of true bugs in a variety of colors and shapes.

I was also at Bell Point a couple days ago, mostly along the coastal area. The lack of vegetation on the coast there limits the number of animals one sees, but there were still a few here and there, including a couple spiders living under the deflated remains of a dinghy and some whiteflies that feed on sea grape. In the distance, a tropicbird was circling near Creole Rock, but I stuck with the small stuff, and have an even bigger backlog of things to identify.