It seems I only managed to do a proper terrestrial nocturnal photo shoot once while I was on the island, but I did manage to see quite a few critters right around The Cottage Club. Whistling frogs were dime a dozen around the swimming pool, and my favorites were the Saban anoles sleeping in the bushes.

Between our early afternoon arrival and a Sea and Learn talk about spiders by Leslie Bishop in the evening I had enough time to make it almost all the way up Mt. Scenery and back. I learned a couple days later that I was only about five minutes from the top when I turned back to get to the talk on time.

The Mt. Scenery trail is mostly made of steps, 1064 of them, which take you from the town of Windwardside to the cloud forest. The top of the mountain is 877 meters. From Windwardside, it’s about the same vertical climb as it is from Grand Case to the top of Pic Paradis, the highest point on St. Martin. The vegetation is astounding, and I saw two red-bellied racers, a snake that is only found on a couple islands. Given the lush surroundings, I was surprised that I didn’t see more insects. This would also be rectified somewhat on my next trip up there. They did have a lot of ferns of many varieties, including tree ferns.

Taking a step back for a moment, below are some photos from our arrival on Saba. We opted for the fourteen-minute plane flight, landing on the world’s smallest commercial runway, which looks more like a driveway. Included below are a few photos of our arrival, the view of nearby islands Statia, St. Kitts and Nevis and some shots of the landscape from the cab ride to The Cottage Club, where we were staying.

Yann and Marie arrived in Saba the day after us, so our second day of diving was actually the first time we all dove together. We started the morning off at Third Encounter, another pinnacle dive. I apologize if the photos are a bit boring. There were so many great sponges that I ended up taking loads of photos of them.

Our next dive was at Diamond Rock, presumably named after its whitewash of guano. This dive site was amazing. In addition to the rock that juts out of the water there is a second peak underwater and a sandy bottom about 80 feet down. In addition to the gorgeous underwater landscape, we saw a giant jack, a southern stingray and a hawksbill turtle.

I should also mention that we dove with Saba Deep, and they were really great. We dove new sites almost every dive and they made everything super easy by taking care of our gear, taxi and such. Since it was low season we were also able to opt in to extra dives in the afternoons, even if we were the only people going out.

Several members of Les Fruits de Mer (Madam J, Yann, Marie and myself) undertook an expedition to the nearby island of Saba last week for some diving, hiking and, of course, Extreme Shallow Snorkeling. Over the next few days I’ll be posting all about our adventures.

Saba is a much younger island than St. Martin, I believe about ten million years younger, or about half the age of St. Martin. While both islands are originally volcanic, St. Martin was submerged and capped with limestone, while Saba is basically still just a volcano jutting straight out of the ocean. It’s about a seventh the area of St. Martin, but twice as tall.

This post features some photos from our first day of diving on the island. The world-famous diving is the primary tourism draw of the island. Our first dive was at a site called Outer Limits, which is one of the pinnacle dives. The underwater pinnacles are basically submerged mountaintops off the coast of Saba that rise to between 90 and 110 feet below the surface of the ocean. Although the depth means short dives, these unique formations are a big attraction to divers.

Our next dive was at a site called Ladder Labyrinth, which primarily consists of coral and sponge encrusted underwater lava flows that create a variety of interesting structures. Underwater hot springs leave sulfur patches in the sand, and geothermal heat can be felt if you put your hands into the sand in the right spots.

We were also lucky enough to arrive during the month-long Sea and Learn event, which includes talks by experts and hands-on research opportunities. We went on a dusk/night dive with Graham Forrester to see if we could watch hamlets spawn. Although we didn’t actually see this because there aren’t very many hamlets in the waters around Saba, we did have a great night dive. One highlight was a nurse shark which followed us everywhere, probably because our flashlights helped it find prey.

It was a busy day and a great way to start our expedition!

Below, with no particular thematic tie, are the last of my photos from September. You can probably tell by the fact that I already did eight posts today that I’m clearing house in order to prepare for future adventures.

Here are some magnificent frigatebirds seen from our veranda.

And here are a variety of shots from Marigot and Grand Case.

To round out our selection of Saint Martin frogs, we have a couple more sets.

The Cuban treefrog is quite huge compared to the others on the island. This one is a male. You can tell because it has little black pads on its thumbs which help it hold on to the female during sex.

And the smallest were these tiny coqui antillanos, also known as Johnstone’s whistling frog. They hatch from eggs directly into tiny froglets, so I would imagine that some of them are probably much, much smaller.

Yann and Marie were doing construction at a house in Cul de Sac, and the unused swimming pool there had ten inches of water and thousands of frogs. Last Monday I went to check it out, but unfortunately they had already drained the pool. Luckily, Yann and Marie saved some frogs and tadpoles. I was particularly fond of the deformed frog you can see below. I also stopped at the nursery to see the Cuban treefrogs hiding in bromeliads again.

I guess I spent a bunch of September nights out looking for nocturnal creatures. Here are loads and loads of them.

I use iPhoto to store my photos, even though I do my editing in Photoshop from the RAW files. Using iPhoto to begin with is probably my mistake, but today I figured out a couple things that will save me some disk space.

If you use the edit function in iPhoto to zoom in on and compare images, then iPhoto will save “modified” copies in the iPhoto library, even if you didn’t actually make any changes. I figured this out because I never modify photos in iPhoto, but had 15GB of modified images from the past 3 months. You can avoid this by using the full-screen mode to zoom in on images and compare.

If you have loads of these images, you can select all the events in your library and then choose Photos>Revert to Original and all these extra copies will be deleted. (The exception is if you have some movie files, it will keep the JPEGs it made as thumbnails for those.) Unfortunately, if you have RAW photos in your iPhoto library that are mixed in with your JPEGs you won’t get the Revert to Original menu option, you’ll get Reprocess RAW instead. In that case, you’re out of luck unless you remove all the RAW photos from the library.

I actually do move my RAW files every few months when I build a new iPhoto library, so from now on, after I pull those out of my library, I’ll revert to original on my old library to make it a smaller archive.

I guess it might be easier to switch to a more pro-style application for workflow management.