I’m about to post a bunch of new photos. These are from a walk through Grand Case down to Friars Bay. I spent most of the time with the new Tokina lens zoomed out to 400mm and got quite a few bird photos. Right now there are common moorhen chicks on the salt ponds and some kind of small wading bird that has shown up in the past few weeks and seems to be everywhere now. I also saw a female American kestrel near the cemetery, which was quite a treat.

In an attempt to get a few better bird photos for the wildlife guide, I picked up a Tokina 80-400mm lens in New York. Although it’s not the best on the market by any means, it is one of the smallest, although it is still at least twice as heavy as my camera. They’re able to make it smaller (and cheaper) because it doesn’t have image stabilization, which means it’s really only useful if there’s lots of light. Luckily, we generally have that down here and I think it’s going to work out well.

On a recent snorkeling excursion in the bay Madam J and I were lucky enough to see a group of four small squid, probably about two or three inches long. They spread their tentacles in a v-shape, perhaps to make themselves look larger and more threatening. I think they were juveniles of the common Caribbean reef squid, but it’s possible that they were adults of a smaller species.

Later, we found an octopus which changed color several times before eventually crawling into a crevice under some rocks.

Below are photos of a few critters that I saw at Pinel Island last week. They’re mostly familiar faces, although the young grasshopper and moth may be new to me.

A few weeks ago I found another tree that was being almost completely defoliated by checkered swallowtail (Papilio demoleus) caterpillars and brought back a single chrysalis which hatched a week or so later. This time it hatched in perfect form. Despite the fact that it is an invasive species, I released it because a single individual would not really make any difference in the colonization of the island.

La Renée is a pretty large wreck sitting at about 40 meters deep off Baie aux Prunes. Going to that depth, one gets less than ten minutes of no decompression time at the bottom, but it’s still a very fun dive. We were also lucky to have numerous large jellyfish floating higher up in the water column. Some of them even had groups of small fish hanging out around them.

On Wednesday I made another trip out to Grandes Cayes and Petites Cayes to look for sea turtle tracks on the beach, but didn’t see any. I did manage to get some photos of a ghost crab that didn’t have a good getaway plan and just froze for a while. I also snapped a couple shots of the terrain at Wilderness and some examples of hills defoliated by grazing.

Below are photos taken in a couple fields in Grand Case. Cloudy weather and some previous showers made it a little easier to get photos of some of the smaller butterflies, while spiders were in abundance and seemed to be having really good luck catching insects.

Here are a few beetles, a moth and the omnipresent gray wall jumper spiders. This was the first time I had seen cannibalism in the gray wall jumpers.

Here are a few shots taken with the point and shoot while snorkeling. The first couple are two different species of scorpionfish. Next is a photo of the algae that are currently blooming on the floor of Grand Case Bay. Huge amounts of these algae started growing after they opened the canal and let the sewage-filled water in the salt pond out to the bay.