Bell Valley is what I’ve decided to call the unnamed valley between Bell Point and Anse Marcel. I headed down to there, in part to check on the dead raccoon I found earlier, and see if its skeleton had been picked clean yet. As you can see below, the flesh is basically gone, but there’s still plenty of dried skin and fur. At least the smell was gone, though! The same could not be said of the dead dog I found there. On the lighter side, I saw a cute calf nursing. Did you know that sometimes a cow will lap up another cow’s urine right from the stream as it is coming out? It’s true!

I took a new route out to Bell Point the other day, from Petite Plage and via the bouldery shore. Heading up the ravine past where I saw the turtle shell, I found a large recess under a boulder, but it seemed empty save for a few scattered goat bones. I also saw two of the very small microteiid that I had seen on the way to Friar’s Bay and a bird egg that had perhaps been washed out of the nest by the recent rains.

The water near the shore was quite clear, so I decided to round the point and climb up the side facing Anguilla. The views were quite nice and I discovered another potential cave on a cliff face on the side of Bell Hill. Heading up to investigate the potential cave, I made my way through some forest and to the cliff face. It was probably scalable, but I wasn’t quite foolish enough to try. After crossing below the cliff, I headed up the hill beside it and crossed the top as well and was able to locate the potential cave, which was just a small recess in the side of the wall.

Switching to my macro lens, I photographed quite a few small creatures, including what I believe were some newly-hatched babies of the red hemipteran I’ve seen on the island, some interesting color variations of Anolis pogus and a stripier version of the dwarf gecko Sphaerodactylus sputator. Along with sightings of Sphaerodactylus microlepis, Anolis gingivinus and Amieva plei, I had seen six species of lizards on my walk.

This morning I took a walk from Grand Case to Marigot, traveling past Friar’s Bay, Ponte Arago and Galisbay. From Grand Case, I took the back road to Friar’s Bay, where I found a lizard I had not seen before beneath a tire beside the road. Initially, I assumed it was a juvenile skink, which was the only known lizard on Saint Martin it could have been. After consulting guides and the internet on my return, it seems to be a microteiid, two species of which are found in the Lesser Antilles: Gymnopthalmus pleii and G. underwoodi. Microteiids can be easily distinguished from skinks and ground lizards because they have only four toes on their front feet, so this looks to be a very interesting discovery.

Continuing past Friar’s Bay, I took Rue Batterie to the shore and walked down a rocky beach that was littered with many things, including large bones that I guessed to be cow bones. The trail around Pointe Arago began just past the beach and headed up a hillside above some rocky cliffs and around towards Galisbay. Near the trail, I found a near-entire cow skeleton. Although the flesh was entirely gone, the contents of the cow’s stomach remained as a large mass of grass fibers surrounded by the bones.

While in this area I found a large number of house geckos (Hemidactylus mabouia) hiding beneath stones and logs, including some hatched and unhatched eggs. They were very quick to run when their hiding places were overturned, and it was interesting to note that I almost always found them in pairs.

Madam J and I took a little walk out to Molly Smith Point and saw lots of interesting rocks. Before we headed out, we took a look at Cemetery Pond, where dozens of egrets were nesting. Next, we headed through the cemetery and hopped the fence to head up the first peak, noted as Smith on my best map. At the top is a large rock formation with many crevices and overhangs, but no cave structures as far as I could see. We then headed down to the point, which is a very pretty grassy area with rocky beaches. At the very tip of the point are some large rocks, the most prominent of which was the home of a common iguana (Iguana iguana).

For our return, we headed down the rocky beach, which eventually turned into sandstone cliffs. Although there were a couple tricky parts, we were able to return to the beach via that route, which was a lot less work than climbing back up and down the hills. Next time, rather than returning to Grand Case Bay, I will probably try heading the opposite direction to Happy Bay.

On April 5th, I took a trip past Hope Estate in an attempt to climb up Mont O’Reilly. From the bottom, it looked like the North face would be a pretty easy hike, with a grassy slope going three-quarters of the way up the mountain. As it turns out, though, the grass wasn’t the ankle-high scrub of the goat and cow grazed areas, but thick, chest-high grass that concealed an uneven terrain covered with large rocks.

After getting up a couple hundred meters – close to the tree line – I headed east to see if the terrain was any different. I eventually came to a dry gully that cut a canyon 30 feet deep in the side of the mountain. Looking out towards Mont Careta, I also spied what looked like a cave in a rock formation. With a new goal, I headed down Mont O’Reilly and up Mont Careta, using the photos I took from Mont O’Reilly to navigate to the cave, which I couldn’t see above me through the thick forest.

Unfortunately, the “cave” was just a hole created by a pile of large boulders, as you can see below. For my return, I traversed the dry gully, largely hopping from boulder to boulder. This was considerably easier than both the tall grass and the forest. I ended up back at Hope Estate, near the base of the mining operations. Overall, the excursion may have been more trouble than it was worth. Next time I’m in the area, I will probably take the dirt road around Mont Careta, which is also marked as a hiking trail.

It had been a while since I took a long walk, so yesterday I headed out to Bell Point to look around. I started by taking the road behind the orange houses across form the Grand Case airport, which leads up the hill and into the valley between Bell Point and Anse Marcel. An early detour off the road led me down a long gully of boulders which rejoined the road at the bottom of the valley. Back on the dirt road, I encountered the worst smell of the trip so far, coming from what I initially thought was a dead dog. Upon reviewing my photos, the ringed tail and dark eye-mask indicate it was probably a raccoon or similar creature. According to a biological inventory of Saint Martin:

The raccoon (Procyon spec.) is shrouded in mistery (Husson, 1960). This animal was supposedly observed once in 1957. Recently too it was reportedly observed, especially on the French side (Wilson, pers. comm., 1996). It is unknown where this animal comes from, but Husson (1960) counts it among the wild mammals imported by humans. It can also be found in several other Antillean islands.

The road led to a path, which led to the small beach at the end of the valley. Near the beach, I found an abandoned well and saw a mongoose run for cover in some brush. The beach had a Nature Reserve sign and I was surprised to find a marked trail leading all the way around the edge to the Grand Case side of Bell Point. The views in this undeveloped area are quite lovely. Along the rocky coast is a blowhole which periodically spouts water which is pushed up from a cave underneath.

As the trail made a brief pass through a more wooded area, I spotted several Anolis pogus and was reminded of their uncanny ability to jump away at the exact moment I press the shutter on my camera. Back on the grassy area near the end of Bell Point the trail ended, essentially in the middle of nowhere.

Heading back towards Grand Case, I found the remains of a goat, including the ID tag that was once attached to its ear. Unfortunately, I also found the shell of a sea turtle nearby, presumably butchered in the woods.

Yesterday we were back at Pinel Island, and I was back to photographing two of my favorite creatures there: vinegaroons and dwarf geckos. Vinegaroons, sometimes called whip scorpions, are Arachnids (like spiders) and they have no venom. If disturbed, however, they can spray acetic acid at you, which is how they got their name. I also found a few of the dwarf gecko Sphaerodactylus sputator. The largest one I have seen yet, pictured below on a plastic plate, was also pregnant. You can see the bulge of the single egg on the left side of her body. I also took a couple close ups of sea skeletons, a chiton and an urchin.

Last week at Pinel I was able to test my new super special macro flash rig. The setup consists of two strobes mounted on the end of my macro lens, which are triggered by the built-in flash. I used the setup with my 85mm macro lens and used diffusers on both the flashes. On Amazon, most of the reviews are by dentists who use this setup to take photos of teeth.

Overall, I found it works quite well. Reflective surfaces still have a bit of glare, but overall the lighting is softer and more even, while still allowing me to have greater depth of field and sharper focus. I was also delighted to find a couple dwarf gecko eggs, one hatched, one unhatched. I believe these geckos typically lay a single egg, which is quite large compared to the size of the lizard. I also saw the smallest gecko yet, probably less than half-an-inch long including tail.

One of the great things about Octopus Diving is that, when they have the chance, they go out in search of new reefs and other potential dive spots. That’s how they found Chris’s Reef and Kusasa Reef and what led them to start diving Roche Marcel and Molly Beday. Even better, if you are friends with them, you might get to go out looking for new dive sites with them. This is how we ended up at a couple new spots in the general vicinity of Tintamarre.

The first spot looked like a 15 meter deep reef in the channel between Anguilla and Tintamarre. We motored out, dropped in and found it to be 35 meters deep, 98% sand and 2% sea urchin. I guess you win some and you lose some. It was still quite fun, though. The red heart urchins looked like underwater coconuts and long-spined sea biscuit was motoring around the bottom pretty quickly for an urchin.

Heading closer to Tintamarre, we dropped in between Japanese Reef and Circus. The reef was generally pretty similar to the nearby official dive sites, but once we drifted down towards Circus, we did get to have fun in a large cave system with a number of openings and passages. After spending a while down there, we popped up above the cave, surrounded by our own bubbles gradually percolating through the holes in the reef.

Also, as you may have noticed from the photos, the dome scratch repair was pretty successful. I think there may be some optical distortion in spots from uneven sanding, but it’s a lot less noticeable than giant scratches!

While I was napping on the beach on Pinel, Madam J and Katie found a dog with an iguana in his mouth. Thankfully, they woke me up and brought me to see the iguana, post-dog attack. Normally iguanas will leave quickly if approached, but this one was clearly injured and perhaps not very mobile, so it was easy to get photos of it as it eyed us warily and whipped its tail. As you can see from the photos, it has a large subtympanal scale and heavily barred tail, clearly marking it as the common or green iguana and not the lesser antillean iguana that I was hoping to find on Pinel. There is still hope, however, that the lesser antillean iguana still lives on Tintamarre.