On our first night with team members Yann and Marie at their house near Pavones we had many guests. There were some surfer friends, and lots of insects attracted to the porch light. There were also plenty of geckos around to eat the insects. One, as you can see below, was a pirate gecko with only one eye. We also made a jaunt through the night down muddy dirt roads where the calls of frogs and insects in the dark changed every few meters creating a continuous, but ever-changing chorus of science fiction sounds.

Aside from the pirate gecko, my favorite critter was the young praying mantis that lived on the trunk of a tree in their front yard. It actually stayed on the same section of tree trunk the whole time we were there, mostly hiding with its marvelous camouflage, but also scampering around the trunk with lightning speed if approached too closely.

This first post about our Costa Rica expedition features mostly photos taken from the window of the small plane we took from San Jose to Golfito. As you can see, Costa Rica is very green and has many muddy rivers. The first shots are above San Jose, and the last ones show the Golfito area. Golfito is the biggest town in the southern Pacific coast area. It served as the port for the area when it was a major banana producing region. Nowadays it’s pretty quiet, although a pseudo-duty free zone brings some folks from around the country to buy appliances and such. There is also a photo of a cowboy and a boy on a bicycle crossing a bridge since I didn’t have a better place to put it.

I only photographed a few, but they were nice. The great egret was near the trailhead of the Sandy Cruz Trail. When we were on Saba last time in October, several locals mentioned the stray great egret that had come by in a summer storm and was hanging out. Perhaps this is the same one. A lack of ponds and mangroves makes Saba a less than ideal habitat for this bird. We also saw the Antillean crested hummingbird and I saw a small flock of scaly-naped pigeons in Windwardside. These pigeons are also seen on St. Martin, but rarely, because they were hunted close to extinction on the island.

On most of the Lesser Antilles, there are one or two species of Anolis lizard per island. In fact, these lizards have been studied frequently as a great example of adaptive radiation. On St. Martin, there are two species (A. gingivinus and A. pogus). On Saba, there is just one (A. sabanus). The male Saban anole is quite striking, with a pattern of dark spots. The female is more plain, looking much like the A. pogus found on St. Martin, although apparently A. sabanus is more closely related to A. gingivinus.

Just looking at them for the day, it seemed to me that there was quite a difference in size between the males and females, although I couldn’t be sure if I was comparing adults of each. If so, however, this would make some sense. On islands with two species of anole, usually one species is larger than another. On islands with just one species, the sexes are more likely to exhibit more sexual dimorphism in terms of size. This allows more lizards to share the same resources as they can target prey of slightly different sizes.

I would love to know if there is more diversity of insect species on Saba or St. Martin. On one hand, St. Martin is larger and probably has more invasive species. On the other hand, Saba has a wider variety of terrestrial habitats, including rainforest and elfin cloud forest (although it does lack mangrove wetlands). One would guess that many of the species found on St. Martin are also present in the lower elevations of Saba, while the upper regions of Saba may be more likely to harbor species that aren’t found in St. Martin. Hopefully someday I will find out the answer.

For the time being, I have a relatively small sample size of Saban insects. For starters, I’ve only visited a couple times. I’ve also spend most of my time in the wet forest habitats. In these areas, insect density actually seems to be lower than it is in St. Martin, probably because walking a trail primarily means exploring the undergrowth, which is relatively sparse due to lack of light. Surveys of the canopy or the leaf litter would probably be the most fruitful.

For the spiders of Saba I have much the same story, a lot of questions and not too much experience to go on. There are definitely some familiar spiders, but there were a couple that I’ve never noticed on St. Martin. Perhaps we need a wildlife guide for the Unspoiled Queen.

In the moist forests of Saba, snails are very common and probably more noticeable than any other invertebrates. With only a couple exceptions however, the snails I encountered were all the same or very similar species of helicinid snail. This family of snails is actually quite interesting for a few reasons. One is that they are primarily found in a few locations that are quite far from each other: the Caribbean, Pacific islands and parts of Asia and Australia. They also moved to land independently of other snails, and their closest relatives are snails that live in either marine or fresh water environments.

In June, I visited Saba for just one day of hiking with the SXM Trails hiking association. It’s a small and beautiful volcanic island just twelve minutes away by plane and about two hours by ferry. Much newer than St. Martin, it is part of an arc of younger islands (or St. Martin is part of an arc of older islands) that sit beside each other in the northern part of the Lesser Antilles. It is known as The Unspoiled Queen, which is pretty accurate. With steep slopes and a lack of natural harbors, it is sparsely populated and very beautiful.

This first set of photos shows some views of Saba from the ferry, the towns of The Bottom and Windwardside and a few other hilltops and landscapes.

Saba is also an island where, to me, the plant life is probably more outstanding than the animal life. The top of Mount Scenery catches a cloud almost every day, providing plenty of water, and the height of the island naturally creates a variety of habitats, from tropical scrubland at the lower elevations to rainforest and elfin cloud forest near the top. I really didn’t photograph very many plants, the tree ferns are particularly wonderful, but here are a few. Some of the flowers were in town, so I’m not sure which are likely to be native.

I have many things to post, including photos from the SXM Trails trip to Saba and two weeks of photos from our Les Fruits de Mer expedition to Costa Rica. First, though, a few shots of a baby iguana. They’re so cute at this age.

A couple days ago I spent an evening hour doing field research. Specifically, seeing what was in the field behind the public parking lot in Grand Case. In fact, there was quite a lot going on there. There were a bunch of species of true bug (Hemiptera) that I have been struggling to identify. There were also lots of insects mating. I guess evening is a good time for that.

Below are some photos of three species of bat in La Grotte du Puits des Terres Basses. This is the first time I have seen the greater bulldog bat, Noctilio leporinus. It is also known as the fisherman bat, because it catches fish. Amazingly, it does this at night by using echolocation to detect disturbances in the surface of the water, then swooping down to catch the fish. Also visible in the photos are many young Antillean fruit-eating bats.

Look carefully and you may also see streblid flies, which are also known as bat flies because they are bat parasites, some of which may use only a single species of bat as hosts. Just another example of the fascinating wonders of nature that are happening on the island every day, unnoticed amid the bustle and development.