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Nature, when left alone, will amaze us.  Inset:  original photo. The island of Hispaniola is the second-largest island in the Caribbean.  At just over 75,000 square km, it is about 2 ½ times larger than Vancouver Island.  The Dominican Republic has the eastern two-thirds of the Island, the western third being occupied by the nation of Haiti. If you ever want to see a contrast in how politics and choice affect the land, you need to look no further than Hispaniola.  The western half is an impoverished nation with a fractured economy, largely run by criminal gangs, and whose ecology has been decimated by foraging for firewood.  Only 4% of Haiti's original forests remain, and none of them are protected.  The eastern half is a tropical paradise where almost 40% of the original forests remain.  The difference is because of foresight, planning, and education. To compare the socioeconomic status of both nations, click here .  It turns out that it isn...

Leach's Anole ( Anolis leachii ), photographed on Antigua in 2016. Also called the panther anole, Leach's anole is a common lizard native to the island of Antigua in the Caribbean.  The interesting thing about endemic island life is that the various species didn't just magically appear; they would have travelled there on some flotsam from some distant point of origin, most likely the nearest continent. We don't know when the first anoles showed up, but the chances are very good that they didn't look anything like they do today, other than that they were anoles.  Separated from the original gene pool, the now-isolated lizards would breed and lay eggs, producing new generations.  If they survived, the population would grow. Two things would happen over the millennia that would produce the new species of anole.  Natural selection, where the environment would weed out less well-adapted individuals, and random mutation, where existing genes would experience small changes...

Antillean crested hummingbird, male.  Photographed in 2016 on Antigua. I wonder, is the raised crest and pointy beak an attempt by this fellow to blend in with his surroundings?  Probably not, but it's a funny thought. The Antillean crested hummingbird is one of three hummingbird species on Antigua, one of the smaller islands in the Caribbean (the archipelago is called the Lesser Antilles).  Like the green-throated carib (yesterday's blog, found here ), it is endemic to the Lesser Antilles.  The third species, which I have never seen, is the purple-throated carib. The female (click here for image) looks stunningly different from the male and reminds me of the Anna's hummingbird females I used to see on BC's coast. This photo was taken in 2016 when my wife and I took a cruise of the Caribbean.  We didn't see a ton of birds, but I did manage to get half a dozen good photos on the island of Antigua.  I was using my D500 camera and my 80-400 mm S-series Nikon l...

Male green-throated Carib hummingbird, photographed in 2016, on the island of Antigua. Islands are hard for organisms to colonize without help from humans.  Hawaii, for example, only had two endemic mammals on it before humans showed up, a bat and a seal.  Birds are much more common on islands since they can fly.  Hawaii and the Galapagos have many endemic bird species, although humans have caused the extinction of over half of them on the Hawaiian Islands.  The creatures on these remote islands rarely exist elsewhere. The Caribbean Islands are much closer to continents, and so there is a greater number of bird species.  Even so, these islands typically have their own native bird populations.  In the case of Antigua, there are three species of hummingbird that are present.  I have photographed two of them.  I will do a blog on the Antilles crested hummingbird tomorrow.  The one above, the green-throated carib hummingbird, can be found on many...

St Barnabas Church - the green stone is locally sourced stone. One of the great things about visiting places is to find history, interesting buildings, and culture that is different from what you are used to.  Our 2016 cruise to the Caribbean certainly provided all of that and more.  The historic church in Liberta was built in 1824, originally as a school, but became a church when an earthquake leveled the nearest church, which was in Falmouth (St. Paul's). I recognized the red brick bastions right away as being fortifications to give structural support should another earthquake occur.  It surprised me that earthquakes were something that Caribbean nations had to contend with; dozens of them have been recorded over the years with magnitudes greater than 6.5.   While many Caribbean nations have limestone, there is often a base of igneous rock making up the islands.  In Antigua, the basaltic rocks contain chlorite and celadonite.  Chlorite has shimmering...

Photographed in 2016 with my D500, 80-400 mm S Nikkor lens.  @ 400 mm 1/250 f/7.1 ISO 400 The crop-sensor D500 renders the 400 mm focal length of my lens to 600 mm relative.  In the original shot, the bird filled 1/3 of the frame vertically, so the amount of cropping that was required was minimal.   This is the first bird I looked up in my Howell and Webb bird book ( see yesterday's blog ).  Unfortunately, there were no images of the bird, not too surprising given that the bird inhabits a very narrow strip of Mexico's east coast and some islands of the Caribbean.   The grey kingbird belongs to the tyrant flycatcher family, it is closely related to the western and eastern kingbirds we have locally.  It has similar behaviours; it perches on a branch that presents a clear field of view and waits for a flying insect to present itself.   I will be looking at other birds I have photographed in tropical settings over the next few weeks, partly ...