All My Blogs

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 ...

The new bird book I got on the left and my trusty one I use locally. We are going on a cruise in a couple of weeks, down the West Coast to the Panama Canal and up to Fort Lauderdale.  There, we disembark and fly home.  The three week trip includes stops in Mexico and Central America.  And so I thought I would bring along a bird book covering the area.  I was surprised by what I got. The first thing I noticed was the size of the book, about three times the weight of my field guide.  I can't call the new one a field guide unless I happened to have a sherpa with me, as it's not what I would call a convenient pocket size.  When I opened it up, I got another surprise.  There are a lot of bird species south of the US.  Many more than we have here in Canada. Looking at the hummingbirds alone, I found that all of North America (not including Mexico) has about 14 species.  Mexico and Central America have closer to 60 species.  To give you an idea...

Killdeer I photographed in Esquimalt Lagoon, 2025 Canadian winters are not for the faint of heart.  Many of us northern folk head south to warmer latitudes, which used to be the United States, but it seems that the killdeer had the right idea all along; skip the US and head further south to Mexico or Central America.  I noticed some migrate to the tip of Florida and stay there, believing that the end of the road has come.  They could be forgiven for not realizing that, should they proceed further south, another landmass awaits. Killdeer range map, from the website Allaboutbirds.org Migrating means flying long distances with few breaks and being exposed to more risk.  Natural threats include harsh weather, predators, exhaustion, and getting lost where no water or food is available.  Add to that all the human vectors of death, such as cruise ships, wind turbines, city lights, tall buildings, and all the chemical threats that exist, and you have a true obstacle cou...

A walking stick, belonging to the order Phasmatodea, photographed at Victory Butterfly Gardens. When I was a boy growing up in Ontario, I spent a lot of time outdoors.  It's where my love of animals and invertebrates began. Sometimes I would find walking sticks.  They were not very large, less than four inches, which is negligible when it comes to walking sticks (see image here ).  The record holder is from China at a whopping 30 inches ( see video here ). I love the Pixar movie A Bug's Life , as there are a lot of insect puns.  Some of the best ones are about the walking stick.  If you want a chuckle, click here to see an excerpt. We had a terrarium at school with a population of walking sticks indigenous to India, but we were told to get rid of them as they represented a dangerous invasive threat should they escape.  Given the fact that a single female can, without a male present, lay eggs parthenogenetically, even a single escapee could represent a...