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Thursday, April 2, 2009

Birding - 1/4/09 - Saint Lucia

Caribbean buckeye (Junonia everete)

Lesser Antillean flycatcher

Decided to try the Edmund National Rainforest tract near Soufriere this morning. We jeeped in along a rough track and after 40 minutes driving elected to walk the rest of the way into the forest, through plantations and patches of old-growth. This paid off quickly as we were soon watching our first St Lucia parrot, albeit in flight. Other great birds along here included my first rufous-throated solitaire - a cracking bird - and I taped in a female-plumaged St Lucia black-finch (the last of the endemics under the belt). Plenty of room for improvement though, still got to get perched views of the parrot and a male black-finch if possible. On the way back to the jeep, picked up two more parrots in flight and finally got the endemic Anolis.

Over lunch we finally got our first swifts, but incredibly these were short-tailed swifts - a rare vagrant to Saint Lucia (overshooting?). This was confirmed on the slopes above Soufriere an hour later when we got our first good views of our first Lesser Antillean swifts. Bonus - just need to find black swift now... The slopes here were good for butterflies and we saw our first Caribbean buckeyes - a very photogenic beast.

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