Birding in Tobago

Birding in Tobago

Write-ups focussing on specific locations can be found at the following links:

Tobago - whetting the appetite part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, part 5, part 6
Tobago - Blue Waters Inn
Tobago - Main Ridge
Tobago - round the island trip
Tobago - Little Tobago
Tobago - Hummingbirds
Tobago - Red-billed Tropicbird

Little Tobago

Little Tobago is a small island off the coast of Big Tobago. It is very easy to get to, especially if you are staying at the Blue Waters Inn, as the boats that go there (known as Blue Boat and Yellow Boat) are both parked in Batteaux Bay, and both use the hotel pier. There are two reasons that people go - for the diving, rumoured to be pretty good, and for the birds, certified excellent.

On this day I was with the Yellow competition

I went for the birds, and I went twice, the second time as I wanted another crack at the Red-billed Tropicbirds from the viewing platform, the results of which are here. Boats leave at 10ish and 2ish - times are always -ish in Tobago, which suited me fine but may irritate those on a tight schedule. Go for the afternoon trip, as the birds return from fishing at this time and there will be many more birds present than in the morning. The crossing is only ten minutes, and costs $25, which included one of the boat guys giving you a "guided tour" - my advice would be to skip the guided tour and head straight on up to the very top (easier second time around of course!) where you can get the viewing platform to yourself - it could easily become very cramped, and one of the days I thought I might go over I ended up staying on the beach drinking cocktails as an enormous party of elderly American birders (Tilley-hatted to the max) turned up, and I may have been forced to throw them off the top had I also been there - that said I could probably have got to the top half an hour in front of them.... My best photos came from the day that I had the platform entirely to myself for a while, go figure. Once over there, it's a mildy strenuous climb to the top - the start is the worst section, lots of steps, but it becomes gentler once you get past the building thing. Take water -  I forgot both times. On the way back the boats will stop near Goat Island and let you do a bit of snorkelling (all gear provided) which is most refreshing after slogging it up the hill laden with cameras. Trips last about two and a half hours, with two hours on the island.

 

 

 

Target birds on the island are Magnificent Frigatebird, Brown Booby, Red-footed Booby, and of course the Red-billed Tropicbirds - the reason why 99% of people go, including my own parents two weeks after me (my Dad ended up photographing the exact same nesting bird as I did!). Osprey is likely, as are many of the rainforest birds like Trinidad Motmot and Spectacled Thrush.

The viewing platform at the top is spectacular - thousands of Tropicbirds, many passing within a few feet, interspesed with piratical Frigatebirds who treat the Tropicbirds much like Skuas treat Terns - not very nicely! The established technique is to grab them by their elegant tails and dangle them until they let go of their fish, after which the Frigatebird will catch it in mid-air. We saw this many times, but each time too far out to get a decent photograph. The Boobies were far fewer, and nested much lower down - difficult to get close to and you will need a long lens - my not-very-good best effort is below. Anyway, a great trip that is not be missed if you ever find yourself on Tobago.

Main Ridge Forest Reserve, Tobago

Tobago is a very small island, and the most interesting birds live in the densest rainforest which occurs on the slopes of the main ridge at the north-east end of the island, the Main Ridge Forest Reserve. This protected area has several excellent trails through it, most accessed from the Roxborough to Bloody Bay road. Seeing as we didn't have a car, and largely didn't have a clue, we decided to employ a guide. Note that I said "we" - yup, Mrs L came too, incredible! Pre-trip research indicated that the best guide was a guy called Newton George, so I made sure to send him an email several months before we travelled. He got back with options very quickly, and the costs (US$60 each for a half-day) seemed reasonable-enough for top-quality guiding. Newton worked for many years as a ranger in the reserve and knows it better than anyone - this proved not to be a boast - he was excellent, and, as I had hoped, picked up all the good stuff on call, which as tourists we simply could not do. We agreed we would sort out precise dates when we arrived, and then I didn't hear from Newton again! Not to worry though, as I left a message for him at the desk of our hotel - much of his business comes from the Blue Waters Inn, and sure enough, one afternoon as I was stood on our balcony in my underpants, he popped round to work out the finer details.

So a couple of days later we met him in the carpark at 6am with a packed lunch and lots of optics, and headed off to Roxborough, seeing a few birds on the way, such as our first Green Heron of the holiday. We turned north at Roxborough and the road began to wind slowly upwards, and the abandoned cocoa plantations gave way to thicker forest. We were the only car on the road, and the order of the day was to make frequent stops either because Newton had seen something, or simply because it was a promising area in which he had previously seen something. In this way we added a stack of new birds to the list, and got views of Collared Trogon that I had scarcely believed possible, and it was Mrs L who found it!! Tropical and Grey Kingbirds were everywhere, pairs of Orange-winged Parrots (O-w Amazon) flew overhead making a variety of noises, and we had several Rufous-tailed Jacamar - a fabulous Bee-eater-like creation.

Rufous-tailed Jacamar

Tropical Kingbird

Further stops gained us the sought-after Venezualan Flycatcher, Ochre-bellied and Yellow-bellied Flycatchers, as well as Olivaceous Woodcreeper and Golden-Olive Woodpecker. Working the forest edge is the easiest way to see birds, and so we spent much of the morning gradually we birding our way up to the best trail in the area, Gilpin Trace - a wonderful track that winds down a valley beside a stream deep into the forest. This is where we saw the star bird - the White-tailed Sabrewing, Tobago's largest Hummingbird. Photos from this particular trip are fairly thin on the groud as at this point I had not DISCOVERED FLASH but I'll try and give a quick impression of what it was like.

Trinidad Motmot

How Newton picked up all the stuff in the forest I will never know, but I guess he might experience (a lesser version of) the same if he came round Wanstead Flats with me - that said he has been to the UK a lot, usually for the bird fair, so perhaps not, and I might have to pay him here too! We got almost all the target birds and saw them well, the only real miss was the White-throated Spadebill which we heard but never saw. Guess I'll have to go back....

 

Here's the list from the day:

Main Ridge Forest Reserve
Rufous-vented Chachalaca
Broad-winged Hawk
Great Black Hawk
Orange-winged Parrot
White-throated Jacobin
Rufous-breasted Hermit
White-tailed Sabrewing
Copper-rumped Hummingbird
Collared Trogon (we saw five in the end)
Trinidad Motmot
Rufous-tailed Jacamar
Golden-Olive Woodpecker
Red-crowned Woodpecker
Stripe-breasted Spinetail
Plain Brown Woodcreeper
Olivaceous Woodcreeper
Barred Antshrike
Plain Antvireo
Yellow-breasted Flycatcher
Ochre-bellied Flycatcher
Yellow-bellied Elaenia
Fuscous Flycatcher
Tropical Kingbird
Grey Kingbird
Venezualan Flycatcher
Blue-backed Manakin
Scrub Greenlet
House Wren
Rufous-breasted Wren
Yellow-legged Thrush
White-necked Thrush
Tropical Mockingbird
Blue-grey Tanager
White-lined Tanager
Palm Tanager
Bananaquit
Black-faced Grassquit
Giant Cowbird

plus these on the way

Green Heron
Cattle Egret
Little Blue Heron

Blue Waters Inn, Tobago

Old news, old news, but the next few posts, added together, are going to form a trip report, that you can access from my Trips Page. Anyway, it's not as if I've seen any birds here - in fact I've barely been out of the house other than to go to work.

So, Tobago. Wonderful. Go. Go now. Actually, scratch that. Don't go now, go next November, for right about now the prices tend to skyrocket, such that a week in January costs 2.5x what a week in November costs. This is apparently the distinction between the wet and the dry season, though for the first six days of our stay we had approximately 40 minutes of rain. Perhaps we were just lucky, but it made our holiday seem like a complete bargain. We flew British Airways (the choices of airline are fairly limited, and it's only a weekly flight, via Antigua), and also booked our hotel, the Blue Waters Inn, via their website. The morning flight, from Gatwick, was pretty long, made longer by the enforced stop in Antigua, and by the time we got to ANR Robinson Airport at Crown Point on Tobago, it was 5.30 in the evening and basically dark - the time difference is four hours. But it was WARM, and as we stepped out onto the pavement, rum punch in hand, a steel band was playing. Holiday mode was immediately engaged! We had prebooked a transfer to the Blue Waters Inn, just over an hours drive away, but in doing so paid well over the odds. It was nice to have no hassle immediately upon arrival, but  the actual fare is $50, or 300 local dollars, known as TT.

The first thing you notice about Tobago is that everybody knows everybody, and the common way of saying "Hi" is to hoot your horn. So, one arm out of the window, the other on the horn - essentially constantly, leaving, er, no hands for the wheel....and the roads to Tobago once you get past the capital, Scarborough, become quite bendy. Lucky then that it was dark. Needless to say, we made it one piece and by 9pm local time were sitting in the Shipwreck Bar of the Blue Waters Inn drinking the second of many rum punches. I had chosen this place for several reasons - the primary one being the location. It sits just north of the small village of Speyside at the eastern end of the island in the secluded Batteaux Bay. This end of the island is the hilly part, with secondary forest coming right down to the shore. The western end, where the airport and the main tourist district are, is the flat part. There are birds there of course, but let's just say there is a reason why all birders stay in Speyside! The second reason was that the hotel was lowrise, and small, just 38 rooms, all of which were right on the beach. I'm not a fan of big hotels with gazillions of guests. This hotel had it's own beach, own jetty, secluded basically. Oh, and it was where the boats to the Red-billed Tropicbird colony on Little Tobago go from.... Many months after I had booked the holiday I asked various birding associates if they had ever been to Tobago - those that had been had all stayed, and I mean 100% of them, at the Blue Waters Inn. Curried Shrimp and a beer later and we were ready to hit the sack.





Bananquit

We awoke at 4am to the sound of birds. Unknown birds. Naturally I leapt out of bed and tried to identify them in the dark. Turns out the first one to start off is the Tropical Mockingbird, followed shortly afterwards by the uniquitous Bananaquit, which sounds like a cross between a hyperactive Dunnock and a Firecrest. Once you've had about a quarter of an hour of duet of those two, the very noisy Rufous-vented Chachalacas start up, a kind of small turkey-like fowl - the national bird of Tobago.





Rufous-vented Chachalaca

It got light before six, and so we started to explore our surroundings. The hotel is literally on the beach - a couple of bungalows and then two small groupings of rooms separated by the bar, restaurant and pool. I estimate that the distance from my bed to the water was easily under six metres, and were it not for the low wall I reckon I could have got from one to the other in under five seconds. As it was, twenty seconds was about the norm, though everything happens much more slowly than you would expect on Tobago. This is both a good and a bad thing. Good in that you cannot help but relax, but bad in that anyone who that you might expect is there to see to your holiday needs is in fact much more relaxed than you are, and consequently - and despite your advanced state of relaxation - you cannot help but get frustrated at just how long it takes for a beer to get from the bar to your table.

We went for our first swim before breakfast, and it was delicious. The warter is properly warm. Not quite bath warm, but warm enough that any testicular fears you may have evaporate instantly. Over the course of the week I spent many happy hours simple floating on my back (I have excellent natural buoyancy....)  watching Magnificent Frigatebirds floating over. My list of birds seen whilst swimming was pretty good. Frigates easily the most common, but regular Red-billed Tropicbirds in the distance, Brown Pelicans and Osprey overhead, Great Black Hawk, Peregrine, Orange-winged Parrots and quite a few others.

Breakfast was a leisurely affair, a buffet of fruits and so on, endless coffee, and then hot food if you felt like it. And all with a brilliant view of a sandy beach - complete with the friendliest Turnstones in the world, Spotted Sandpiper, and Yellow-crowned Night Heron - and verdant scenery down to the water's edge. There was a lot of happy sighing.




Trinidad (Blue-crowned) Motmot

I mentioned that this wasn't a birding holiday - indeed it wasn't. Much time was spent sitting around. Swimming, reading, snoozing, outright dozing in fact. My biggest downfall was the presence of Hummingbird feeders between the rooms and the beach - and there a great deal of time was spent, as I have already shown here. A non-photographer could have had a much more sedentary week. Of the seven days we spent on Tobago, five and half were spent no more than fifty yards from our hotel room - it was that kind of holiday. Tthe grounds of the hotel encompassed several acres, and the manicured areas quickly gave way to wilder habitat, and it was this edge that was probably the most productive. Is it time for a list? I think it is!

Blue Waters Inn
Rufous-vented Chachalaca
Magnificent Frigatebird
Red-billed Tropicbird
Brown Pelican
Brown Booby
Magnificent Frigatebird
Yellow-crowned Night Heron
Little Blue Heron
Osprey
Great Black Hawk
Yellow-headed Caracara
Peregrine
Turnstone
Spotted Sandpiper
White-tipped Dove
Pale-vented Pigeon
Orange-winged Parrot
Smooth-billed Ani
Grey-rumped Swift
Rufous-breasted Hermit
Copper-rumped Hummingbird
Belted Kingfisher
Trinidad Motmot
Red-crowned Woodpecker
Barred Antshrike
White-fringed Antwren
Yellow-breasted Elaenia
Ochre-bellied Flycatcher
Tropical Kingbird
Grey Kingbird
Scrub Greenlet
Tropical Mockingbird
Blue-grey Tanager
Bananaquit
Blue-black Grassquit
Crested Oropendola
Great Cowbird

I've no idea how many that is, but whilst a few birds were omnipresent, you had to go looking for many of them, and so in the quiet hours before the hotel was up, that's what I did. This quickly became the routine - a spot of birding before a swim and a leisurely breakfast, another swim, a quick photo-session before lunch (all photos in this post taken no more than twenty seconds away from our room), lunch, beer, more swimming etc. Fairly strenuous really, I don't know how I coped.

A few thoughts on the hotel - fabulous surroundings, all I thought it would be on paper. Slightly let down by largely indifferent cooking - if you stuck to the daily grilled fish you were largely OK, but overall we thought it was pretty average. Not that we went there for the gourmet experience you understand, but top-quality nosh is always appreciated and this wasn't. Similarly the cocktails were all standard pub-style cocktails, ie not very good, or at least not versus what a real cocktail ought to be - half the time they had no limes, which is ridiculous as I found a lime tree in the grounds whilst birding! My guess is the staff were just too relaxed to go and pick them - and this was probably the most annoying thing. I can relax up there with the best of them, but there are limits, especially when you're working in a service environment. Then again, perhaps I shouldn't attempt to apply western european standards to the Caribbean, and this is what it is like all the time and if you go often you just expect it. So in summary, setting great, birds great, room great, food, drink and service mostly average. Nothing to warrant complaining about, but equally nothing to write home about either. Like I said, I went there for the former rather than the latter, so no real worries. And when you have Bananquits sat on railings as you eat lunch, who cares?

 

Hummingbirds

I am still in full-on photo-editing mode, so here's another very photo-heavy post over at www.justbirdphotos.com. Normal service about seeing nothing on Wanstead Flats should be resumed shortly, though there is a whiff of Scaup in the air, and Waxwing is surely on the cards before too long. Tobago was wonderful, magical, and I am going to do a full trip report in due course. I've put a Steel Band CD on my iPod, and this makes the Central Line a little more bearable, but essentially I cannot believe that the trip is over and that the warm turquoise sea is now but a memory. This lay about ten feet from my hotel bedroom door - about the distance I sit from a lady called Michele in the office. She too recently returned from a holiday that she would still much rather be on, though I don't know how far away warm water was for her. But if you ever find yourself booking a holiday to Tobago, do go stay at the Blue Waters Inn. Barring any serious incidents, the sea I'm talking about should still be there, and you will have Hummingbirds and Bananaquits quarraling over the feeders two feet from you all day long, and be woken up by Tropical Mockingbirds and Rufous-vented Chachalacas while it is still dark.

Red-billed Tropicbirds

No visit to Tobago would be complete (for a birder, or a birder's wife) without a visit to the tiny island of Little Tobago just off the coast from the village of Speyside. This is where the Red-billed Tropicbirds nest, and it's a fabulous experience. If you have not tried walking up a steep hill carrying a ton of gear in temperatures of 30 degrees and around 85% humidity, then frankly you haven't lived. It's all worthwhile once you get to the top is all I can say. Here is a taster, with a lot more here.


I finally understand flash too late

I had a eureka moment earlier on today. Exciting for me, boring for you. Yes, I realised that I had finally cracked flash. Or perhaps just finally cracked? Anyhow, I have been jumping up and down very enthusiastically for most of the day - knowledge is power, as they say. Why it has taken this long, i.e. many many years, is anyone's guess, but I finally understand how it works and how to use it. Shame that this revelation only took place on the penultimate day of my holiday, and that I had already visited the rainforest - where let me tell you, that Blue-backed Manakin would have been toast - but such is life. The secret lies in manual everything. Manual flash, manual exposure. None of this fill-flash crap, manual all the way. The specific revelation was realising that if you reduce the power of the flash, what you're actually doing is reducing the duration of the flash - the actual light output remains the same. I just hadn't grasped that before. So if, say, you reduce your flash power to 1/32 of full power, it illuminates for a split second, a much faster split second than your camera shutter is capable of. Thus in a dark place, for instance a rainforest, the shutter speed you set on your camera is completely irrelevant, as the light that hits the sensor is all driven by the flash, and not from ambient light. So your shutter can be open for ages, say 1/200th of a second, but if your flash is set to 1/32nd of full power, then that lights up for only 1/20,000th of a second (or so), and the rest of the time it's just dark and nothing is recorded. With me so far? So you can safely set your camera to manual, dial in 1/200 or similar, set a nice small aperture that will ensure lots of stuff in focus, and fire away safe in the knowledge that in Aperture Priority mode you would get a black image and the flash does everything else. This also means you can handhold, and leave the pain-in-the-arse tripod at home for ever. As the distance changes between you and the bird, so the relative power of the flash increases, so you can keep your exposure constant by moving ISO down as you get closer(sensor less sensitive to light), up as you move further away (more sensitive), or your aperture down as you get closer (make hole smaller, less light hits sensor in available time), or up as you get further away (bigger hole, more light hits). The only issue with this is that, for me at least, at the beginning of this voyage of discovery, it's all a bit trial and error, with a high likelihood of either not enough or too much with the first attempt, after which the bird zooms off. Nonetheless it's a miracle, and I am really really dense for not discovering this earlier. This is how people freeze the wings of hummingbirds - by using 100% flash which gives bonkers shutter speeds far in excess of what the camera is capable of. Genius. All of the above came to me in a flash, so to speak, when I was wandering round the gardens of the hotel early this morning . There were plenty of birds, but they were impossible to photograph. I idly wondered whether the Hummingbird technique might not work on other birds, birds in dark places.....bugger me if it didn't. Look at this Barred Antshrike - perhaps not the natural-looking image we all strive for, but given the choice between impressionistic blur and pin-sharp albeit flash-lit, I'm going for the latter every time.



1/300s, f8, ISO 640, FLASH 1/32 power

  

Still warm

I'm typing this from the bar of the Blue Waters Inn on Tobago. For the first time this week the rain is hammering down, and it lends a certain ambience. A Caribbean bar right on the beach is the place to be right now, and that is an undeniable fact. To properly enjoy this scene, I've just ordered a Planters Punch. I expect that it will be rather good. Here, have a Motmot. There are loads of them here, so I can spare one.

9000 to go

My world bird list has just surpassed 1000. Just in case you are confused, this is of course very exciting, and not really sad and boring. I can't remember which bird it was, but I'm kind of hoping that it was the Collared Trogon, and not the frankly very dull Plain-brown Woodcreeper. Not that it matters, I'm not really much of a world lister anyhow - which is a good thing as it would be the job of several lifetimes. Didn't do much today, a bit of swimming and some light drinking, followed by an extended Hummingbird photography session. Apparently the technique is to shoot on very limited flash power, which is the equivalent of an extremely fast shutter speed (when you reduce flash power what you are actually doing is reducing the illumination time), but to be honest I'm struggling. My rudimentary technique is to instead crank up both flash and shutter speed, wait for some direct sunlight and hope for the best on the focussing front. Consequently my hit rate is very very low indeed, but when I get lucky the results can be quite pleasing.



Copper-rumped Hummingbird

Rufous-breated Hermit






Tough

I cannot begin to describe how much I like the Caribbean. My last post, in case any confusion lingers, was mere jest. It's bloody brilliant here. I mean, Canary Wharf is excellent, but this is even better. Today Mrs L and I got up early and went to the main rainforesty bit of Tobago. I could post a long list of birds, birds that would knock your socks off, but I won't, as that would just provoke unfair feelings of jealousy. Instead I'll post a single photo, which should be fine. Apologies for the lack of words, I'm a bit busy.


innocently-chosen