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“Here it is! It’s carrying a leaf! It’s at a nest!”. We are birding a wooded ravine in the dry scrubby forests of the peninsula Presqu’ile de la Caravelle on Martinique, and we are searching for a very rare, highly localized, globally-threatened species, the White-breasted Thrasher. And there it is! We had been birding for about an hour, catching glimpses of one or two birds here and there, but this is a fabulous sighting! Both male and female are present, at the nest no more than 20 feet away, stunning leisurely views, excellent photography opportunities. Excellent! White-breasted Thrasher
was one of our target species on our Lesser Antilles tour, being an
endemic species here. We did very well – we found
practically all the single and two-island endemics, the Lesser
Antilles endemics, and Caribbean endemics, including such exceptionally
rare species
as Imperial Parrot, Grenada Dove, Whistling Warbler, the Grenada
Hook-billed Kite, and Montserrat Oriole. Some species were fairly easy
to locate – the
St Lucia Black Finch and St Vincent Parrot spring to mind – but
others took patience and perseverance, such as Guadeloupe Woodpecker
and Martinique
Oriole, but we were finally successful in finding our target species.
We also had superb views of White-tailed Tropicbirds, a leisurely
flyby of
a Pomarine Jaeger and a fast flyby of an Audubon’s Shearwater.
Lastly, we had excellent views of a shorebird that had all the
diagnostic features
of a Common Sandpiper, a Eurasian vagrant! Who knows what we’ll
find next time!! Click here to download a list of birds seen on the 2004 Lesser Antilles tour. To go to the Lesser Antillies webpage, click here. Old News:
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