Antigua and Environment

Antigua’s landscape is far more arid than any we’ve seen so far. With little rainfall compared to the higher islands, much of their fresh produce is imported from Dominica. It also makes for a slight variation in avifauna as well. This was only the second island we have seen collared doves (the other being Martinique) and I presume these have been introduced by Europeans along with our first sighting of house sparrows. Both were still outnumbered by the ever-abundant lesser Antilles finches and zenaida doves. The mangroves around English Harbour are also home to the white crowned pigeon. This initially had me flummoxed as the size and colour looked like a slightly greyish coot but it was obviously flying like a pigeon.

We saw wintering laughing gulls here – again only the second place since we saw them in Soufriere, St. Lucia but again the frigate birds and royal terns are more frequent. Sightings of brown boobies are now decreasing although frigate birds are still present (we won’t get up to Barbuda to see the breeding colony at its peak) and there are more brown pelicans than further south.

Wading birds are still pretty much limited to herons and egrets. We saw a swamphen briefly at the Indian River in Dominica but nothing else before or since. Even the lagoons behind the beaches in Antigua appear bereft of small waders but there was a substantial heronry in the shallows at St. Johns, peppered with hundreds of snowy and great egrets, with a pair of little blue herons proving that it wasn’t just for white birds. We also spotted a handful of martins hunting around the arriving cruise ships in the early morning.

Peregrine mobbing egret at St.Johns, Antigua

Raptors have been even more infrequent. I watched a black hawk in St. Vincent then there was nothing until we started seeing American Kestrels from Les Saintes northwards. On arrival in St. Johns I photographed a peregrine mobbing a lone snowy egret. It nearly succeeded in drowning the egret as the latter crashed into the bay, was submerged up to its neck and then could barely drag its wet feathers clear of the water to make it to the shore, under continued harrying by the falcon. We also spotted a large bird of prey but were unable to identify it, larger than a falcon but smaller than a buzzard with slow, deliberate wingbeats.

The sea around Antigua is equally shallow shelving. Most of the seas are less than 10m deep and so coral is restricted to shipwrecks and shallow rocky headlands. However, the sea is an amazing pale blue as a result. This was until we entered the harbour at St. Johns where a line showed the colour change from blue to sickly green with an aroma of untreated sewage. The sludge in the shallows made for poor anchor holding and a smelly night. We, however, continued to use our holding tank.

We have been quite careful with litter. Most shopping is packed into our own bags and stall holders are reluctant to hand out plastic bags for fruits and vegetables. We had been carefully separating our recycling and keeping our Dominica litter to recycle further north in Guadeloupe and continued to separate glass for Antigua. However, the recycling bins at English Harbour only catered for aluminium drinks cans, PET and HDPE, and there was no recycling in St. Johns.

Meanwhile, we are learning to make do with less, avoid litter and eat less meat – lessons we will most likely carry home with us.