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Taking flight
WBN09 - Feature_Taking flight
Taking flight
Birdwatching catches on in The Bahamas
Nassau’s Cable Beach Golf Course glistens emerald green as the early morning sun begins to burn off the dew that covers the grass.
A group of about 20 people has gathered at the back of the course. Oddly enough, golf is the last thing on their mind. Most have binoculars hanging from their neck and packs on their back. Cameras, field guides and notebooks are in evidence. One enthusiast carries a powerful telescope.
This is Nassau’s hard core birding group, augmented by visitors from abroad, which meets at different locations around the island on the first Saturday of the month at 7am, September through May. They’re here to observe the hundreds of birds that either spend the night on or around the course’s many ponds and those that glide in with the morning light.
Carolyn Wardle, who has coordinated the Bahamas National Trust’s ornithology group since 1993, leads this morning’s group. She passes out checklists of birdlife that might be spotted around the course.
Wardle, who was one of the first birders to be certified as a tour guide by the Ministry of Tourism, instructs the group to be quiet and stay behind her. “If there’s anything interesting to see, the leader will spot it first and point it out,” she explains.
Wardle is accustomed to leading groups of six or fewer, but that number is continually increasing. “Birding is the fastest-growing segment of the tourism industry worldwide,” says Wardle. “It’s big business.”
She organizes not only the monthly field trips on New Providence but multi-day trips to other islands in The Bahamas.
Birdwatcher’s Shangri-La
Among the first birds Wardle points out on this particular morning are American coots—black waterbirds with a startling white shield and beak—and common moorhens, which are grey-black birds with a red patch above their bill. Both look somewhat like ducks, and they spend a lot of time in the water, but they don’t have webbed feet.
Flying in are a great blue heron, a great egret, a yellow-crowned night heron and a belted kingfisher. After a short time, the birders have seen a least grebe, a La Sagra’s flycatcher, a northern mockingbird, a common yellowthroat, an American redstart, and many different warblers.
While accomplished birders can identify birds by their calls, novices must refer to their field guides, especially when the quick-moving birds are partially obscured by trees and leaves.
Within this group is the Kelly family. Parents Tracy and Glen have brought along their seven-year-old son, Joshua. While no one in the family is a serious birder, Tracy can tell that Josh likes the experience and may grow up to be a birdwatcher.
Residents and migrants
Wardle, who runs Bahamas Outdoors Limited, a nature tour company, says year-round resident birds include the Bahama woodstar, bananaquit, white-cheeked pintail duck, red-legged thrush and smooth-billed ani, which looks somewhat like a crow, along with flycatchers and seed-eating birds like the black-faced grassquit.
Three summer birds that nest in The Bahamas are the gray kingbird, Greater Antillean nighthawk and black-whiskered vireo.
Winter residents—migrant birds that fly in to avoid cold weather up north—include many different kinds of shorebirds.
To see the national bird of The Bahamas in the wild—the West Indian flamingo—visitors would have to travel to Great Inagua, the southernmost island in the Bahamian chain, where the stately pink birds are protected in a national park. However, they can see a captive breeding flock at the Ardastra Gardens Zoo & Conservation Center on Chippingham Road.
Also on view at Ardastra is the endangered Bahama parrot and a vibrant flock of riotously coloured lory parrots that visitors can hand feed.
Although he’s not yet seen a wild flamingo, Don Andringa—a chemistry teacher from Portage, Wisconsin, who came to The Bahamas to escape the snow back home—has spotted a few birds he has never seen before.
“We do a fair amount of birding in Wisconsin, but since we came here we’ve got 47 ‘life birds’ … [that is] the first time you’ve seen them in your life,” says Andringa.
“This is a totally different environment. We don’t get many of these birds in Wisconsin. The American coot we’ve seen, so that’s not a big deal for me, but the moorhen does not get up to Wisconsin, and I’ve seen several of those.”
Andringa, who describes himself not as a tourist but as a “birder away from home,” became a birdwatcher after his wife introduced him to it 10 years ago.
“It’s a way to get out in nature,” he says. “There are so many birds out there, [and they] are so striking.”
“I would highly suggest that if anybody is a birder, they would want to get a guide here. You don’t want to go out by yourself. Out of my 47 life birds, I would say 30 of them we would not have seen without Carolyn.” Andringa has now been on three tours with Wardle.
More than 100 species of birds were recorded in the annual Christmas bird count on New Providence in 2008, so there’s plenty of action for birders here throughout the year, whether you’re an experienced pro or a recent convert to the exciting world of birdwatching. Those interested in joining a field trip with the BNT ornithology group should call Carolyn Wardle at 362-1574.
Sidebar 1:
T ony Hepburn, a recently retired attorney, has been an avid birdwatcher since 1995.
Hepburn meets regularly with other members of the Bahamas National Trust’s ornithology group to visit various locations around New Providence. They also travel to a different Family Island each year to study birds.
Four years ago Hepburn took up photography. Today, armed with a Nikon D300 digital camera and a powerful 400mm lens, he has taken hundreds of photos of the islands’ abundant birdlife, including herons, egrets, stilts, ibis, rails, sandpipers, plovers and ducks.
One of his favourite locations is Harrold and Wilson Ponds National Park, an oasis of peace and quiet within the hubbub of New Providence.
Sidebar 2:
Linda Huber loves to photograph the natural world—the one that most of us are too busy or too preoccupied to notice. Her favourite subjects are the hundreds of flowering plants that flourish in The Bahamas and the 300-plus species of birds that call the islands home, at least for part of the year.
It is that passion that draws Linda out into the early morning air, when the light is just right, at least once a week. There is nothing complicated about this. “I just enjoy it,” she says, adding that she’s happiest when she’s observing or learning something new about nature.
Linda is the author of an informative and attractive 32-page booklet entitled Flowers of The Bahamas and co-author of Nassau’s Historic Landmarks, with noted historian Dr Gail Saunders.
She uses a Sony Alpha100 camera with a Sony 75-300mm zoom lens for most of her work with birds.
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