Volunteering in St Lucia: a dry forest in a very wet dry season

By Edward Bell

The beautiful bustling island of St Lucia is going to be my home for the next 6 months. St Lucia is part of the chain of islands known as the Lesser Antilles in the Caribbean, the Lesser Antilles with the exception of Barbados are volcanic islands, some more active then others e.g. Montserrat. The mountainous terrain in the center of the island helps shape the climate trapping moisture leading to lush vegetation and rainforests at the core and coastal dry forest down the Atlantic east coast.

The rainforests of St Lucia are home to many of the islands endemic bird species including the St Lucia Parrot Amazona versicolor. The dry forests are just as important and home to quite a few of the islands other unique wildlife. In my first couple of weeks here I have been mostly in an around the bays of Anse Pouvert and Trou Halhal on the east coast just above the town of Dennery where we live. This area and the bays of Louvet and Grande Anse make up one of the territories of the White-breasted Thrasher Ramphocinclus brachyurus.

The White-breasted Thrasher is listed as endangered on the IUCN redlist and is only found in one isolated area on the island of Martinique and split between two areas on St Lucia, south of Dennery near the town of Praslin, we call this the southern population and then north of Dennery is the northern population. The majority of the population is on St Lucia and is mostly concentrated in the southern population. We have been monitoring the more scattered northern population, this has involved early starts and long walks as the Landrover has temporailry lost its 4wd capability. We hike and cut our way through the bush till we get to a pre designated point which we locate with GPS then observe and record any bird sightings or calls heard over a ten minute period we will repeat each point over the course of 3 separate visits. The first time we go to a new point we also carry out a detailed habitat survey including leaf litter samples and species counts for the various sized trees in an area of 15m from the point.

This week we were also joined by one of the officers from the St Lucia Forestry Dept, Tim Jn Baptiste and we set up some mist nets in the hope of catching some Thrashers so that we can bleed them and assess the genetic diversity in the northern population. Sadly we didn’t have the best of luck only catching a hummingbird which freed itself as quickly as it was caught and a Scaly-breasted Thrasher Margarops fuscus, during this time we did spot the pair of White-breasted Thrashers we had hoped to catch but they seemed to be on to us and our plan. Luckily at the minute the Thrasher survey is the main body of the work we are doing so we always have tomorrow to try again.