Potted Caribbean highlight snippets

Antigua
Eyeball to eyeball with baby egrets deep inside a mangrove heronry.

Surrounded by noisy Sooty Terns, a Red-billed Tropicbird flies by.

Snorkelling from Bird Island over soft corals and sea cucumbers, following cuttlefish back to the catamaran anchored offshore.

Barbuda
A million lagoon jellyfish turn upside-down to filter feed like hydroids, ignoring the Rasta at the dock.

A joyous damp boat trip powered by a bat-faced grump to cruise within laughing distance of full-grown baby Magnificent Frigatebirds.

Barbuda Warbler, mid-pish, pished to touching distance.

The horror of former slave caves; which now house an irascible, disheveled Pearly-eyed Thrasher.

Montserrat
Sleeping in George Martin's bed; replacing Green Heron and Iguana with a dive in his pool.

A male Montserrat Oriole forages oblivious to us and brings a cricket or a moth back to young from a previously unknown nest.

Turtles mating at the surface, near the edge of the Exclusion Zone.

Pure tragic emotion, seeing from the unbelievable blue sea, the hollow grey ruins of Plymouth, buried and reburied since 1997.

Brown Trembler (the Twitcher's friend) at the nest.

Dominica
Plumbeous Warbler at our fingertips in a channel through mangroves blocked at the sea by hurricane-driven rusty hulks.

Five-and-a-half hours of Quaker-driven silent vigil, awaiting the Imperial Parrot that never came, while everything else came to pay respects.

Blue-headed Hummingbird dancing around us, Queen of the forest flowers.

A powercut night under the Milky Way, new stars flashing on and off with every firefly.