I’m just back from two weeks on the small island of Little Cayman in the northern Caribbean Sea. We were there primarily to dive the coral reefs but our late afternoons were open, so after a late lunch and a nap, and we made it part of our daily routine to walk over to the mangrove ponds across the road, where there were birds to see.
The place we were staying is right on the beach with some cool ocean breezes but even the ten minute walk inland was scorching for us Washingtonians, so we’d wait until after 5pm when the blazing sun had began to drop toward the horizon. There were some birds in the trees where we were staying too, so I’ll include them in this report.
Little Cayman is one of the Sister Islands in the British West Indies. Grand Cayman, where all the offshore banking, cruise ships and most of the country’s population is located, is 80 miles west. Cuba is 150 miles northeast and Jamaica 150 southeast, so Little Cayman is fairly remote both for humans and wildlife. However unlike iguanas, birds can fly, and many are passing through or there just to winter or to breed. It’s always weird to see common birds like Barn swallows flitting around, knowing they’re just pausing to refuel in the mangroves, and will soon be continuing north across the ocean to breed up north where I see them all summer long (though more likely up to the eastern US rather than the West).
We like to visit Little Cayman in April for several reasons: the water is warming, the weather isn’t too hot yet, many sea creatures are nesting and so are birds. While it gives us a limited picture of the place seasonally, our repeat visits at the same time of year reveal how the current year’s weather affects bird distribution, especially in the mangrove ponds.
The place we stay is on a low ridge, about 10 feet elevation, that separates the ocean from the interior marshes, which are almost sea level. The ridge is very dry but supports native sea grape trees, gumbo limbo trees, as well as nonnative Indian almond, palms, scarlet cordia trees, all of which provide habitat and forage for birds. The most common inhabitants around the place we were staying were all-year residents Caribbean Elaenias, Northern mockingbirds, Bananaquits and Greater Antillean grackles.
We also saw a few less common birds. I was hoping to see a Vitelline warbler, an endemic subspecies of a bird that only lives in the Cayman Islands and a couple of remote uninhabited offshore Honduran islands. If I did I didn’t recognize it.
Across the road and down a few minutes walk is the closest of several access platforms to see the lowlying ponds surrounded by mangroves and buttonwood thickets. There are other ponds with more birds but frankly this is as far as we can walk in such hot weather.
The water level in the ponds varies from year to year. One year they were almost dry. This year they were higher than we’ve seen them due to to some heavy rain events in March, an early start to the rainy season. The ponds are brackish to hyper saline (depending on the season) because ocean water seeps in through the porous limestone bedrock. The high water level meant most of the wading birds stayed in the shallower areas on the far side, not great visibility for us unfortunately. But better than the super dry year.
One of my favorite of all birds is the Black-necked stilts, who breed in these islands. eBird bar chart says they’re around most of the year, departing from January to March. Their piercing calls can be heard from long ways off. Stilts are lively and feisty, a lot of attitude in a small package, and vocal, much like my favorite duck, the bufflehead (both are also contrasty black and white!). They can be elegant and acrobatic too.
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April is nesting season. In previous years I’ve seen them with fuzzy chicks, little brown ping pong balls on toothpicks. This year they are earlier in their season.
Among the larger waders, I only saw Snowy egrets and Tricolored herons this year, but they are great fun to watch. Alternately active and serene.
Egrets:
Herons:
I did a double take seeing this heron fly by: a Great Blue.
Most shorebirds are passing through on their way to breed up here in North America.
Screenshot from a video of sandpipers and a gallinule:
A video:
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Common gallinules are year round and abundant in these ponds. One photo I took is a little puzzling: is the one on the right missing part of its face shield? or is it just the angle?
Ducks are few in the Cayman Islands. By far the most common winter resident and spring/fall migrant is the Blue-winged teal, but even their numbers vary with water levels. The full ponds meant quite a few teal this year.
The other common duck is the West Indian Whistling duck, which is a year round resident. They really do whistle. The ducks I saw in the ponds were mostly chillin, either sleeping or grooming; they do their foraging mostly at night.
Birds of the World says they are
One of the rarest ducks in the Americas…. It is endemic to the islands of the West Indies where it can be found in a variety of fresh and saline water bodies, including lagoons, swamps, salt ponds, tidal flats, coastal mangroves, rice fields and palm savannas. West Indian Whistling-Ducks populations are very small on most islands and greatly reduced from historical numbers due to excessive hunting, destruction of wetland habitats and predation by introduced invasive species such as mongoose, rats and feral dogs and cats.
West Indian Whistling Duck
Having protected refuge and feeding sites clearly makes a difference. Such sites on Little Cayman are where they all are.
Mostly the whistling ducks I saw were hiding out under the mangroves and buttonwoods but one day they were out in the open. On that day they were joined by a youngster Yellow-crowned Night heron, who I read take several years to come into adult plumage. I have seen YC Night heron adults (eating hermit crabs) so I know they’re around.
It was very contemplative to just sit and watch the ponds from day to day. There weren’t a great number of kinds of birds but they were busy doing birdy things.
(Note: besides the birds pictured here, the Merlin app on my phone also picked up Palm warbler, Northern waterthrush, Yellow warbler, and Vitelline warbler, all fairly common in April according to eBird and my go-to field guide Birds of the Cayman Islands, by Patricia E. Bradley and Yves-Jacques Rey-Millet.)
Sunset is a beautiful quiet time on the ponds:
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The Dawn Chorus is now open for your birdy reports of the week.