Puerto Rico: Beach Birds and a Cool Wasp

Obligatory beach vacation photo

All right. So, Puerto Rico. I went there, and I can't put this post off any longer. I've been putting it off for over two months now. There was always something I'd rather be doing. I had to beat Breath of the Wild, of course. Then I had to read Watership Down because there is a Netflix miniseries based on it coming out sometime this year. And you can't read Watership Down without also reading Tales from Watership Down. And then I had to read The Odyssey because... The Odyssey. Look, what I'm saying is, I tried really hard to put off writing this, but now I can't anymore.

It was the best vacation of my life. Not that I've had that many vacations, but still. I snorkeled, I climbed a mountain, I ziplined and kayaked through a bioluminescent bay. And I saw lots of cool plants and animals that I'd never seen before.

Day 1:

My family arrived at San Juan Aeropuerto around noon on May 19th. We rented a car and drove to the condo where we spent the week, which was in Luquillo. In addition to house sparrows (booo) and a northern mockingbird, I saw two life birds just in the lot where we picked up the car: Greater Antillean grackle and zenaida dove.

Greater Antillean grackle

En route to our condo I saw rock pigeons and... chickens! Or more specifically, red junglefowl, Gallus gallus. They apparently live in an entirely wild state in Puerto Rico.

The condo had a balcony facing the beach, which was great. I watched the laughing gulls fly by and also spotted something magnificent:

A magnificent frigatebird! Who doesn't love frigatebirds? And is it just me, or is that silhouette reminiscent of one that appears on a certain masked vigilante's chest?

DA-NA-NA-NA-NA-NA-NA-NA... FRIGATEBIRDMAN!

Okay, maybe I'm trying too hard. Frigatebirdman doesn't exactly roll off the tongue. What would he even do, steal fish from people? Still, just look at that wing-to-body-size ratio!

ANYWAY, that was day one. Five lifers without even trying, woo!

Day 2:

I hung my hummingbird feeder, which I had brought from home, up on the balcony (Puerto Rico has five species of hummingbirds, as I told my mother when she asked me why I was taking my hummingbird feeder to Puerto Rico). Behold:

Sadly, despite my INGENIOUS red ribbon hung from the edge of the balcony above ours in an attempt to entice the hummers, I never did see any. I guess hummingbirds don't frequent third-story beachfront balconies. Who knew?

After putting the feeder up (and the ribbon; I felt stupidly proud of that darn ribbon), I decided to go explore Luquillo for some urban wildlife.

The first new bird I saw was this gray kingbird.

Despite its name, the house sparrows, rock pigeons, and grackles did not seem to recognize its authority. Maybe that's why it seemed so intolerant of them. There were a lot of these guys, though. I'm not even sure they understood the concept of a monarchy.

As I continued through the streets, I found doves. Three different doves. That's three times as many different doves as Ohio has!

There were zenaida doves...

White-winged doves...

And this common ground dove.

Common ground dove feeding with a zenaida dove

As you can imagine, I was on a dove high after that, and I had only seen a fraction of Puerto Rico's 14 species of columbid fauna.

Then I hit the beach, and there were pelicans.

Five brown pelicans on patrol

Also, a yellow-crowned night heron forgetting to be nocturnal.

Maybe crab tastes better in the daytime? But speaking of crabs, look at this one!

It's an Atlantic ghost crab. I think this is the best wildlife photo I took in Puerto Rico, and it's a crab. You want to know a secret to taking great photos? Photograph things that are sitting still.

Day 3:

I hit the beach at 8 AM. When I say I hit the beach, I don't mean I went swimming. That is not something I did at the beach one time during my week in Puerto Rico. I hit the beach with camera and binoculars to look for birds.

There are no birds in this photo, but I like it anyway.

And I took a long walk on the beach. I mean a long walk, as in like 5 miles. I'm not one of those people who puts "likes long walks on the beach" on their Tinder profile, and then when you try to walk on the beach with them, they barely even make it a mile before they start complaining. Those people are the worst.

Anyway, I've walked on some beaches before, but never one with bona fide coconut trees!

Pictured: a bona fide coconut tree

The coconut trees were too cool. And there were huge groves of them. But I digress. Here are some beach birds.

Laughing gulls were everywhere.

As were terns. This is a sandwich tern.

This is... some other tern. Unless it's a sandwich tern with a weird beak? I don't know.

And then I stumbled into Egretville. Pictured: one great egret and six cattle egrets. The taped off area is a leatherback sea turtle nest (more on that in my next post).

I also stumbled into this little blue heron... 

...and its two babies!

Naturally, birds were not my sole focus. I was interested in everything, including insects.

This is a band-winged dragonlet, Erythrodiplax umbrata. 

 This might be another band-winged dragonlet. If it is, it's a male in its awkward teen years. It doesn't look like an immature male, nor does it look like a mature male.

This is the only butterfly I got a photo of. It's a white peacock, Anartia jatrophae.

But they all pale in comparison to this sand wasp:

Holy crap, look at the sand go flying as she digs with those thin little wasp legs! It's like a dog burying a bone, except it's a wasp burying prey for her growing larvae! Sand wasps nest in sand and practice progressive provisioning, feeding their developing young as needed, much as birds do. This behavior is unusual in insects, with the exception of eusocial insects, but sand wasps are solitary.

And that's what I'm going to end on. I'll cover the rest of the trip in my next post, which will include leatherback sea turtle nests and El Yunque National Forest.