Fish List ... Monday 25th March 2013
When our friends Lynn and Lee mentioned that they were
keeping the ‘fish list’, I thought that’s a great idea. For years we’ve been keeping birds lists for
every trip, even a day out to Plum Island.
Admittedly these scraps of paper wound up in all sorts of unlikely
places and were rarely transcribed onto the “official list” kept on the
computer. The concept of lists is firmly
entrenched in our bird watching. Why
weren’t we thinking about keeping a list of the fish we see while snorkeling?
One obvious difference is that writing the list while snorkeling isn’t quite as
easy… Another difference is that we can’t seem to remember what we’ve seen when
we get back to the boat. You might think
that the skills you need for identifying birds would be very useful in fish
ID. Perhaps we need to hone our skills
further. In the water it’s harder to
confer about the fish, it’s even hard to be sure that you are both looking at
the same thing.
Our recent additions to the bird list have been the
Caribbean Coot, Bahama woodstar (a hummingbird) and the white-tailed
tropicbird. To be honest we didn’t even
realize that the Coots here could be different from Coots in the US. An e-mail from Woody, the chap we went
birding with in the Abaco, alerted us to this fine distinction. We had to make a special trip to the golf
course water hazard at Emerald Bay to confirm that we had been seeing this
different species. We saw the tropicbird
from the cliffs of Cambridge Cay today as we were taking a walk. It was great to see these birds. About half the length of the bird is the tail
plumes. Hopefully we will see more birds
as we head north into the migration.
Gloria
Gloria
Cambridge Cay anchorage - looking across the pond
Bell cut to Exuma Sound - on a very calm day
Sunset over the Banks
Beach Party for the cruisers
Lynn, Lee and Maggie
No comments:
Post a Comment