2006 St Lucia Scenes

The view looking south in the bay. Not a huge beach, but very private and mostly deserted.

A pensive moment from one of the local people produced this gentle picture which perhaps sums up the Caribbean.

These busy shore crabs were everywhere, and would scuttle off sideways at speed if approached. Sitting quietly you could sometimes get them out of their burrows to make nice pictures.

The view looking north along the bay. The buildings on the hill-side in the distance were part of the Windjammer Landing Hotel.

What an opportunity, a distant sail-boat against the lovely colour of the sunset.

This was a tranquil end to the day where even the sea seemed to be too tired to wave! It was one of those times where you just stood or sat quietly taking in the atmosphere in silence.

The tranquil and beautiful gardens at East Winds were a pleasure to just walk and look.

The grounds of this hotel were well established and there were meandering paths everywhere. The guest cabanas were well spaced and not intrusive anywhere.

This cabana was near the sea front, but behind the main restaurant and lounge complex. The position allowed us to run our travelling Moth Trap out of the side window, but as there were quite a few lights from the buildings and although we had a few moths there, we asked if we could move over to the south side of the property adjacent to the perimeter fence and some undeveloped ground to see if we could get better catches.

A view out from our first cabana, with the open-air lounge to the right. The path led down to the beach, just through the trees.

A path up the valley towards the Reception area, also showing one of the hills inland. The cabanas behind us had more open areas with well manicured lawns between their privacy bushes.

This little lady was found along the shore from the hotel on one of our exploratory walks. We always look for wild areas close to the hotels to see what wildlife there is, but this one is presumably an introduced species.

A fairly common Nymphalid butterfly throughout the Caribbean, found resting on the wild ground near the hotel.

This quite large Hesperiid was also in the same area, near the shore. We were lucky enough for it to wait patiently whilst we took its photograph. Most butterflies in the tropics don't stop for long anywhere to be able to do this.

One of the larger Orthoptera which gets attracted to lights at night. Probably on the cabana window near where we had set up our Moth Trap.

At most of the smaller dispersed hotels, where there is plenty of foliage around, the local birdlife quickly get to know where the free-bees are, and are not hesitant to take advantage of the free food. Breakfast time was when you would see rows of birds awaiting the chance for a quick meal.

The local Finches were very tame here, and quite brazenly would come to your table as soon as you had finished, or even before. Their favourite food included sugar, so they inevitably stopped off at any sweet glasses to see what was left. When I took this picture, it had decided at the instant of operating the shutter to take off, to produce this amazing shot. Unfortunately, as it wasn't planned to capture this, - it was framed for a close-up of it sitting on the glass - the wing-tips were out of the frame.

Another point of take-off picture, this time at the side of a Finch which had been eating the sugar granules on the table. At Coffee-time, some of the larger birds would often take a complete sachet of sugar from the tray, to fly off and eat it at their leisure.