Life's a Beach

30/11/2015

I had a pretty picturesque week in Dominica this week, as well as finding "Katie", the frog we released a couple of weeks ago, again I also managed to visit Mero beach (a black sand beach a few miles from here) and Syndicate which is a huge section of beautiful primary rainforest to the north of the island. Also the spot were two US tourists were robbed at gun point, but lets gloss over that. Fantastic forest, some of the best I have seen and crucially part of the Waitukubuli National Trail. The WNT is a 14 section long trail which does the entire length of the island, the longest hiking trail in the Caribbean. And I plan to do as much of it as possible. I think only 8 sections are open at the moment, but hopefully by the time I leave all the hurricane damage will have been repaired and I can do more if not all of the trail. I also managed to scope out a trail which leads to the top of Morne Diablotin the highest mountain in Dominica (1447m). Hopefully I will be up there next week.

I have now taken over the night feeding at the captive facility, I live much closer to it than my project partner. So I offered to take over the responsibility. I also love doing it! The frogs are very active and pretty much pounce on anything we feed them. Which is mostly cockroaches and crickets.

I have attached a video of a Mountain Chicken vs a Cockroach.

I also visited Mero beach, which is a lovely small black sand (volcanic) beach. I managed to get there before the hundreds of cruise ship tourists arrived so I pretty much had the place to myself. Great snorkeling! Saw several lobsters, a barracuda, an octopus in a box and some invasive lionfish. Got a good bird show to due to the fishermen throwing a lot of fish waste into the water. Frigate birds, terns and tropic birds everywhere!

I big part of my work here on the project is public outreach, i.e. getting the public onside to help conserve the frogs. One of the best ways to do this is to educate the children. Many adults can't or wont change their opinion but kids are very open minded. So it really pays dividends to educate them. We visited Soufriere Primary School this week and it was very succesfull, all the kids were enthusiastic and interested, they seemed very keen to save the frog!