The Frigatebird Colony on Barbuda

Tracking down George Jeffery, the tour guide recommended by our guidebook and some friends of ours had proven quite difficult the previous day.  His mobile telephone was not working and the other number we had for him put us through to a lady in Antigua.  She had said that she would contact George via her nephew (in Barbuda) and that we would get a reply via a different WhatsApp number.  All very convoluted!  With no messages received during our walk, we had asked Claire at the Art Café and she had directed us to his house – he wasn’t in.  In the end we had asked around at the harbour and had been directed to him, waiting for someone outside one of the grocery stores. We’d arranged that he would collect us from BV at 1000 on Wednesday 19 December; he arrived a little early because (quote) “I look at the sun for the time.  I have no timepiece.”  Nicky was tickled by the use of the word timepiece but whilst George’s word for a watch was quaint, his means of propulsion was totally 21^stcentury. And, boy, did it shift his boat! Just look at that wake and Nicky’s grin!

Channelling our inner David Bellamy – ‘Here, in the mangroves…..’

To our surprise, since we had expected to enter the mangroves and the frigatebird colony from the north, George took us back into the lagoon through the breach in the wall, explaining en routethat the beach off the Lighthouse Hotel (the wrecked hotel close to our anchorage) used to extend a further 20ft out in front of the hotel.  Now the sea is pretty much at the hotel’s foundations and wearing away the sand and ground below it all the time.  George also explained that the lagoon wall had been breached after several previous hurricanes.  None was as large as the current breach, and the sea rebuilt the wall on each occasion in about 14-18 months.  This breach is clearly going to take a lot longer to repair but George pointed out where the sandbanks are building.

40 foot ISO container which was picked up by Hurricane Irma from
outside the hotel near our anchorage and deposited here, about a mile away

Amongst the mangroves George pointed out another casualty of Hurricane Irma, a 40ft ISO container, which could only have reached its current position, a mile from where it originated, by having spent at least a little time airborne.

Though the mangroves suffered badly at the hands of Hurricane Irma, they are still alive (note the areas of green) and the frigatebird colony has continued to roost here.  Frigatebird numbers are, apparently, much as they were before the 2017 hurricane

The mangroves where the frigatebirds have their colony had suffered much more hurricane damage than those close to where the ISO container had ended up.  Nevertheless, they are still alive and the frigatebirds have continued to roost in them.  Indeed, the Canadian researchers who study the frigatebird colony say that bird numbers are very similar to pre-Irma, at around 30,000 individuals.  George told us of a previous hurricane which had destroyed the mangroves in which the frigatebirds then roosted.  Happily, the birds survived by just migrated a few hundred metres to their current colony but the mangroves in which they had previously nested all died and all that we saw of that old colony location was a few twigs and stumps sticking up into the lagoon.

The birds in this colony are Magnificant Frigatebirds, one of 5 types of frigatebird found globally.  The Magnificant Frigatebird is widespread in the tropicalAtlantic, breeding in colonies in trees in Florida, the Caribbean and the Cape Verde Islands, as well as along the Pacific coast of the Americas from Mexico to Ecuador, including the Galapagos Islands.  We spent quite some time, motoring gently around the colony, observing the birds from surprisingly close up.  Clearly they realised that we posed them no threat as they seemed quite unconcerned by our presence.  We were surprised at how quiet the colony was – had this been a colony of gulls or penguins the noise would have been nearly unbearable.  As it was it seemed virtually silent.  There was also a distinct lack of the dreaded smell of guano. We’re not quite sure why that should have been the case, but it made for a far more pleasant experience!

During the mating season the adult males display their red throat bladders (correctly termed ‘gular pouch’) puffing them up when they see a particularly attractive female.  For further attention-grabbing good measure, the male might also beat his gular pouch with his bill, making a sound like a drum. One male we watched was clearly getting rather chummy with a female he was perched next to.  But he was also eyeing up one of her competition circling overhead and every now and then drummed his throat to try to attract the flying female’s attention too.  Soap opera-like, we were left on tenterhooks and never actually found out which of the female birds (if either) graced the male with her charms.

Male frigate birds are black with a red gular pouch displayed in the mating season.  Females have white chests

Juveniles have white heads and the very young are cute downy bundles of fluff.  It takes so long to rear a chick to maturity that female frigatebirds breed only once every 2 years

Frigate birds are ace aerial acrobats but do not have well oiled feathers and so cannot land on the sea. They hunt fish, notably flying fish, that are chased to the surface by other predators, catching them whilst the fish are airborne or just at the surface.  They also steal fish from other birds, including other frigate birds.

Upside-down jellyfish

But not everything that George wanted to show us was in the mangroves or in the air.  In the shallow, still waters among the mangroves, he pointed out more of the upside-down jellyfish that we had seen in such profusion in the Beef Island lagoon in April.  Here the jellyfish were nothing like as numerous but there was still a good sized colony of them.

Feeling rather like David Attenborough, it was with some reluctance that we agreed with George that we had probably spent enough time in and around the frigatebirds and that we should move on.

Hauling the lobster traps

George’s plan for ‘moving on’ was to find some of his lobster pots and see how much success he had had.  The conditions were not good for locating the pots. George doesn’t buoy them, rather he depends on dropping them into the lagoon (only a meter or two deep at this point) on a known transit and then running along that transit looking down into the water for the trap.  When he sees the trap he hauls it out using a grapnel anchor on a line or, if the water is very shallow, a boathook.

With plenty of scudding clouds and a brisk wind blowing, locating the traps was difficult.  But Nicky was wearing polarised glasses which helped her to see through the rippled water.  We hauled up 3 or 4 traps on as many different transits and recovered a good number of spiny lobsters, though each trap was left with a couple of small ones still inside as bait for further lobsters.

Lunch and dinner, and dinner…. thank you George

And George very kindly gave us a good number of his catch, more than enough for several meals.  He refused additional payment but, as a result of his generosity, lunch was exceedingly good!

Low Bay beach at sunset.  And yes, it is pink, thanks to the myriad small pink shells washed up on it.  The sand is also talcum powder soft….and there’s no-one else around

That evening we had sundowners ashore on the perfectly soft, virtually pink beach off which BV was anchored. The sand was like talcum powder and our feet sank deeply into it, even into the dry sand, not just the sand at the water’s edge.  We’ve never experienced sand like it before.  The pink colour is due to the shells washed up on the beach.  It’s truly beautiful – and the only people there to experience it that evening were the two of us.  Fabulous.  Sadly, if Gaston Brown, the Premier of Antigua and Barbuda has his way and the beachfront areas here are sold off to the developers of hotels and condos, this beautiful beach will be lost, if only because every day ‘the management’ will require the beach to be ‘pisted’, raked over by hand or by machine, so that it looks clean and ready for the new day.  In doing so, the shells that give the beach its lovely pink colour, will be buried under the sand and, whilst the beach may remain soft, it will not remain pink. Everyone’s loss.

Low Bay, Barbuda