Antiguan wildlife
Hey! How would you like to see some of the wildlife of Antigua? These are all creatures that do well around humans, naturally, since I'm not exactly traveling to the deep wilderness. All of these pictures are from the house or by a restaurant. This is an Antiguan anole, a colorful little insect-eating lizard seen scurrying across walls and walkways.
These little holes in the yard are the daytime retreat of nocturnal tarantulas! One of my goals of the trip is to get a picture of one.
The Lesser Antillean bullfinch is a bold songbird that picks crumbs off of plates! This is a male, mostly black with red accents.
The waitress in the restaurant hosting this big spider called it a "money spider." I'm not sure what it is, but it reminds me of the huntsman spiders of Australia.
Here's my hand for scale. EDIT 4/18/13: thanks to wirrrn for pointing out to me that this spider is recently mo(u)lted, thus her pale color, and the fact that my sister-in-law noticed the spider changed color in the time we were there.
The restaurant had bullfinches too.
It was an open air restaurant, so the Carib grackles came in to check things out, too!
Is it looking at the goat curry, or the spider?
A bullfinch enjoys the colorful backdrop of beach wraps for sale.
The female bullfinch is a brown bird, with a light spot on its chin. This one kept coming to watch us eat lunch only to be chased off by a male.
Outside the restaurant a cattle egret hangs out near the parking lot.
The little pond outside the restaurant was full of these cute ducks, white-cheeked pintails--a new bird species for me!