Back to Birding, and Soon Bowdoin

All my aquatic activities are done for the near future, so I had no reason to get up at a reasonable hour today. I took advantage and stayed up late last night and then slept in by a whole forty minutes! The reason I got up was to go for a walk with my dad, try to find some birds. Usual vacation stuff, that's what all of you do right? We were surprisingly successful even though we really started too late to find any birds. I also stole my mom's camera so the pics in this post will have been taken by me not wikipedia. We heard a bunch of birds, and saw a few, but most were common local birds that I wont bore you with. When we were looking for some noisy little bird, I happened to notice a different one just chilling on a branch

It's a very snooty bird and refused to make eye contact with mere humans

The rufus-tailed jacamar is a type flycatcher, so it would sit and wait on that branch until it saw a fly, and then it would dart after the fly and catch it before returning to its initial perch. This made it pretty easy to keep track of. We kept walking and eventually saw two great black hawks and two peregrine falcons. We then had to turn back because there were other things to be done (involving birds, obviously). On the way back we heard this bird kind of cawing at us. The sound seemed wrong, almost crow like, and the glimpses we got showed that these were small nondescript passerines. While trying to find them I saw this branch or wire that seemed to be moving. "Hey Dad, a snake!" I cried with glee. My father looked thoughtful for a moment before replying, "maybe that's what the birds are all excited about." He's completely right. Those were either distress calls or mobbing calls, as shown by other birds approaching the vocally agitated ones. We talked about this kind of stuff in ecology, so it was pretty cool to see nature in action. and to see a snake.

My parents and brother set off to do what we had done last week, with the glass bottom boat and tropicbirds. I decided to pass on that. Instead I plopped myself in front of a hummingbird feeder, intent on seeing and photographing the ruby topaz. Epic fail. I sat there for ages and didn't even see it once. I did see a woodpecker

Red-crowned woodpecker. It was making a giant hole. It was
there for ages. It's probably still there now, pecking away

and a hermit crab and a bunch of other species of hummingbirds, but not the stupid one I wanted to see. I got lunch with the fam when they returned, wherein Jonah and I had a misunderstanding over ketchup mainly because I was being oblivious slash greedy. 

I had done most of my packing already, but I finished that up. After that I went and over to check on my dad, who had taken up my former vigil at the hummingbird feeder. I retrieved the camera and joined. My mom's camera is a canon rebel, with an awesome 70-300 lens. The problem is that there looks like one button got damaged. The manual focus button. So everything is autofocus which is incredibly frustrating when trying to photograph hummingbirds, especially those that don't perch when they feed. They're really fast so you end up focussing on what's behind them. After probably another hour plus of arguably patient waiting and deleting photos of walls, I got one

yes it's a bit blurry, but focus on the pretty colors instead

And that's about it for today's activities and the trip. We head out at five (about 40 minutes), and between layover and flying will be back in New York around 5 am. Then I fly up to Maine for the remainder of preseason. It should be lots of fun (preseason not the flying in at 5 am).

I was also invited back here to do an internship if I'd like, so that's an awesome option to have. Who knows what the future holds. Hopefully animals.
This ends part two of my travel blog, TZ in Tobago, thanks for reading. I hope you enjoyed it and found the plethora of animals and animal facts interesting, or at least tolerable. Bye for now