Only a few short days after the conclusion of this tour, I kicked off the month's second 10-day birding odyssey across Trinidad & Tobago. This edition was in the works for several years; my relationship with co-leader and good friend Benny began somewhere on the internet in ye olde pre-covid times and we had long been hatching itineraries to share with birders. This was his third time in T&T and I was thrilled to finally flip the switches on our ideas birthed from conversations on the winding...

This April involved two back-to-back 10-day birding tours in gorgeous Trinidad & Tobago – which also serves to explain my online absence. This year I have also taken a bit of a sabbatical regarding content for my social media platforms; this extended to almost a complete hiatus from tech for my February trip, where we kept track of our sightings around dinner each night using the traditional method of pen and spreadsheet. For these two tours, however, I returned to eBird to track our...

Today, we celebrate 250 years of the Main Ridge Forest Reserve. 13 April 1776 marked the end of an eleven-year battle to preserve Tobago’s thickly forested spine, thus cementing in history one of the earliest acts of the ecologically sensible. The deed was done not for the glorious biodiversity within — but for the ridge’s role as a watershed. While it was valued for the water it provided to the surrounding estates, we now understand the contribution of Main Ridge to far exceed what was...