Birds

My wildlife photography sucks. I am going to use it  anyway to tell you about the Birds at the Beach.

The pelicans are good at fishing, diving for fish and scoping out where the fish reside. Sea gulls are food robbers and take every opportunity to get a free, easy meal.  We watched the drama play out at our last beach visit.  The sea gulls would circle the pelicans. When  the pelican dove for fish, the sea gulls would land on the pelican's head and try and steal the fish before the pelican could swallow it.  How rude!

I don't know the name of this bird.  I will just call him "Beggar".  We were sitting at the beach and Beggar comes within two feet of me and lands on a sea fan that washed up on shore.  He eye balls me, turns his head, and looks over all of our equipment (towels, chairs, water bottles, snorkels) to determine the edibility. He has obviously been fed by beach goers in the past.  He didn't get a crumb from us. Disgusted, he flew away.

These are bananaquits and commonly called "sugar thief's". The bar at Sorobon always has a cup with sugar to feed the bananaquits. They are tiny birds but big squawkers.  When they eat the sugar it is all over their beaks. They go crazy over the sugar and I am sure it's like crack to them.

I am still working on getting photos of the more interesting birds on the island... flamingos, parrots, hummingbirds and herons, to name a few.

This is the KLM bird that lands everyday at 3:00 over Te Amo Beach. St Maarten has nothing on Bonaire as we too have planes that fly low over the beach to land. It is a tradition of ours to watch KLM leave Bonaire everyday at 5:00 for Holland.  No matter what we are doing, we can hear the plane engines windup and then lift off within seconds. It signals the start of cocktail time. We stand on our patio and watch it ascend into the sky and disappear in the clouds.  One day we hope to be on the 5:00 KLM to Holland.  For now we just enjoy watching it take off.