Birds, Leps, Observations & Generalities - the images and ramblings of Mark Skevington. Sometimes.
Showing posts with label Green Iguana. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Green Iguana. Show all posts

Sunday, 31 March 2019

There Be Dragons

Whilst I can, I'm posting a few lizardy bits from our Caribbean holiday. I always think that no holiday abroad is complete without seeing a lizard or two, and in Europe this is usually a wall lizard of some variety and maybe a gecko. This was something else as we found lizards pretty much everywhere, and some of them were relatively big.

I've managed to identify a few of them, some with more confidence than others, but aside from these I've got photos of a quite a few other small brown jobs that I'll leave for now.

Green Iguana - Saint Martin
I was completely unprepared for these beach dragons loafing on barrier rocks around a harbour on the French half of the island, and then we soon noticed that they were all over the place including loafing around a beach-side bar that we stopped at. The fully mature adults were a variety of colours, but the smaller younger individuals were generally a bright green. As far as I understand these were introduced, don't know when but whenever it was it preceded a rapid island extinction of the indiginous Lesser Antillean Iguana within 20 years.


Caribbean Ameiva - Sint Marten
Over on the Dutch half of the island, I saw quite a few of these loafing around the edge of a car park next to a big salt pool. They were not as accomodating as the iguanas for photos though and scooted off as soon as I approached.


Giant Ameiva - Grenada
There were loads of these loafing in sunshine on the grassy hillsides heading up to Fort George.


St Vincent Bush Anole - St Vincent
These were abundant around a botanical garden that we visited.


Carrot Rock Anole - Tortola, British Virgin Islands
At least that's what I think they are, again in a botanical garden (we split our time between beaches and sun, and soothing gardens and rain forest!).


The rest are as yet unknown, but I thought they looked funky enough to post.

This was on Tortola, can't see a match so far.

On Grenada, it is perhaps just a juvenile Giant Ameiva.

These were on Dominica, several together on same tree.