USVI: Wild Wildlife

I should preface this with a note that I am one of the world's worst nature photographers. I don't have a very fancy camera, and I'm not terribly good at spotting critters at the best of times, so my best pictures are of relatively immobile creatures like the crab in yesterday's post. Still, I find myself trying to take pictures of lots of animals and bird, and here's a selection of what I got from St. John. The vast majority of these are birds, for whatever reason, such as these pelicans off Lovango Key:

(click for larger image). Pelicans on land or in the water are ridiculous, ungainly-looking birds, but in the air, they almost manage to look graceful:

Of course, birds in flight almost always look cool, even when they're basically winged rats, such as seagull 1:

and seagull 2:

The B&B we stayed in had a lovely garden, which was full of hummingbirds. However, they flit around so quickly that I never managed to get a good shot of one in action. Here's the best I managed-- a hummingbird at rest:

Along with the hummingbirds, there were tons of these little yellow-and-black guys:

who could also be found elsewhere on the island doing amusing things:

(the glass of red liquid must've been left on the end of the bar specifically for these birds to drink out of, because I never saw the bartender make any move to pick it up. The bird did this cute look-left, look-right surreptitious-drink thing, which I can't really capture in a still photo.)

The final bird picture was a water bird of some sort stalking brine shrimp in the salt pond that gives Salt Pond Bay its name:

Transitioning awkwardly from birds to other flying things, here's a butterfly:

And here's the unhappy-Kate picture of the set:

This guy was along the path to Francis Bay, though his larger cousin had turned up in our bathroom earlier in the trip...

Finally, speaking of creepy-looking things with too many appendages, the vast majority of the wildlife we saw was underwater, and I didn't have a camera that could get shots of those. The best I can offer is this shot of baby sea urchins in a tide pool at Drunk Bay:

They're hard to make out in the small image, but you can click for a larger version.

And those are the creatures we saw, or at least the ones I managed to get on CCD.