We were meeting our bird watching guide at 6am in Vieux Fort, so set our alarms for 5am. It was still dark when we woke, but had lightened enough for me to drive by 5:30.
It’s a beautiful drive along the coast from our hotel. Our first time in after arriving I was too focused on adapting to the new car, and couldn’t take in the view. There were quite a few locals waiting roadside for buses to get to work.
We met up with our guide, Nestor, in the Massy parking lot in Vieux Fort (Massy is main grocery chain in St Lucia). We joined him in his vehicle and drove north along the east coast towards Dennery. The water is much rougher on the Atlantic side than the Caribbean side we’d seen thus far in St Lucia.
There’s seven birds endemic to St Lucia (five species and two sub-species). On our excursion we were hoping to see six; with the highlight hopefully being the St Lucia parrot.
We made a couple stops at seemingly random places along the highway, but were actually access paths for workers to maintain electrical towers. We managed to spot four of the endemics, so a good start to the day!
The second stop was also the habitat of the St Lucia pit viper, a poisonous snake. Our guide had a long stick to beat the grass before we got through to the access path. We were glad to be done with that part.
Finally we drove 30 minutes inland towards Quilesse Forest Reserve, over roads in pretty bad shape. We would have turned around (not that there was anywhere to turn) if we had tried to do this independently.
We got to the park gates and the start of the trail through the rainforest. The trail goes through the heart of the rainforest to the west coast; we were only going in about 2km. The mosquitoes were bad, but our bug spray worked fine. It’s the only time we’ve had to use bug spray on this trip - in the evenings at dinner, it’s been mostly bug-free.
We enjoyed the walk through the rainforest, over a roughly maintained path. It was a nice temperature under all the trees, we were also at about 500m. After about 30 minutes we arrived at the lookout with a view across the valley.
Less than a minute after arriving, we saw a St Lucia parrot! It’s a really colourful bird, with blue, black, white and splashes of red, yellow, and green. Nestor hadn’t even set up his scope yet :) It's the national bird of St Lucia, and its flag also incorporates its colours.
We watched for another 45 minutes or so, and saw around 8-9 parrots in total. You hear the parrots squawking as the fly through the valley, waiting for them to appear and then hopefully track them until they land. It was too far across the valley to see their colour without binoculars or a zoom lens, we were lucky to track a few. I got a very blurry pic of one.
Finally we started the trek back to the vehicle, and then drove back to Vieux Fort to our car. Overall it was cool to see the St Lucia parrot and walk through the rainforest.
We had planned to have lunch at Mamma Tilly’s, a popular St Lucia seafood place, but it was closed Mondays. So picked a random place from Google maps and had a local lunch, which was okay.
Our dinner was excellent, we both had the catch of the day which was tuna today. (In some other places, the ‘catch-of-the-day’ is the same every day, like the wahoo in Fiji). It was super fresh and was served with the usual assortment of vegetable sides. Very yummy :)
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