Friday Postcard: Trinidad

Biodiversity in the southern Caribbean

White-necked Jacobin feeding at a flower in Trinidad (2013).

During the course of my travels, I’ve been to the Caribbean island of Trinidad four times. The first two times were in the late 1990s, when I was doing field work there as part of my biology dissertation project. I was always so impressed by the colorful tropical wildlife, but I got crummy photos. That’s mostly due to the fact that I didn’t have a good telephoto lens (I think 210mm was the longest focal length I had at the time), and I was using a manual-focus film camera, my Nikon EL2.

I always thought it would be fun to be able to go back to Trinidad with a good camera kit, and in 2013, I did just that. I followed that up in 2018 with a photo safari for clients. Trinidad doesn’t get credit for biodiversity that places like Costa Rica do, but it’s still an extremely rich environment for photographing birds, insects, and other rainforest wildlife.

About this photograph (and why I originally went to Trinidad)