An obliging Green Heron was the best this morning on a brief visit to the lagoon before breakfast.
Green Heron 5 Dec 2018 Guardalavaca © Tim Norriss
And a walk around the Las Guanas nature reserve adjacent to the hotel was quite quiet today with not many butterflies or birds, but we always find something of interest. We always see Anolis lucius Slender Cliff Anole here and they are often quite approachable. And we noticed a sloughed snake skin up on the coral limestone overhang where a snake had used the rough surface to shed it skin as it grew. It was about a metre long but I don't know what species it was.
Anolis lucius Slender Cliff Anole 5 Dec 2018 Las Guanas © Tim Norriss Beach bean Canavalia rosea, also called coastal jack-bean, is a common plant around the coasts with its pink pea flowers and long stems trailing over the rocks and vegetation, and with large fleshy round leaves. There were two Braco Skipper Burca braco nectaring on its pink flowers and also five Miami Blue Cyclargus thomasi. We watched as the latter even laid an egg on the flower bud of the peas which is a first as we have only seen them lay on Stigmaphyllon before. There were some of these yellow flowers growing nearby and they too had eggs of Miami Blue. A week later I was keen that we came back to see how these eggs were faring but when we did it had been so hot during the week that the Stigmaphyllon had all dried up and there was no sign of the larva on the pea.
Las Guanas reserve
Stigmaphyllon 5 Dec 2018 Las Guanas © Tim Norriss
The attractive trailing Passiflora cuprea was quite common here.
While I was photographing the Passiflora an anole ran across that I didn't recognise at all. Annoyingly I didn't manage to get a picture as it was certainly something we hadn't seen before. There were some that we did recognise including this Cuban Whiptail Pholidoscelis auberi.
Cuban Whiptail Pholidoscelis auberi 5 Dec 2018 Las Guanas © Tim Norriss
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