Wildlife Photography Hides in Anguilla

Dog Island – Northwest Anguilla Bank

Dog Island — an uninhabited 202-hectare limestone cay on the Anguilla Bank 13 kilometres northwest of Anguilla's main island — is the northern Lesser Antilles' most productive seabird photography location accessible from an established tourism base, hosting nesting colonies of Brown Booby, Sooty Tern, Brown Noddy, and Laughing Gull on its rocky slopes and coastal cliffs from February through August. Brown Booby is the most abundant nesting species, with several hundred pairs using the limestone ledges and dense vegetation on the island's eastern side — courtship involves elaborate bilateral bowing and sky-pointing displays between pairs, performed at close range on the nest ledge within telephoto range from a stationary boat or from the island's beach. Sooty Tern nests in dense colonies on the island's flat interior, its 'wideawake' call creating the characteristic sound of a Caribbean seabird island; Brown Noddy congregates on the rocky outcrops above the main tern colony. The White-tailed Tropicbird — one of the Caribbean's most graceful birds, with streaming white tail feathers and black wing markings — nests in the cliff crevices above the northern beach and is regularly photographed in flight displaying its extraordinary trailing tail. Charter boat excursions from Sandy Ground and Meads Bay on Anguilla's main island take 45 minutes to reach Dog Island; departures at sunrise allow the morning photography in calm seas before the easterly trades freshen. The island is a protected nature reserve under Anguillian law; landing is restricted to designated areas and requires advance notification to the Department of Fisheries.

East End – Scrub Island

Anguilla's network of protected beaches — particularly the remote east-coast beaches of Little Bay, Rendezvous Bay, and the uninhabited Scrub Island 2 kilometres offshore — supports one of the more productive Hawksbill Sea Turtle nesting programmes in the northern Lesser Antilles, monitored annually since the mid-1990s by the Anguilla Sea Turtle Program in partnership with the Wider Caribbean Sea Turtle Conservation Network (WIDECAST). Hawksbill Turtles nest on approximately 15 of Anguilla's beaches from May through October, with peak nesting in July–August; Scrub Island's undeveloped beaches host the island's largest concentration of active nests. The Anguilla Sea Turtle Program runs an established volunteer monitoring programme that photography guests can join: nightly beach patrols with experienced biologists locate nesting females (which can be photographed with dim red light as they lay), measure and tag individuals (adding data to a regional database of several hundred individually-known turtles), and excavate hatched nests to count egg success rates. In-water Hawksbill photography is excellent at the shallow coral reefs off Sandy Ground and Little Bay, where individual turtles known to the dive community feed on sponges on specific reef sections. Green Turtle numbers are lower but the species is reliably encountered at the seagrass beds of Road Salt Pond.