Tobago is a great place to chill out but there are also plenty of attractive places to see and interesting things to do. If you are interested in wild life then you can visit the equatorial rain forest or the island of Little Tobago. To get the best out of your visits it is best to sign up with a guide. Two particular good guides are Newton George (tel. nos. 660 5463 or 754 7881) or William Trim (tel. no. 315 9191 or 326 4364). William is very good on bird life.
If you take out a boat from the Blue Waters Inn (just beyond Speyside) to Little Tobago you can snorkel on top of some of the best reefs as well as visiting the Bird Sanctuary. When you get to the island make sure you take the nature trail across to the viewing platform on the other side of Little Tobago where you can watch the Frigate birds swooping down on the gulls forcing them drop the fish they have caught.
See the birds on Little Tobago
It’s also worth making a flying visit to the Asa Wright Wildlife Resort in Trinidad. You’ll need to catch an early morning plane or book in overnight at the Centre.
Humming Bird in Flight
I’m not a “twitcher” or “birder” and you probably aren’t either but I’d be surprised if you weren’t like me, impressed by the Asa Wright Centre. In a short distance you’ll probably see a greater variety of birds than nearly anywhere else in the world. There are so many birds to be seen from the verandah of the big house that you barely need to wander round the nature trails, (but then you’d miss the butterfly garden, the day bats, the leaf cutter ants, the agouti, and fail to see the 150 year old mango tree being killed by the “strangler” vine). There are 17 species of hummingbird, I believe. You can see as many as 13 of them of them at Asa Wright. To see their varied colours you need to see them in flight or hovering as they feed. Then there are the Mannekins – at least two types. If you see a group of males you’ll see them competing to show off to their female counterparts. They do something like the Michael Jackson “moon walk” along the horizontal branches of the trees in their “leks”. They also have to keep their “sections” clean and tidy and leaf free to impress the ladies and sometimes their male rivals fly over and try and drop leaves – to sabotage their attempts to impress and keep the ground leaf free for their women. Then there are also the Bell birds that make a metallic noise when they call out to mark their territory, and the Parrots and Toucans, the gorgeous green and purple Honey Creepers and the Mot Mots.
Honey Creeper
The leaf cutter ants can have nests that house literally millions of ants and some nests go down as far as 30 feet. They are all females and there is only one Queen. It’s tough being a male leaf cutter ant – you’ll only last a day. There are also tiger lizzards and geekos, and we even saw a boa constrictor, but that was unusual. I didn’t do the night walk to look for tarantulas but it seemed to me that most of the participants were pleased that they didn’t find any.
