Site Report: Parc National de la Guadeloupe

Visits

• 2025-04-05: The public services disaster continued in the French West Indies. We were really hustling to try to make our early morning flight and also return the rental car. But, when we arrived at the airport, our flight was not listed on the departures. They had cancelled the flight (Air Antilles) without notifying us, and there was no one working at their counter. After a couple of hours waiting, they opened their office and put us on another flight, leaving 4 hours later, for a grand total of 6 hour delay. Then, when we were coming in for the landing on Guadeloupe, the airplane briefly touched down on the runway with a thud before taking off again and apparently swerving for some reason before doing a huge loop around the island to attempt another landing. The second landing was one of the smoothist landings ever. Since our flight was so late, we effectively lost one of our days on Guadeloupe. We got an early start at the Location Cascade aux Ecrevisses picnic area, where fortunately we had some cover while we watched birds foraging in the rain. It was rainy much of the day on the higher levels of the island. We did stop over at the beach for a moment, but the French police don't allow kayaking without a cell phone, so we were not able to rent the kayaks. We dropped off the car rental, and we went over to the ferry terminal to catch our ferry to Dominica. There was a massive unruly line of people trying to get into the ferry. People were pushing to the front and other rudeness. It really looked like we were going to be on some overflowing ferry, but once we got onboard, there were plenty of empty seats.

Species Seen

Lifelists

• North America
• World

Trips

• Lesser Antilles