Something a little different this week, some thoughts about the process of refining the raw materials into a worthwhile wildlife guide:

200 meters (actually 200 metres for everyone except poor Americans like me who barely know what a metre is) doesn’t seem like a whole lot. But if you’re talking altitude—and we are—it is a pretty big deal around here. Take a trip upward in the latest Wild Statia:

Wild Statia takes a second look at the wealth of information presented in the recent Journal of Caribbean Ornithology article about Statia. In addition to compiling records of species never seen on the island before, the article also shares data on populations that have been changing in recent years. The full article from the JCO is available as well.

In this week’s Wild Statia, we take a look at a recent publication collecting records of new bird species sighted on Statia. You can access the original article for free at the Journal of Caribbean Ornithology.

The Zebra Longwing is one of Statia’s most beautiful and captivating butterflies. It also has a truly amazing life history with plenty of surprising details.

A survey of Statia’s birds from the early 1950s reaches back to summarize all that science had learned until that point and became a milestone marking a more modern era of ecological study.

What can we learn about Statian wildlife and the history of Statian natural history studies from a museum collection thousands of kilometers away? Quite a bit, in fact!

Little migrants, sometimes heard but rarely seen, in Wild Statia:

In this week’s Wild Statia article, we take a close-up look at one of the challenges of creating a wildlife guide: wildlife photography! Of course, to be fair, the photography is also one of the most fun and rewarding parts of working on the book.

I spent last week in the field working on the upcoming Statia wildlife book with Hannah Madden and it was a blast. We saw—and documented—many things, and I’m still going through my photos. In the meantime, the most recent Wild Statia article explains a bit about working in the field.