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semi-tame hummingbirds
Friday, February 20 2026
location: Cabin 300, the Star Clipper ship anchored in Englishman's Bay, Tobago, the Caribbean Sea
The plan today was to drop anchor in Englishman's Bay further to the west along Tobago's north coast, and our ship did that at some point this morning. But then it was decided that the sea there was too rough to safely ferry passengers to shore, so today's activities were all reworked so they could start in Charlotteville. This was why we returned to Man O War Bay and dropped anchor there. All this rejiggering of logistics took time, pushing today's activities into the afternoon.
This morning during a long briefing (about I don't remember what) in the Jungle Bar, Gretchen's phone locked up, reporting that it had an incompatible SIM card, and refused to do anything at all. I poked around on it, and found I could get into settings. But nothing I did, including disabling the Cricket (our cellular provider) eSIM, made the locking screen go away enough to be able to use the phone. One would think that WiFi would have nothing to do with the whatever was happening with the eSIM, but the locking that was happening made the phone unusable.
Not to worry, though, Gretchen had a tab on my laptop with her Google login information in it, so she could still get to her email. Or so we thought. But when I went off to check Gretchen's email for her, I got hit with a demand for two-factor authentication of the kind requiring Gretchen's phone, which was now disabled. This mean that all of Gretchen's communication channels were now cut off. This was bad, because she was the only point of contact for a number of important outside entities, including our housesitter, the people who would be picking us up in our own car from the airport, and all the tenants in our sprawling real estate empire. At the minimum, we needed some way to stay in contact with our housesitter, so Gretchen devised a work-around to our communication lock-out. She remembered the email address of our neighbor A, so she had me send A an email telling her to contact our housesitter (perhaps by going over to our house, since we didn't have her phone number) to tell her that Gretchen's phone is disabled and to redirect all her communication to my email address. This was about as good of a plan as we could have given the circumstances. It also suggested that, on future trips abroad, more information should be shared with me and my contact information should be shared with those who need to contact Gretchen as a backup.
At lunch today, I was very happy to find a variety of tempura vegetables and mushrooms to eat. We sat with Kelly and Brian and I was telling them about what makes a good renter. My biggest nugget of wisdom here is that older renters, as a population, are generally less reliable rent payers than young renters. This is because nearly everyone starts out as a young renter, while the people left renting later in life tend to be a subset of the population who are worse at managing their money. This isn't always true, of course, but it's something to consider when deciding whether or not to rent to an older tenant.
This afternoon, a large group of us took tenders to Charlotteville and then boarded a bus and van to go do some activities up in the rainforest near the spine of mountain running down the center of Tobago. Gretchen and I at first got into a van that had no air conditioning and none of our friends, and she immediately decided to relocate to the bus, which had air conditioning and our friends (particularly Simon and Cathy). Dirk, the leader of the outing, wondered what difference it made, since we'd only be in the bus for a few minutes. That, as it turned out, was very wrong. It took about an hour to get to our desitination.
Along the way, a local guide, and older man with a wry smile and a quick laugh told us all about the history of Tobago. Various other colonial powers had controlled it before the British, and when they took over, the commissioned a study to see if there was enough rainfall on the island to grind sugar cane with water power. It turned out that there was, and the use of windmills (pioneered on Tobago by the French) was abandoned. But to maintain the rivers, it was important to preserve the forests, and this is why Tobago is home to the world's first ecoreserve. Once we'd crossed the main ridge of the island and were driving through Speyside, our guide pointed out a number of buildings that would never have warranted a mention anywhere else; these were the same buildings that had apparently been pointed out to Kelly and Brian on an excursion yesterday, and which Kelly had later related to us with a world-weary eye-roll. Our guide had a few fun things to say about the culture of the people, particularly religion. He joked that Tobago has more religions than it does people, and it was pretty clear he had no patience for any of the former.
After driving back up to the top of Tobago's spine some distance west, we arrived at the place where our guide would be taking us on a rainforest hike. First, though, those of use with open-toed shoes were strongly cautioned to rent rubber boots from a guy whose business that was ($4/pair). I thought I'd be fine in my flip-flops, but Gretchen more or less insisted we do what the guide suggested and, well, happy wife, happy life. (It was hard to find a pair of boots big enough for my enormous feet.) Then we were driving to a building some distance away where we could use bathrooms (though Simon and I didn't feel like waiting in line, so we just went out of view and peed on the ground).
When the walk began, our group seemed too big for a proper hike with just one guide, but somehow it mostly worked. Our guide knew the biology, and knew of specific things to show us that we would've never seen on our own, such as a trapdoor spider's lair (complete with a hinged plug) and the nests of a white-tailed sabrewing hummingbirds hanging beneath the ends of palm fronds. There were also a few dangers lurking in the shadows. The trail was narrow and one had to make sure not to stray too close to the cliff on one side. And there were occasional needle palms, much like the ones that complicated the crossing of the Darién Gap for Manousos Oviedo in Pluribus (a show few on our ship had watched).
Our guide said that the trail we were on had originally been built as a donkey trail to get sugar cane from the north coast down to the south coast on occasions when the harbors on the north coast were too rough for docking. He also said that a lot of men had died making the trail, which was narrower in most places than the Stick Trail.
At some point we encountered another group from our ship heading back up the trail, so we also turned around and walked back to the bus.
Our next stop was Shurland James Hummingbird Nature Park, a place where people can hold tiny hummingbird feeders in their hands and feed wild hummingbirds directly. The hummingbirds (and there are six or seven species, all with different color patterns or curvatures of bill) are accustomed to feeding this way and will even perch on your hand as they slurp up the faux nectar. It was an intense experience to be among so many semi-tame and tiny bejeweled birds. There was also a dog hanging out there and a woman who kept trying to get us to eat her cakes and other baked goods, though nobody had told her we were vegan and she only had one vegan thing. Simon and Cathy, of course, gladly took the non-vegan treats and secretly fed them to the dog, who looked like he or she could use some nutrients.
On the long drive back to Charlotteville, where we arrived just after sunset, we had to endure a very loud-talking woman as she talked at our friend Cathy. One could hardly hear Cathy say anything at all except maybe an "mmm-hmm" that was lost in the engine noise. But the annoying woman had one of those voices that is keyed specifically to an audio frequency gap that exists in a moving bus and thus rang out like a siren. (This is something I also remember of some people on the bus in Sri Lanka.) But the woman had nothing interesting to say, droning on an on about her internet trouble and how she was supposed to be working on this trip but the internet was making it impossible. She also related a familiar story from the Portugal cruise, about the very meat-forward restaurant where we'd all eaten a vegan lunch in Salamanca, Spain.
As we passed through the small hamlet of L'anse Fourmi (a corruption and Frenchification of the English phrase "Lands for Me," named after a leafcutter ant eradication project that resulted in land distribution to poor settlers), our guide pointed out the houses belonging to his various relatives, some of whom were outside puttering around and gave us enthusiastic waves.
This evening, Gretchen and I ate dinner with just Brian and Kelly, and it was my turn to buy a bottle of wine. Gretchen had pointed out the other day that I didn't have to buy from the chef's recommended list (where I'd found that 32 euro bottle of Francis Ford Coppola on the first night) but could ask to see the wine list instead. So I did that and ordered one of the cheapest bottles of red, which cost only 18 euro. When he was later asked what he thought of it, Brian replied that it was "fine." By that, he meant acceptable.
Dinner conversation went on an interesting trajectory after I mentioned how it might be nice to have a technology installed in the human gut where one could decide to throw a switch to have swallowed food come out early instead of being fully digested. I then jokingly started giving a schpiel to the sharks on Shark Tank. Kelly is also a big fan of Shark Tank, or actually its British version called Dragons' Den, and we talked about that (and the many show-specific tropes) for a good while.
Our group walking in the rainforest. Our guide is wearing the khaki hat and grey-brown vest. Click to enlarge.
An open trapdoor spider lair. Click to enlarge.
The trap door is now closed. Click to enlarge.
Ferns and such growing on the steep wall of the roadcut. Click to enlarge.
I am not sure what plant this is, but I liked it. Click to enlarge.
A white-tailed sabrewing hummingbird nest. Click to enlarge.
An open strangler fig fruit. Click to enlarge.
An even fresher open strangler fig fruit. Click to enlarge.
Some sort of guppy in a brook. Click to enlarge.
Our group along the trail with an interesting perspective effect. Gretchen is closest to me and Simon (with the grey hat) is the next one further away. Click to enlarge.
A Microgramma creeping fern. Click to enlarge.
Google Images says this might be peacock fern. Click to enlarge.
Hummingbirds at the hummingbird nature park. Click to enlarge.
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The white-tailed sabrewing. Click to enlarge.
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A chachalaca. Click to enlarge.
The resident dog at the hummingbird park. Click to enlarge.
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