The Urban Pantheist

It was kind of nice to experience pond sliders (specifically the red-eared slider Trachemys scripta elegans*) in their native home range. True, it was in an artificial body of water in the botanical garden, with animals clearly accustomed to being fed by humans, but it was their native home range. These hardy semi-aquatic turtles are transported around the world as food animals and especially pets. More often than not, any pet sliders that survive the care of their early years outgrow their tiny tanks. The pet owners time and time again take their problem to the nearest pond and dump it. Pond sliders turn out to be survivors, and this practice has meant that these turtles now have among the broadest range of any turtle species in the world. Australia and Europe have banned its importation, but much of the damage is done. I can see a time when the pond slider is the last species of turtle, and once we're gone it will radiate into all the other turtle niches.

*Elegant written rough turtle

Well, the internet connection was a bit uneven on the trip, so be prepared for the deluge of pictures now that I'm back in Boston, procrastinating away my buffer day!


A female Anolis wattsi, which I'm calling the Antiguan anole but wikipedia is calling "Watt's anole." I believe that juveniles are colored like females and then the males change as they become sexually mature. I saw some small intermediately colored specimens on this trip. The tiny ones are too fast to photograph in most cases.

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We had to walk by this view on our way from our room in the convent to the elevator.

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Backstory: someone posted a picture of two exotic doves on the back porch of their Bozeman Montana home in birdlovers. The reply came: those are not feral birds, those are escaped pets. I tended to agree (thankfully, not in print, until now). Bozeman is nice (in the summer), but settling there strikes me as an eccentric decision, for a bird or for David Quammen.

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The Eurasian Collared Dove is a bird originally native to India or thereabouts, that has been semi-domesticated for hundreds of years. People keep them as caged pets, or sometimes uncaged pets, which is why they didn't stay just in India very long (once people started moving around and selling caged birds to one another). If you read North American bird guides, they'll tell you that a feral population in the Bahamas has spread to Florida, so they are listed in the "exotics" parts of the guides.

However, if you look at current data:


Holy cow. This is from the Great Backyard Bird Count. Not only could you see them in Bozeman, but apparently also in Seattle, Denver, and even Calgary. Well, that shows the importance of citizen science. Not that the current range of the Eurasian collard dove is the most critical thing to know, but since they only update field guides about once per generation, this is pretty dramatic. I wonder if the ec dove found a niche in the vacancy left by the passenger pigeon, or if it's just taking advantage of human changes to the landscape. And what does it have against the Northeast?