There is a fair amount of wildlife on the Virgins Islands. Some is 'native,' been here for a long time, and some has been introduced by former residents. Here are pictures of some of the ones I have gotten close enough to for a picture.

This is a Hermit Crab. They are land crabs that find empty shells and take them over as their homes. When disturbed, they retreat inside the shell as far as they can and wait for the treat to go away. They are very common on all the islands. There are a lot of them at the VIERS compound and they can actually be quite useful. When we have a pan with baked on food, you can just set it outside and the crabs will clean it very nicely by morning.



There are several hummingbirds around here. This one is sitting in an aloe plant checking me out before feeding on the yellow aloe flowers. They hover next to the flower and can get their beaks up into the flower, it's open at the bottom, to get the nectar. They don't like the Banana Keets (not sure about the spelling) that also eat the nectar and will chase them away.





These are sea urchins on the rocks by the VIERS dock. They eat the algae that grows on the rocks and corals. Notice how nice and clean the rocks and coral look.







This is a Cuban frog. They apparently came from Cuba and are becoming a problem because they eat the food that the native frogs eat but they don't seem to have any predators to keep them under control.



A mongoose looking for some food scraps. The mongoose was brought to the Virgin Islands to control the rat population. The problem is that the mongoose only hunts during the day while the rats feed at night. So there are a lot of mongooses here.




There are a lot of white tailed deer on St John. They were brought to the island to provide sport for the estate owners. They have done well here but are considerably smaller than the ones in the states. It is so dry here that they have a somewhat limited diet. They come into the VIERS compound to eat the tamarind fruit.


These donkeys may or not be considered wild. They roam around the island eating whatever they can find. The population has declined some but there are still quite a few around.



A white egret, I think. It was on shore by the VIERS dock.





This is a school of small fish that were under the VIERS dock. I don't know what they are but they were about 1 inch long. They were being eaten by the Bar Jacks in the picture to right. The Bar Jacks were about a foot long and didn't have much trouble catching the little guys. I didn't see him attack anything but there was also a barracuda there. He was about 4 feet long and was just swimming around looking at me.





This is Conway. She owns Scot, the VIERS Operations Manager.