Spring 2021

Bottle Creek Lodge opens again. By Jody Rathgeb~ Images Courtesy Bottle Creek Lodge Here’s a new adage for the Islands: You can’t keep a good tourist site down. Proof? Bottle Creek Lodge on North Caicos, which has opened to guests for the third time in nearly 30 years. The new Bottle Creek Lodge, under the ownership of Jim ...

The nitty-gritty of filming the East Caicos Expedition documentary. By Matthew Matlack ~ Photos by Matthew Matlack and John Galleymore Filming the East Caicos Expedition documentary was a thrilling endeavor. I had not been camping in years, I had just one experience under my belt filming in caves (which had a gift shop with snacks at the ...

Telling “A Caicos Sloop Story.” Story and Photos By Michael P. Pateman, Ph.D. and Vanessa A. Forbes-Pateman In the Summer 2019 Astrolabe, we introduced “People of the Islands.” This project seeks to tell the story of “Islanders” through a first-person narrative. The various interview topics include boat building, food/cooking, bush medicine, island migration, cultural traditions, music, dance, ...

Treasures on the beach. By Melissa Heres, Waterfront Assistant, The School for Field Studies The beach has always been a special place for me, linking the land we traverse every day and the incredible ocean environment that looms below. This link, if it could talk, could share so many stories. The stories of how rocks have eroded ...

Ready for the unexpected. Story & Photos By Lorna Rae Daniel-Dupree, Lorna Rae Photography Broken away from the mainland at West Harbour Bluff tands a sheer, sharp faced coral rock—a 30-foot high tower protruding out of the ocean. Nestled on top, safe from human intervention, perches an osprey nest complete with  a pair of chicks. It is January ...

A perfect pairing. Story & Photos By Ben Farmer, Waterfront Assistant, The School for Field Studies “Is it pretty tonight—the sunset?” “I’ve never seen a bad one.” This is a dialogue between two characters in Carl Hiaasen’s novel Skinny Dip. One character, Joey, is temporarily blind after a harrowing experience at sea, and Stranahan is describing the evening Florida ...

New reporting hotline for green iguana sightings. By B Naqqi Manco, Acting Assistant Director of Environmental Research & Development, DECR Our very special endemic Turks & Caicos rock iguanas Cyclura carinata was recently down-listed on the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) category from Critically Endangered to Endangered. This is due largely to decades of ...

How much of Taino depopulation was the result of disease? By Lindsay Keegan, Betsy Carlson, Michael Pateman and Bill Keegan Today’s “Talking Taíno” is brought to you by the letters R and N. First R—not the pirate’s favorite letter (which actually is the C)—but R0 (“R naught”), the mathematical term that indicates how contagious an infectious disease ...

Providenciales’ international airport started out as a handmade runway. Story & Photos By Bengt Soderqvist Pre-COVID-19, the Providenciales International Airport was bustling with flights from around the world, especially on weekends during the busy winter/spring months. In 2019, nearly half a million visitors arrived on the 9,199-foot runway and passed through the singular terminal building. International airlines ...