Iguana 12.1


IGUANA  •  VOLUME 12, NUMBER 1  •  MARCH 2005 45HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVES

Ilanded one morning from the Utowana2 on the Island of
Saona, off the coast of Haiti.3 It is a rather flat, uninteresting

little island and I was not prepared for what I found. I knew
that there was a high degree of endemicity on all these islands
around the Haitian coast. I knew, also, that Saona had never
been visited by anyone in search of reptiles, so I walked around
the confines of a small open garden patch, knowing that this
was the sort of terrain where one might expect to find Ameiva
lizards. Lizards of this genus have a way of splitting up, so nov-
elties may be expected.

I hunted a long time before I heard a noise in the dead
leaves. Ameiva lizards are anteaters and scratch with their paws
among the leaves, throwing them about in their search for the
insects which may be below them. I approached the sound as
stealthily as possible and could scarcely believe my eyes when I
saw a perfectly typical Ameiva, and by the same token one
utterly unlike any which I had ever seen. I have collected count-
less numbers of lizards of this genus. I shot this lizard on April
8, 1934. It was lilac gray on the back, washed with fawn colour
on the head and turning to pale blue on the tail. A black band,
beginning with the eyes, ran along the side of the body and the
tail, which was azure blue beneath, while the undersurfaces of
the body were glaucous blue, suffused anteriorly with cream
colour. The sides of the head were buff yellow. All in all, it was
one of the most beautiful and strikingly coloured reptiles which
I have ever seen.

I sent the specimens to Miss Cochran of the National
Museum in Washington, who was writing a herpetology of the
Island of Hispaniola,4 although I fairly itched to describe it
myself. I realized it was new the second I saw it, as I have said
before, and I asked her if she would name it for my wife. She
not only named this species Ameiva rosamondae,5 but without
my knowing it she named the Ameiva from La Gonave Island
for me.

The Haitian peasants are so poor that they will struggle
hard to catch lizards, snakes, frogs, and toads — which they do

not really like to do — if they can sell them for five cents each,
and I mean five cents of a Haitian gourde, which is only worth
fifteen cents to start with. We often had as many as a hundred
people collecting for us. In this way, on the islands that were
populated of course, it was possible to secure in a few days as
much material as a single person could have gotten during a
long stay, so that while we stopped at innumerable different
localities during these voyages on the Utowana and never had
very much time at one place, all around Haiti and in the
Bahamas we got big collections. You can do this in Jamaica, but
not in Cuba.

We stopped on one occasion at Isle Tortue. I went ashore
in the morning and passed word around that we would be back
in the latter part of the afternoon prepared to purchase what
might be forthcoming, explaining what we wanted. I had a sack
of Haitian five-cent pieces on board the yacht. We found that
we got much better results from our collectors if we ourselves
did not stay where they could watch us. It was so much more
fun to stand and stare at strangers than it was to do anything
else that the temptation was quite overwhelming. But if we
went ashore in the morning and spread the news of what we
were prepared to do, then disappeared on board and hauled up
the gangway, by the middle of the afternoon we could go ashore
and be overwhelmed by a rabble of men and women, boys and
girls, with snakes and lizards dangling at the ends of dozens of
little lassoes which they fashioned cunningly from shredded
palm leaves.

On one occasion a poor old man came up to us with a
gourd full of fat white grubs. These he had dug out of a rotten
palm trunk. I recognized them at once as the larvae of a big
weevil which lives in decayed palm wood. Of course he brought
them feeling sure we would buy so succulent a dainty, for the
Haitians are extremely fond of these grubs fried. Rosamond was
utterly disgusted by their very appearance and I was not allowed
to take them on board and eat them, which I should have
greatly enjoyed doing. I have no right to complain, however, for
the family did not relish the intimacy with a wide variety of rep-
tiles which they patiently endured.

Ameiva taeniura is widely distributed across the relatively mesic low-
lands of Hispaniola. The population on Isla Saona (A. t. rosamondae)
was named for Thomas Barbour’s wife by Doris Cochran of the
National Museum. Photograph by Father Alejandro J. Sánchez Muñoz.

Collecting Herpetological Specimens in Haiti1

Thomas Barbour

1 Excerpted from Barbour, T. 1950. Naturalist at Large. Robert Hale
Limited, London.

2 A 210-foot yacht owned by Allison Armour, on which Barbour
toured the West Indies and adjacent areas of the American mainland
in 1929, 1931, 1933, and 1934. See also the excerpt from Barbour’s
Allison Armour and the Utowana, which follows this account.

3 Actually part of the Dominican Republic; the island, Hispaniola,
was often referred to as “Haiti” at that time.

4 Cochran, D. 1941. The Herpetology of Hispaniola. Bulletin of the
U.S. National Museum (177):1–398.

5 Now considered a subspecies of Ameiva taeniura.