Sustainable Travel · Antigua and Barbuda

A Travel Guide to Antigua and Barbuda’s Wildlife, Reefs and Culture

The Caribbean’s largest frigatebird colony, a snake brought back from about 50 animals, and a hawksbill nesting beach watched since 1987. What to see on both islands, and how to visit without adding to the pressure on them.

By SEVENSEAS Media | Ocean Conservation

Most visitors to Antigua and Barbuda come for the beaches, and few go home disappointed. The wildlife that makes the country interesting to conservation biologists is easy to miss from a sun lounger, though, because most of it lives offshore. It sits on limestone islets in Antigua’s North Sound, on a nesting beach that has been patrolled every season since 1987, and in a mangrove lagoon on Barbuda holding the largest magnificent frigatebird colony in the Caribbean.

The country is two inhabited islands with very different characters. Antigua, at about 280 square kilometres, carries the capital, St John’s, and most of the hotels. Barbuda lies about 64 kilometres to the north and had roughly 1,800 residents when Hurricane Irma forced the evacuation of the entire island in September 2017.

Two islands, two ways of holding land

On Barbuda, land has been held in common since emancipation. The Barbuda Land Act of 2007 put the arrangement into law, stating that all land on the island is owned in common by the people of Barbuda and that none of it may be sold. That system is now contested, which is covered further down, but for a visitor it means something simple. You are arriving in a place where residents have long expected a say over what gets built, and where trips into the lagoon leave from Codrington, the island’s main settlement.

Antigua is busier and more developed, and most visitors stay there. The capital, St John’s, still has a working waterfront of painted wooden shopfronts and small boats tied up alongside.

The North Sound and the Antiguan racer

Off Antigua’s north-east coast, the North East Marine Management Area takes in more than 30 islands, islets and rocks. It was declared a marine reserve under the Fisheries Act in December 2005, covers about 108 square kilometres, and is the country’s largest marine reserve.

Its best-known resident is the Antiguan racer, a slim, harmless snake that ambushes lizards. Introduced mongooses wiped it out on Antigua itself, and black rats that arrived on ships nearly did the same on Great Bird Island. By 1995 an estimated 51 racers survived on that islet of 8.4 hectares, many of them with injuries consistent with rat bites. A consortium of local and international groups eradicated the rats that year and the population promptly doubled. Snakes were then reintroduced to Rabbit Island in 1999, Green Island from 2002 and York Island from 2008, and the wild population has passed 1,100. The Environmental Awareness Group, which leads the work locally through its Offshore Islands Conservation Project, put the figure at over 1,200 as of 2016.

The rat removals helped more than the snake. Fauna & Flora, one of the project’s founding partners, reports that some bird colonies on the cleared islands have grown more than thirtyfold.

Great Bird Island is a regular stop for boat tours of the North Sound, and visitors have not always been good for it. An early assessment of the project listed deliberate killing by tourists among the threats the snake faced, alongside inbreeding, hurricanes and invasive predators. The rules for a visit are short: leave the snakes alone, keep food and rubbish on the boat, and choose an operator that explains the conservation work rather than one that simply drops anchor. The islets also earn their keep intact. A 2014 profile of the EAG’s work in Caribbean Beat quoted an estimate that most visitors pay more than US$150 a head for a few hours on the offshore islands, adding up to at least US$7 million a year in tour fees.

When an environmental and socio-economic study of the reserve was carried out in 2007, diving in the area was restricted to the reefs off Green Island and Great Bird Island, so check the current rules with your operator. One of the fish snorkellers meet here is the Atlantic blue tang, a grazing surgeonfish. It tends to do well where algae spreads across a reef, and increases in algal density have been linked to larger blue tang populations.

Hawksbills on Long Island

Long Island, the private island better known by its resort name, Jumby Bay, sits off the same coast. Its main nesting beach, Pasture Bay, runs for roughly 650 metres, and hawksbill turtles have nested there under regular night patrols since 1987, when the Jumby Bay Hawksbill Project began tagging every nesting female. The resort’s operator, Oetker Hotels, describes it as the longest continuously running hawksbill research programme in the world.

For years the project was one of the region’s good-news stories, and an analysis of the first 18 seasons reported a significant increase in nesting. A population update published in November 2025 in Chelonian Conservation and Biology is less reassuring. Working from 38 years of nesting data, the authors describe sharper swings from one year to the next over the past decade, with a steep decline underneath. They point to changing conditions on foraging grounds and the spread of Sargassum seaweed as possible drivers, but say the cause is not yet clear.

Nesting patrols on Long Island have historically run from mid-June to mid-November. The island is private. A 1999 paper noted that the Jumby Bay population had survived while most other beaches on mainland Antigua had lost their nesting turtles. If you do come across a nesting turtle anywhere, keep every light off, phone screens included, because artificial light pulls hatchlings away from the sea.

Frigatebirds in Codrington Lagoon

Barbuda’s west side is dominated by Codrington Lagoon, a wetland listed under the Ramsar Convention and fringed by mangroves along its eastern and north-western shores. The frigatebird sanctuary sits at its north-western end. BirdLife International counts it as the largest breeding colony of the magnificent frigatebird in the Caribbean, estimated at 1,743 nests and 5,300 birds in March 2008. The same factsheet records around 200 West Indian whistling ducks in the lagoon, a species listed as vulnerable. Brown boobies loiter in the colony and laughing gulls nest on the sand beneath the mangrove islets. The frigatebird is also the national bird.

Irma showed how exposed the colony is. Before the storm it held 4,000 to 5,000 birds, with chicks in the nests. Surveys just afterwards found no surviving chicks and only about 300 birds. Six weeks later, a BirdsCaribbean team from Guadeloupe counted 279 frigatebirds in just seven bushes. The birds depend on mangroves to nest and roost at night, and the storm stripped many of them. The BBC later reported that more than half the tree mass was lost and that the Waitt Institute would oversee mangrove restoration through its partnership with the Barbuda Council.

There is no road to the sanctuary; you reach it by boat. BirdLife notes that tour boats, and occasionally helicopters, approach too close to the colony. Go with a Barbudan guide, ask them to hold back from the nesting bushes, and bear in mind that the Antigua Observer puts the peak of the breeding season in February.

Who decides what happens on Barbuda

The dispute over Barbuda’s land sits behind any visit, and it is worth understanding before you book. After Irma, the national government moved to dismantle the communal protections in the 2007 Act; amendments watering them down had already passed both houses of parliament in 2017, and the government argued that opening the island to investment would ease the recovery. Opponents, including the Barbuda Silent No More movement, call it a land grab and point out that much of the new development lies inside Codrington Lagoon National Park.

The most visible project is a new airport, built in a deal involving the government, the Barbuda Council and PLH (Barbuda) Ltd, the developer behind the Barbuda Ocean Club. By late 2023 roughly 162 hectares that served as habitat for red-footed tortoises and Barbuda’s fallow deer had been cleared for it. Two residents, the marine biologist John Mussington and the retired teacher Jacklyn Frank, challenged the permit. In February 2024 the Privy Council in London, still the country’s final court of appeal more than four decades after independence in 1981, ruled that they had standing to bring the case. A full High Court hearing of their judicial review took place in June 2026. The government maintains that the airport is critical to Barbuda’s economy and development.

For a traveller the practical question is where the money goes. Staying in a locally owned guesthouse and booking the lagoon trip with a Barbudan guide puts your spending with the people whose land this is.

The dockyard, Carnival and the food

English Harbour on Antigua’s south coast holds the Georgian buildings of Nelson’s Dockyard, inscribed by UNESCO in 2016 as the Antigua Naval Dockyard and Related Archaeological Sites. UNESCO’s own text is plain about who built it: the dockyard’s construction and operation were made possible through the labour and skills of enslaved Africans. It has been a national park since 1984. The Dockyard Museum has an exhibit on the enslaved and free Africans who built and worked there, and it is worth the time before you walk the quays.

Emancipation shapes the calendar as well. Enslaved Africans in Antigua were freed on 1 August 1834, and Carnival, first held officially on 1 August 1957, is a celebration of that emancipation, closing with public holidays on the first Monday and Tuesday of August. The national dish is fungee and pepperpot, a firm cornmeal dough served with a thick stew of salted meat and vegetables.

The 2025 population update on the Jumby Bay hawksbills is published in Chelonian Conservation and Biology. BirdLife International’s site factsheet covers Codrington Lagoon and its frigatebird colony.

SEVENSEAS Media · Conservation Journalism for the Ocean