Preliminary assessment. We will travel to Saint Lucia in fall 2025 for two weeks and in spring of 2026. A preliminary assessment of boa habitat will be conducted by walking through accessible properties and noting and photographing potentially suitable boa habitat. Then priorities for surveys will be assigned based on accessibility and segments with the largest remaining continuous suitable habitat areas.
St. Lucia Field Research. Intensive visual encounter surveys (VES) will be conducted during the day. During each VES, team members will spread and walk slowly through the vegetation looking for boas in the entire visible surrounding habitats. Logs and rocks will be lifted, whenever possible, to search for boas and then replaced to minimize habitat disturbance. Trees, caves and vegetation will also be searched. Start and end locations of each VES will be recorded using a hand-held Global Positioning System (GPS). The number of people searching, and the time searched will be recorded and will be considered for each VES to calculate an estimate of total search effort.
When Boas are encountered, they will be captured by hand and placed in a cloth snake bag for later processing. The GPS coordinate of each capture will be recorded and marked with brightly colored flagging tape to ensure the snake is released at the exact point of capture after processing. Data regarding the surrounding habitat, weather, time, and behavior of the snake will be recorded on a data sheet at every capture. At the end of each VES, all the snakes captured will be taken to a designated field station for processing.
Snake Processing. In the field station all snakes will be sexed, measured and weighed, and checked to see if they had been caught previously by scanning for the presence of a Passive Integrated Transponder (PIT) tag. Sex will be determined by the presence of enlarged anal spurs in males compared to the relatively discrete anal spurs in females. Where this difference is less obvious (for example, in smaller specimens) and sex cannot be determined, gender will be determined by probing retracted hemipenes. If the snake has not been previously caught, it will be injected subcutaneously with a PIT tag to facilitate identification if recaptured later. We will attempt to return captured snakes to their original site within 24-48 hours.
Radiotelemetry. Adult and sub-adult boas (up to four boas of each age class per island) caught will be surgically implanted with temperature sensitive radio transmitters (Model SB-2T; Holohil systems Ltd.) according to a modified version of the procedure reported by Reinert and Cundall (1982). The transmitters will weigh no more than 10% of the total body mass of the snake. This adheres to the guidelines set out by the American Society of Ichthyologists and Herpetologists (ASIH). Snakes will be allowed at least 24 hours to recover from surgery prior to their release. Once released, the snakes will be tracked every day for approximately two weeks using a Yaesu VR-500 receiver (100 kHz1300MHz) and a two-element “H” type antenna (Telonics, Inc., Mesa, AZ).
Conservation Education Program.
Global Insular conservation Society (GICS) will help organize and conduct/ support conservation Programs on Saint Lucia.
