Saint Lucia Forestry Stories: Remembering…Stanley John
The first Saint Lucian contributor to scientific knowledge on the birds of the island
Contributed by Christopher Cox, based on an interview with his daughter Pamela Dujon, August 2024. Acknowledgement to Margaret Ishmael-Severin who provided the contact information for the family.
Stanley John is the first noted Saint Lucian who was an avid birder, who contributed extensively to the knowledge of the birds of the island. He worked with the Forestry Division that was at the time headed by William Lang, as a forest ranger with responsibility for areas in the north of the island that included the La Sorcière, Trois Piton and Forestiere areas. His natural interest and keen tracking skills made him highly sought after by visiting ornithologists to the island from the 1920s who contributed pivotal scientific observations on birds of the Caribbean. He assisted the famous American ornithologist James Bond in his field observations of St Lucia birds, accompanying him in his visits to the island in 1927 and 1929. Bond authored the first comprehensive guide to the Birds of the West Indies. Bond served as a curator of the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia.
He also assisted Stuart Danforth of the University of Puerto Rico at Mayagüez in his field surveys in 1931 toward the documentation and publication of the monograph The Birds of Saint Lucia. He gave an account of the eighty species and subspecies he encountered found on in Saint Lucia including brief descriptions, their habits and distribution over the island. Danforth noted that Stanley was an expert hunter with thorough knowledge of the birds of the island and that he was successful in locating habitats of the rarer species that included the St. Lucia Black Finch, the St. Lucia Thrasher, Semper’s Warbler the Rufous Nightjar and the Forest Thrush, and collected specimens that were furnished for overseas museum collections.
Stanley learned the craft of taxidermy to preserve bird specimens, his skill apparently acquired from James Bond and earned diploma certification in the field. At the time he was the only taxidermist on the island. He is associated with being the last person who convincingly saw the Semper’s Warbler, a bird that is found only on Saint Lucia, named after Reverend John E. Semper, who was the Colonial Chaplain of the island (Danforth, 1935) and an amateur ornithologist in the latter part of the 1800s. Stanley collected a specimen of the Semper’s Warbler in 1934, and despite searching extensively for the bird since then, he did not encounter it again until 21 May 1961 at Louvet, near the east coast of the island (Weidensaul, 2022). Although there have been reported sightings of the bird since then, none of these have been conclusive and the bird is feared to be possibly extinct, although there could be a small chance that it still inhabits the undergrowth in forests deep in the island’s interior.
Stanley would walk for long distances from his home in Forestiere to seek out wildlife in locations like Grand Anse, and other wild and remote areas in the northern part of the island. He collected a wide variety of specimens; besides birds for museum collections, he would also collect snake skins where some of these would find their way to collections in the Ministry of Agriculture, which had management responsibility for the Forestry Division. According to Calixte George Sr. (whose father was a friend of Stanley John) Stanley authored a weekly series in the Voice of Saint Lucia newspaper in the early 1950s in which he described the birds of the island. He travelled to some of the other islands on trips likely related to natural history, in association with his work. In 1975 he accompanied as lead guide, David Jeggo, Deputy Curator of Birds of the Jersey Wildlife Preservation Trust (now Durrell Wildlife Preservation Trust), along with Stephen Jovicich of Houston, Texas and supported by Julian King of the Forestry Division, in the first population survey of the St. Lucia Parrot in the central forests between Millet and Mt. Gimie. That first survey raised the alarm about the extreme rarity of the parrot, where the population was estimated to be somewhere between 100 to 150 birds.
He remained a life-long resident of the community of Forestiere, living in close proximity to the western boundary of the Castries Waterworks Forest Reserve, just higher up the road from where the Forestiere Methodist Combined School is situated today. Stanley had nine children. He passed away in 1978 at about the age of 75 and is buried in the Forestiere cemetery.
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