Close-up marine encounters and rare birdlife: why St Helena is a wildlife-watching paradise

ByJessica Vincent

Published December 8, 2023

• 8 min read

For decades, the only way to access St Helena — a subtropical island 1,200 miles off the southwest coast of Africa — was aboard the Royal Mail ship RMS St Helena on its five-day sailing from Cape Town. But since 2017, a new commercial airport has made one of the world’s most remote islands easier to visit. We speak to Anthony Thomas, founder of St Helena dive operator Sub-Tropic Adventures, and Dennis Leo, wirebird conservation manager at St Helena National Trust, to find out how responsible wildlife tourism is taking hold on this remote South Atlantic island.

You’re both key figures in St Helena’s wildlife tourism industry. How did you get into it? 

Anthony: I was born and raised on St Helena. My school was in Jamestown, so I had direct access to the ocean growing up. I learnt to dive at 14 and became certified at 16. I fell in love with St Helena’s marine life and became a dive instructor in 2000 — when I was 20 years old — and decided to open Sub-Tropic Adventures [a marine service provide] the same year.

Dennis: I came to St Helena in 2011 in want of a job. Back then, wirebirds — St Helena’s only endemic land bird — were in a critical condition. That year St Helena’s National Trust launched a predator control programme to help wirebird numbers recover. They needed help setting up traps and monitoring wirebird nests, so I applied for the job. Here I am 10 years later, managing the wirebird conservation programme and running wirebird-watching tours on the island.

What makes St Helena such a special place for wildlife-watching? 

Dennis: You can’t help but see wildlife on St Helena. The island is so small that one minute you can be walking in the hills with a masked booby flying over your head, then you’ll see a whale and its calf feeding in the bay below you. At 4pm, in Jamestown, you’ll see tropicbirds flying all over the place. The island is a paradise for birdlife.

Anthony: We have quite a protected marine environment on St Helena. Fishing around the island is controlled, and it shows when it comes to the diversity, abundance and size of the marine life you encounter. On a really good day, we’ll see hundreds of pantropical dolphins, whale sharks and Chilean devil rays on a single dive. We also have around 50 endemic marine species on the island.

St Helena is home to rare flora and fauna. What conservation efforts are being made on the island to protect them?

Anthony: The number of divers that can dive at a particular site is now limited. All dive operators on St Helena must also pass an accreditation process to ensure they’re following sustainable practices. Right now we never have more than 20 divers at the same site, but these new regulations have been put in place to protect marine life as the island opens up to more tourists.

Dennis: At the National Trust, we’ve been protecting St Helena’s endangered wirebird since 2007. When the project started, there were 275 left on the island and now we have roughly 582 adults. We’re currently working on removing invasive species from St Helena’s grasslands, an important habitat for the wirebird.

What kind of experiences can people have below the waves on St Helena?

Anthony: We have caves, swim-throughs, overhangs, pinnacles and seven wrecks for recreational divers to explore. But what makes St Helena really special for divers is that you’re surrounded by life as soon as you get in the water. You can see dolphins, damselfish, our endemic butterfly fish, three types of ray, red reef and spiny lobsters, whale sharks and more. Because the visibility is so good here — an average of around 30 to 35 metres — snorkellers and boat trippers can also see a lot of marine life from the surface.

What’s your favourite dive spot on the island?

Anthony: There’s a dive spot called Barn Cap, a small pinnacle 800 metres off the coastline. You have an abundance of marine life here year-round, including lots of large fish like rainbow runners and yellowfin tuna. During the warmer months, male and female whale sharks come to Barn Cap to mate. I’ve had over 50 whale sharks circling my boat at Barn Cap.

What kind of landscapes and wildlife can I expect to find above the waves in St Helena?

Dennis: They say St Helena is an emerald set in bronze. When you arrive at the airport, you’ll think you’ve landed in a desert. But then you go into the interior of the island and everything is green. St Helena is small, but we’ve got cloud forests, grasslands, rocky cliffs and volcanic beaches. The main attraction above the waves here is the birdlife. As well as the wirebird, you’ll see masked boobies, tropicbirds, petrels, Madagascar sparrows, Java sparrows, turtle doves and more.

What is your favourite wildlife-viewing spot on the island?

Dennis: Walking is the best way to see St Helena’s wildlife. There are 21 marked trails on St Helena called Post Box Walks that take in all the best spots on the island. My favourite is Blue Point because you’ve got the rugged cliffs of Sandy Bay on one side and Blue Hill on the other. From Blue Point, you can see a lot of seabirds — sometimes there are so many masked boobies nesting here it looks like there’s snow on the hillsides.

Plan your trip
Airlink has direct flights from Johannesburg to St Helena every week, and twice a week November to March (switching from Johannesburg to Cape Town during this period 2024/25). Sub-Tropic Adventures offers diving and snorkelling experiences year-round, as well as whale-watching tours between June and December, when humpback whales arrive from Antarctica to give birth. Wirebird-watching tours with Dennis Leo can be booked through the St Helena National Trust. For more information, go to sthelenatourism.com

This paid content article was created for St Helena Tourism. It does not necessarily reflect the views of National Geographic, National Geographic Traveller (UK) or their editorial staffs.

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