The Bahamas from north to south: Hope Town’s lighthouse, the Lucayan caves and Inagua’s flamingos

The Elbow Reef Lighthouse Society dates continuous staffing and hand operation at this station to 1863; it says the lantern is still wound by hand and burns kerosene. The society’s history says that, after lighthouse oversight passed to the Bahamas Port Department in 1973, the other Bahamian lights were automated by 2012 except Elbow Reef and San Salvador. The compound has eight historic support buildings, including two former keepers’ homes, which the society dates to 1862–63. Hurricane Dorian badly damaged those buildings in 2019.[1]

Yager’s 1981 article gives Lucayan Cavern on Grand Bahama as the collection site for the type specimen of Speleonectes lucayensis; the paper introduced Remipedia as a new crustacean class. The Bahamas National Trust’s park history instead links the species to Ben’s Cave. The Trust dates the park’s establishment to 1982 and its expansion to 2015. It reports that the remains of six Lucayans, found in a cave in 1986, are evidence of pre-Columbian settlement, and says the park’s name honours the original inhabitants of The Bahamas.[3][4][5]

Ramsar lists Inagua National Park as site 892, designated on 7 February 1997, and identifies Lake Rosa as important for a flamingo breeding colony. Bahamas National Trust’s history recalls the 1952 visit of Audubon researcher Robert Porter Allen, led by Sam Nixon to the Upper Lakes, where Allen saw more than a thousand birds courting. The Trust says it took over the flamingo-protection role when it was formed in 1959. Its page gives an undated estimate of about 70,000 flamingos; the Ramsar Information Sheet, which RSIS identifies as last updated in 1998, records about 21,000 in the early 1970s and 40,000–50,000 in its then-recent years.[6][7][8]