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Published December 8, 2023
8 min read
For decades, the only way to access the remote subtropical island of St Helena was aboard the Royal Mail ship RMS St Helena on its five-day sailing from Cape Town. However, with the new commercial airport that opened in 2017, this once hard-to-reach destination has become much more accessible. We sat down with Anthony Thomas, founder of St Helena dive operator Sub-Tropic Adventures, and Dennis Leo, wirebird conservation manager at St Helena National Trust, to learn more about the growing wildlife tourism industry on this unique 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 provider] 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.