Cuba

April 4-15, 2006

By Kathy Van Der Aue

The Connecticut Audubon April trip to Cuba was a fascinating, educational journey into an environment of which we had little real knowledge, because of the existing politics between Cuba and the USA. The opportunity for us to go there happened because of a program which has earned a Treasury Department License permitting travel to Cuba for the humanitarian purpose of conservation work. For us that work was to study the birds of Cuba with particular emphasis on the presence and behavior of neo-tropical migrants such as wood warblers on their way north to nest. We began and ended in Havana, where we met our guide Arturo Kirkconnell, co-author of the book “Birds of Cuba” and curator of the Natural History Museum of Cuba. Arturo is passionate about Cuba’s birdlife, especially her endemic species, and proved to be a personable leader and the best bird spotter I have ever encountered. Havana seemed to be a physically decaying city but pulsating with the rhythms of Cuban music and vibrant with promise, once there is money to renew the wonderful structures we saw everywhere. We saw the familiar cars of the American fifties now refitted with Russian diesel engines and lovingly maintained. All this emphasized the feeling of a culture suspended in time for me, a country waiting for its future to begin. Cuba encompasses many varied bird habitats from cloud forest to cactus scrub. We visited a wide range of these habitats in our travels and saw 151 species in all including most of the endemics (20 out of 22 bird species found only on Cuba).

Our birding began to the west of Havana in the Vinales area where we visited a defunct coffee plantation and the confiscated estate of a corrupt former official, both now wildlife reserves, plus a National Park.  We saw our first Cuban Trogon, the National bird, saw nine endemic species and seven neo-tropical wood warbler species in migration, together with many other great birds. The confiscated estate had beautiful limestone caves where we heard the haunting, reedy song of the Cuban Solitaire, an endemic thrush. Our lunch one day was at a vegetarian enclave where the food was absolutely extraordinary.

We returned to Havana and flew to Cayo Coco, an island in the Jardins Del Rey archipelago off the northeastern coast. Our accommodations there were in a new luxury resort catering to Canadians, very plush, but I wonder what will happen in this fragile environment of the cays once the embargo lifts and greedy developers get their hands on these pristine areas. We explored more National Reserves where we saw the rare and threatened Gundlach’s Hawk, the Cuban Pygmy-Owl, more migrating wood warblers frolicking in a stream, and the Key West Quail-Dove among many others.

We then moved to the Zapata region where we stayed on the shores of the Bay of Pigs and experienced the annual migration of the Cuban land crabs. This is an event of biblical proportions in which millions of these most attractive crabs follow their ancestral urge to leave their forest home and deposit their eggs in the sea. There is little vehicular traffic on the road they must cross right now but their future survival may be in doubt once the embargo is lifted and more of the population can afford cars. We had the opportunity to discuss our concerns with the National Parks Director for the Zapata region who assured us that they have been studying the situation and plan to build some sort of migration corridors for the crabs at some future date. We swam in the Bay of Pigs (our own invasion, if you will) but our main quarry was the tiny Bee Hummingbird (smallest bird in the world) and we had stunning success in our mission, getting good long looks at a male defending his patch of flowering vine. The Zapata region has beautiful salt flats teeming with shorebirds, everglade type environments that were home to an endemic sparrow, wren and blackbird as well as scrubby forested areas where we saw the endangered Fernandina’s Flicker, the Bare-legged Owl (who refused to show her legs) and more migrating wood warblers. A sharp-eyed Connecticut Audubon traveler spotted a Gundlach’s Hawk, on a nest with two chicks! This caused great excitement for our guides who carefully documented the location.

While this trip is meant to help scientists fill the gap in our knowledge of bird migration and other areas of ornithology, it is not only a trip for the die-hard birder as there are wonderful opportunities for cultural exchanges with a lively culture from which we have been separated for far too many years. The accommodations were clean and comfortable, if somewhat Spartan, and the food, while not luxurious, was nourishing and tasty. The people were warm and welcoming without exception. It is a must-do trip for the very experienced birder but the novice with “good eyes and ears” will also find it very rewarding. I felt fortunate indeed to participate in this important work and hope the trip will be repeated annually so others can share in this exciting experience.