Mokka mit Schlag

Day 7, Tuesday. More traveling today. We drive on to Camaguey, arriving around lunch time. Lunch is good. As usual, I buy a 10 CUC CD from the house band. Then we check into the hotel and unpack. We have some siesta time, so I explore the city on foot. I prefer birding, but it’s also nice to have free time to just wander around a strange country. Our hotel is on the edge of the “tourist” zone, such as it is. However neither Cuba nor Camaguey is so big that you can’t easily walk from there to the more normal areas of the city. Once again I really wish I spoke Spanish. There’s only so much you can learn from just watching people. In Camaguey I see the first “Internet cafe” I’ve seen all trip. They have a few old model PCs in large space. I’m tempted to check my email, but it doesn’t feel at all secure.

We leave around 3:30 for Sierra del Chorillo where we arrive an hour and a half later. There’s been some confusion. Apparently another group showed up earlier in the day and the local guide we arranged thought they were us, showed them around, and then went home. However eventually someone else is found, and we get down to some serious birding.

First bird we get almost as soon as we leave the bus is #834 Giant Kingbird. Good, I was worried I’d missed that one. It’s not immediately obvious why it’s a Giant Kingbird instead of any of several other species of flycatchers around here, but apparently the bill is bigger, which I can sort of see. There aren’t as many flycatchers to sort out in Cuba as in Central America, but they’re still a damned tricky family to differentiate.

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Day 6, Monday. This is mostly a travel day. No lifers today and few birds at all aside from caged Bullfinches and Mockingbirds. We first stop for an hour in Cienfuegos so the driver can get gas. While he does that, I explore town and encounter my first hustlers and beggars. I also find the first non-tourist shops where regular Cubans shop with pesos instead of CUCs.

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Day 5, Sunday. We lose an hour of sleep die to the daylight savings time change. I’m woken up sometime after 5:00 AM by someone knocking on my door. Apparently the hotel decided not to trust the wakeup call phone system after all. I dress and head to breakfast, where I’m late; but it doesn’t matter because the cafe staff didn’t arrive on time either and my group is just ordering.

After breakfast, it was about 45 minutes out into the Zapata Swamp. We weren’t early enough (and the group wasn’t ambitious enough) to try for the Zapata Rail, but after a kilometer or so we found #830 Zapata Sparrow:

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We started Saturday morning with breakfast and then headed out at first light. On the bus ride to the first site, we encountered a mass of thousands of land crabs scuttling across the road. These were likely Gecarcinus ruricola. I would have liked to stop to look at them; but birds were the goal, not crustaceans, so we drove on past (and over) the crabs.

First stop was a bird blind where several dove species were feeding. I added #822 Blue-headed Quail Dove and #823 Key West Quail Dove, but missed Gray-headed Quail Dove because there were simply too many people in the group for everyone to see at once. The trip was overly large at 17 people including guides; it should have been half the size it was. :-(

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Day 3, Friday, we grabbed a quick breakfast at the hotel and then drove to Cueva de los Portales, a holiday camp and park featuring caves where Che Guevara hid during the Missile Crisis.

Also many Cave Swallows:

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Day 2 was all birding. We got up early and had a quick continental breakfast at the hotel. Then we walked the three blocks to where we could meet our bus, and added #806 Cuban Martin (aka Cuban Swallow) while waiting to load our baggage. (Lucky too. These were the only ones we ended up seeing the whole trip, and it’s an endemic species.)

We drove about an hour and a half west out of the city into the Pinar del Rio province where our first stop was the Ecological Station of Canada del Infierno, (aka Sierra del Rosario–we moved around a lot and not speaking Spanish I’m a little hazy on the exact names of some of the places we visited). Here we met our local ornithologist guide Hiram Gonzalez for the first time, and chatted with him and Fidel Hernandez Figueroa about local birds and conservation projects. Then it was out into the field for some birds! It was a very pleasant walk, through some gorgeous Caribbean scenery with lots of good birds including #807, Cuban Bullfinch, #808 La Sagra’s Flycatcher, and #809, Cuban Emerald. There was also a possible Cuban Vireo that I missed, and a possible Cuban Grassquit seen by some of the group.

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