His first goal was to find a Zapata wren, obviously endemic to this swamp, and he was successful, even got one singing. Video of that can't transfer to the iPad, and I couldn't capture a good pic from the video because the bird was mostly obscured by leaves, tho in truth it's not much to look at anyway - see D's narrative about that.
We saw a number of Cuban endemic species. Cuba is clearly a place for serious birders looking to jazz up their life bird list (hear that Sally Gould?)
We were quite fortunate to get a real good view of one of them, the Cuban Pygmy Owl. Those of you who are not birders please bear with the photos. It's really a very cool bird - 6.5 inches according to the book - although this one looked smaller, no bigger than a small woman's hand.
He's also on the cover of our Cuban bird book, along with the Cuban trogon, the national bird, chosen for his blue, white and red colors, those of the Cuban flag. We saw many, and I've included several shots to show it from different angles.
We saw some more Cuban Green Woodpeckers, also endemic.
There were a lot of Cuban Emeralds, found only in Cuba and the Bahamas...
as well as a Great Lizard-Cuckoo, also limited to those two areas.
At the other extreme is the black-crowned night heron, which, according to the book is one of the most widely distributed species in the world. I included it because I got a good shot.
Another trip with Angel tomorrow, hoping to see the bee hummingbird, smallest in the world. That will probably be the greatest videographic challenge of all.
The minute we got back from the bird trip we started a snorkeling odyssey - another Cuba travel story. Angel gave us a ride to a place near town to rent snorkel gear. The place was closed, and the owner had gone home, supposed to be back in a minute. Two Dutch guys staying at our place happened to be at a little canteen nearby and since they were going snorkeling we waited together.
Twenty minutes later, with no sign of the owner, a woman working at the canteen went with D and the Dutch guys in their rentacar to the owner's house, and got him to ride back to the place on his bicycle. We got the gear and rode the 20ks to the snorkeling place, which wasn't wonderful, but not bad.
We did two lengthy snorkel loops, dried out in the sun, and decided to get back to town on our own, since the Dutch guys were getting lunch. We stood on the highway trying to catch a ride for about 20 minutes, and then got picked up by an overcrowded wahwah (truck converted to public transport), and rode in it for about 8 cents back to the snorkel place. The wahwa disproved five or six times my belief that not one more person could be crammed into that vehicle.
We turned the gear in and started walking back into town, trying to stay close to the shore to get the shortest route to our place, but were stymied by a disheveled barbed wire fence that I started to climb over, prompting a guy to come running out to shout that we were entering a zona militar. Rather than give him my opinion of his unit's military perimeter, we quietly retraced our steps a bit, and wandered out of the trees into some houses from where we worked our way around the military camp back to our place. We generated more than a few curious stares.
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Location:Playa Larga
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