10 Jul Sharing Space with Nature in Cuba
Our group stood quietly in the forest trying to ignore the mosquitoes buzzing incessantly as our guides played a softly-repeating whoop-like call over their loud speakers. We all listened as they paused the audio, straining to hear the faint response of a Gray-fronted Quail-Dove. Our guides conferred in whispers, then motioned us to follow them further down the muddy path. I smiled as one of the men in our group opted to lay in a sunny patch of grass along the edge rather than follow; we’d been at this for nearly an hour with nothing more than these intermittent returned calls buoying hope over growling stomachs. Perhaps inspired by this man, others lagged or became distracted by something in the bushes such that there were only a few of us at the guide’s side when he crawled into the brush, then frantically motioned the bird’s presence. I was one of only a couple to catch a solid but very fleeting glimpse of this Cuban endemic.
“Don’t worry, we can keep trying,” the guide promised.
“Not now,” was the very firm response from several in the group – it was clearly time for food.
This had been one of our tougher endeavors. Not to say we hadn’t had other near or total misses after considerable effort, but we’d also had a group of Cuban Trogons appear from the forest in Vinales to feed on a fruit-laden tree before us. We watched a Zapata Wren emerge from tall marsh grasses to perch and sing in the open mere feet from us. We admired a Cuban Black-Hawk swooping above a flamingo-filled salt pan to eventually settle on a nearby snag. This was a trip focused on Cuban endemic birds and from that perspective we were doing incredibly well. My own interest, however, ran deeper. My participation was motivated by my upcoming book, Recovering Caribbean Nature.
I wanted a more intimate understanding of the Caribbean’s largest island – Cuba – and one of the sponsoring partners of my new book – BirdsCaribbean – who had organized the trip. I wanted to personally experience Cuban nature, observe its protected areas and conservation practices, meet some of the local players, and capture a few photographs to include in the book. From this perspective too, the trip was a success though not necessarily in the way I had anticipated.
I’d long heard tales and read reports of large swaths of pristine habitat under the protection of the government, so expected the seemingly endless mangrove-studded shallows of the Zapata Swamp. I was somewhat more surprised to discover that the country’s famed limestone mogotes of the Vinales Valley erupted from agricultural fields rather than forest, yet in retrospect this makes sense. This area has long been the main source of tobacco for the country’s even more famous cigars, and in fact demonstrates the type of human-nature coexistence I’ve long promoted. The naturally vegetated-mogotes provide stepping stones of habitat for birds and other wildlife through this human-altered landscape.
Vinales wasn’t the only place where humans and nature coexisted. My only sighting of the country’s endemic Gundlach’s Hawk was in the Jardin Botanico Nacional, a botanical garden surrounded by Havana’s sprawl. Endemic Cuban Parrots and Parakeets flocked in fruit trees above people’s garden plots in small villages. I saw my first Cuban Grassquits at a farm that had begun providing seed to lure these endemics into view for a little extra income from birders, an action which over time had also reportedly supported an increase in the area’s grassquit population. I saw endemic Bee Hummingbirds and a Cuban Pygmy-Owl in the native-plant and bird-feeder laden guest house garden of a former poacher turned bird guide. I visited a neighborhood where every yard boasted native plantings and it was there, sitting under a covered backyard patio that our entire group watched Blue-headed Quail-Doves saunter out from adjacent forest to pluck seeds from the ground before us. I couldn’t help but marvel at the comfort and ease of this Quail-Dove sighting, a stark contrast to our venture in the woods for the Gray-fronted one and a demonstration of yet another benefit of sharing space with nature.
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