Our guide speaks little English, and I attach myself to John O'Donnell, a Sierra Club tour leader, and Herlitz, excellent companions for an uncertain birder (As it turns out, the language isn't really much of a barrier: It doesn't take long to figure out that their "carpentero" is a woodpecker, or that "polyglottus" is the mockingbird). At a forked path we choose the long route, intrepid souls that we are. John's excitement is infectious and takes me back to childhood explorations of my own familiar woods a time long gone, yet perhaps it's a reason why, 20 years later, I find myself counting parrots on St. Lucia and in Cuba and hand-feeding wild kestrels in Mauritius.

John is keen to find a Bachman's warbler, which is declining sharply due to habitat loss in both Cuba and the United States. He's out of luck on this trip, and gloomily notes the bird is on the verge of extinction. Otherwise, though, it's a bumper day for birds. As our eyes become accustomed to the tangled gray undergrowth, John spies the endemic Cuban vireo, a small bird with olive gray upper parts and a soft yellow throat. They are pretty but plain which, from the pleased look on John's face, matters little when it's a "lifer" (hard-core birders inhabit a peculiar world of their own; in time I start to subconsciously add my own lifers, but never with quite the same obsessional devotion as people like John). Distracted by butterflies, I take his word for the Cuban bullfinch—"negrito"—a small black bird with a white wing patch and a pretty warble. I do see plenty of loggerhead kingbirds, members of the tyrant flycatcher family, and alternatively called "fighter" or "hard-headed bird," presumably testament to an aggressive nature. There are a few carpenteros, too; I have always been drawn to the woodpeckers, and the unmistakeable Cuban green is a particularly attractive member of the family, with its green back and wings, red neck patch and crown, and soft greenish-yellow belly.

Rounding a bend a male stripe-headed tanager, sharply dressed in black, white, and burnt orange, graciously poses for a photo; his mate joins him on the branch, her drab olive-gray a sharp counterpoint to his dandified beauty. According to Bond these attractive birds go by 16 different names (in somewhat fewer countries), from bastard cock in Grand Cayman to Tom James' bird in the Bahamas; in Cuba they are simply known as cabreros.

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