Birding in Cuba

Cuban cormorants perched overhead

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The forest, semi-deciduous, is sweet and green after the dry and hot open field, and we gratefully enter its cool embrace. Yaroddys is taking us to find the elusive bee hummingbird (what's a birding story without the word"elusive"?). At about two inches in length and weighing in at two grams, this red-throated endemic is the world's smallest hummingbird. According to Bond it's more apt to be mistaken for a bee. (Interestingly, a recent discovery has given Cuba the distinction of also having the smallest frog in the northern hemisphere: The eleuth frog lays a single egg and is tied for "world's smallest" with a South American species.)

Stroke of Luck

We don't see any hummingbirds—or any bees, for that matter—but we are in store for a stroke of good luck. Yaroddys stops suddenly, quivering like a pointer. Through a tangle of green I catch a bright flash of lime and orange, a Cuban Tody, rare as a bright jewel (or, it comes to me, some fat-feathered citrus fruit). Yaroddys is bursting with excitement: Though he practically lives in the forest, this is his first tody.

We watch the chubby little bird a while. Despite the obvious differences he bears a noticeable resemblance to his distant relations in the kingfisher family. Todies nidify in April and May (reading about the tody in the Cuban magazine Flora y Fauna was my first encounter with the word "nidification," which—I blush to admit—I took to be some odd Spanish mistranslation for "nesting"). They dig long tunnels and lay four or five whitish eggs at a depth of one to two feet; far more nests are begun than are finished. What's more interesting is their use of helpers. Non-nesting adults attach themselves to a nesting couple and assist with feeding the ravenous young everything from worms, spiders, and insects to fruits and small lizards, providing up to a whopping 140 feeds per chick per day.

The tody moves on and so do we, only to be delighted with the sight of a tiny Cuban emerald, motionless on a branch in a patch of golden sunlight, glittering green. Locally know as Zunzun, they are in fact quite common, though that's an unfortunate word to apply to such a beautiful creature. (Later in Havana my host's lemon tree is a magnet for the neighborhood emeralds, and in the early morning hours we sit with a strong cup of Cubita coffee and watch, still as cats, while they methodically drain each nectar-rich bloom.) We move on toward the heart of the swamp, where there's a foul stench of something large and dead, and then the gleaming bones of a cow, explaining the dozen or so turkey vultures wheeling overhead. For a while I am distracted by a Cuban green woodpecker drilling a tall gray stump, and when I look up the rest of the party has vanished into the swamp to watch white and glossy ibis.