A Cuban encounter of the rare kind

IN the “casas particulares”, the private houses at which we stayed in various towns in Cuba, we never encountered fleas and only once did we see a cockroach.

However, we saw house lizards now and then, and I got good photographs of two.

In an old house, a “casa colonial”, in Baracoa, we found a little gecko in our room, not like the see-through baby geckos in La Gomera in the Canary Islands which are so transparent one can see their organs like electric wiring inside.

This small Cuban gecko was thin and not transparent, except for its tail, the bone of which could be distinctly seen.

The exotic birds of Cuba sometimes offered photo opportunities but often, before I had the camera ready, they had flown, so I have photos of various birds’ tails.

One such photo proved especially useful in identifying a sighting of Cuba’s national bird, the trogon, which has a long tail, quite distinctive, its three layers of overlapping feathers looking like each is cut short with scissors.

I later managed to photograph a whole trogon, a beautiful bird about the size of a magpie, but red, white and blue, the colours of the Cuban flag.

As for cutting feathers with scissors, we came upon a disturbing sight on a lonely beach on Cuba’s east coast. Small shacks stood amongst the coconut groves just beyond the sand, and from these a group of children emerged as we passed.

They were truly charming, some seven boys and girls, asking to look through my binoculars. No adults appeared and we talked to them for, perhaps, 20 minutes. Their innocence was genuinely engaging. They asked us what country we came from, what it was like there. The eldest was in secondary school, aged 12, the youngest about seven.

I made a raffle for a ballpoint pen, tearing up pieces of paper, dropping them in my hat — a lucky dip. The youngest child won. One of the boys asked us to come to his house for a drink of coconut milk. We said we had to be on our way, I wanted to look for birds with my binoculars before it got dark.

At the mention of birds, and my interest in them, one of the kids ran off and came back minutes later bearing a small bundle of feathers under his arm. I thought it was a chicken. It was not. It was the rarest bird we saw in our Caribbean travels, a Stygian Owl, gravely endangered in all its Caribbean habitats, almost extinct on the island of Hispaniola, still hanging on, in small numbers, in the east of Cuba. And its wings were clipped.

It looked at me with huge yellow eyes. It appeared terrified as he placed it on the ground and the children all surrounded it. As the boy tried to get it to look towards me, towards the camera, it hissed and cowed.

I felt immensely sorry that this creature should become a plaything, something caged in order to provide interest for humans.

Cubans believe the Stygian Owl is associated with evil. When I asked the boy what it ate, he said “Carne”, meat, and “Pollitos”, little chickens. Not so: it emerges long after dark and hunts bats and takes pigeons at their roosts.

I had no idea at the time that I was witness to a very rare sight. The Caribbean bird book which I had ordered hadn’t arrived before I left home in west Cork.

I sought to buy a copy in Jamaica but, none being available, a local birder, Dr Hugh Vaughan, kindly lent me a field guide. Not wanting to damage it, I didn’t carry it on expeditions but photographed birds, or their tails, and identified them back in my room.

Needless to say, my jaw dropped when I discovered that the bird I had so casually photographed was perhaps the rarest I will ever see.

Had I known, I would have told the children how special it was and, if it had been taken from the wild and could still hunt, to let its feathers grow and then release it. Had I been staying longer in Cuba, I would have returned to that remote beach to tell them. I thought of alerting Cuban zoologists, but then the children and their families might have gotten into trouble, and I wouldn’t have wanted that.