Okay, well I aint up for writing a laborious account of everything I did here, there's plenty of trip reports from Cuba on the net and to be honest I spent perhaps only 40% of my time birding... the other 60% was spent drinking, eating, sun bathing, perving and doing other touristy kinda things. We stayed at the magnificent 5 star Playa Pesquero resort on the Guardalavaca coast in the Holguin Province which after the c9hr flight was thankfully only an hours coach ride from Holguin Airport.
I spent perhaps 80% of my time on the resort and managed a nice haul of species, many from the ground floor balcony of the room I was staying in and very often accompanied by a soothing ice-cold beer (the temp rarely fell below 34 degrees). We took a few excursions doing the aforementioned tourist bits and one pinnacle birding trip to a nearby national park. In total I recorded just 43 species of which only 9 were seen 'away' from the resort. 35 of the birds were lifers for me of which 6 were endemic to Cuba (of the 22 - 28 in the country - I found it difficult to find a definitive list of endemics as things are being split/lumped all the time).
Below is the full list of species I notched up, in the order I saw them. The endemics are capitalised & the 9 birds seen away from Playa Pesquero have an * following their name. I'll upload a few images to another post later.
I spent perhaps 80% of my time on the resort and managed a nice haul of species, many from the ground floor balcony of the room I was staying in and very often accompanied by a soothing ice-cold beer (the temp rarely fell below 34 degrees). We took a few excursions doing the aforementioned tourist bits and one pinnacle birding trip to a nearby national park. In total I recorded just 43 species of which only 9 were seen 'away' from the resort. 35 of the birds were lifers for me of which 6 were endemic to Cuba (of the 22 - 28 in the country - I found it difficult to find a definitive list of endemics as things are being split/lumped all the time).
Below is the full list of species I notched up, in the order I saw them. The endemics are capitalised & the 9 birds seen away from Playa Pesquero have an * following their name. I'll upload a few images to another post later.
- Turkey Vulture
- Cattle Egret
- Northern Mockingbird
- Red-legged Thrush
- CUBAN BLACKBIRD
- House Sparrow
- Grey Kingbird
- Yellow Faced Grassquit
- Stripe-headed Tanager (Western Spindalis)
- American Redstart
- Yellow Warbler
- Mourning Dove
- Smooth-billed Ani
- Spotted Sandpiper
- Great Lizard Cuckoo
- Tawny Shouldered Blackbird
- Great Antillean Grackle
- Clapper Rail
- Black-necked Stilts
- Lesser Yellowlegs
- Green Heron
- Antillean Nighthawk
- White-winged Dove
- Common Yellowthroat
- Snowy Egret
- Black-whiskered Vireo
- Great (white) Egret*
- American Kestrel*
- Cuban Emerald
- Loggerhead Kingbird
- La Sagra's Flycatcher
- Common Ground Dove
- Tricolored Heron
- ORIENTE WARBLER
- Shiney Cowbird
- CUBAN GREEN WOODPECKER*
- Red-legged Honeycreeper*
- Zenaida Dove*
- CUBAN PYGMY OWL*
- CUBAN TODY*
- Royal Tern*
- CUBAN MARTIN*
- (Ruddy) Turnstone
