For the third time, BirdWatching magazine, in collaboration with the Caribbean Conservation Trust (CCT), is promoting an exclusive, U.S.-led and U.S.-managed birding program to Cuba, the Caribbean’s largest and most ecologically diverse island nation. (The two...

This season, several of our faithful partner organizations and individual travelers had the pleasure of visiting ‘CASA BERNABE’, and the small but incredibly attractive backyard cultivated by a simple yet extraordinary couple who have lived their lives in a rural community in the confines of Zapata National Park, arguably among the most important bird habitats in the West Indies.

CARIBBEAN CONSERVATION TRUST has developed a Community Education Program in Cuba with the goals of informing kids and families of the value of birds, habitat, and a conservation in an effort to instil local interest in birding, and in nature in general. Our interest is to help develop a greater sense of appreciation in Cuban communities for the enjoyable and valuable resource that birds and nature provide.

A new species has been added to the roster of birds that once lived in the West Indies. It’s an owl, and an impressive one, a relative of the Barn Owl alive today but much larger. Gone for thousands of years now, it is known only from fossils unearthed in Cuba. The discoverer, ornithologist and paleornithologist William Suárez, and Storrs L. Olson, curator emeritus in the Division of Birds of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, described the new species recently in the prestigious journal Zootaxa.

Spring Migration Cuba Bird Survey – April 2016. Itinerary included Cuba’s Western Mountains, Zapata Peninsula, Northern Archipelago, Escambray Valley and Havana.