192 On the trail of vanishing birds 



how, so we clambered aboard a dusty and already overcrowded 

 omnibus and made the long, hot journey south. No one stopped or 

 questioned us. 



I was now farther away from flamingos than ever, but there was 

 nothing to do but make the best of it. The foothills of the Sierra 

 Maestra in that region are cleared and planted in sugar cane. We 

 passed several days wandering about the countryside, looking at 

 birds and visiting little settlements in the hills, some of them quite 

 primitive. The revolution and the unrest in the town seemed far 

 away, and these hill people seemed almost wholly unconcerned. 

 At one little place we were entertained by a family who operated 

 a bakery. In a separate building there was a huge ancient brick- 

 and-clay oven, and when we entered they were just pulling out 

 great trays of gingerbread. One of the sons, a good-looking boy 

 of ten or twelve, stacked the loaves into baskets that were slung 

 on either side of a gentle little horse, and climbing onto the beast's 

 rump, he then set off along the winding, hillside trails to sell the 

 bread from village to village. 



I was anxious to get on home. It had been my original plan to 

 cover the bays and cayos along a portion of the north coast, as 

 far as Cayo Romano, but the revolution seemed at that time an 

 uncertain quantity, and I felt it would be wise to postpone any 

 further searches along isolated fringes of the Cuban coast. So some 

 days later, when word reached us that international flights had 

 been resumed, I made my way by various stages to Camagiiey and 

 eventually found space on a flight to Miami. 



It was more than a year later when I returned once more to 

 Cuba. Conditions there were far from tranquil, but persistent 

 rumors had been reaching me of a flamingo nesting place on one 

 of the bays along the north coast the region I had meant to visit 

 the previous season and, like Tartarin, the moment arrived when 

 I had to go. By prior arrangement I was met by Erasmo, a Havana 

 taxi driver who hailed from a village near the coast and who 

 claimed to know exactly where the flamingos nested, a refrain that 

 by now had a familiar and slightly unpleasant ring. Steve Briggs 

 had met and talked with Erasmo entirely by chance, in front of 

 the Hotel Nacional, and Erasmo had insisted that he knew 



