While Lynn was having an early morning swim I did a bit of birding and found an Antillean Nighthawk roosting on the flat roof in front of our room. I had to stand on a chair to get reasonable views of it and it was too distant to get any reasonable pictures. A bit later however we noticed a man out on the flat roof doing some maintenance so seeing an opportunity we went and spoke to him and asked him if I could get some pictures. Previously the access door had been locked so this was very fortuitous. I'm sure I could have got a lot closer but I didn't want to disturb it. This was the first time I had seen one settled like this.
On previous visits here we have always seen ospreys and a variety of water birds on the lake and Limpkins on the margins. On this occasion however the only thing we saw was a Double-crested Cormorant as we took our last trip across the lake in the boat.
So we set off for Topes stopping on the way at the viewpoint that looked out over the forest towards one of the arms of Lake Hanabanilla below. Further on there was evidence of how much damage had been done by the rain last month. Topes had been cut off completely for several days and although temporary repairs had been made to the road it will be some time before it is completely made good. We were later told that there had been 300mm of rain in one day and 500mm over three days. This had caused a surging torrent that was 20ft deep lower down and had caused devastation. Whilst there can be quite a bit of rain here in the wet season this amount in such a short period of time was unprecedented.
There had been an accident on the road two days previously where a truck carrying local workers had been traveling too fast and had come off the road and overturned. Amazingly nobody was badly injured. The standard of driving in Cuba is generally very good but the truck drivers here didn't seem to have learnt the lesson and were still hurtling along far too fast.
We made a stop for butterflies a bit further up and were very glad that we did. A pristine male Silver Emperor Doxocopa laure was on the ground taking moisture and salts and was remarkably tame. It was interesting to see that the purple colour was only visible at certain angles and that some of the time it looked plain brown instead. We also saw Polydamas Swallowtail Battus polydamas and Many-banded Daggerwing Marpesia chiron.
We passed a snake stretched out on the road and got Raul to pull over. Doug was swiftly out and grabbed it before it had time to make off. It was a Cuban Racer Cubophis cantherigerus which we see far more commonly than any other snake. It wouldn't live long lying in the road so we made sure it moved off quickly into the vegetation at the side.