Because of the dry weather we've been struggling to find good habitat locally with butterflies flying other than around the hotel so we decided to go back to Cienfuegos Botanic Garden again today. Soon after we arrived we saw a Gundlach's Hawk briefly circling over the trees above us. This rare endemic, though widely distributed, is far from easy to see and this is only our second sighting. Another good find was a Barn Owl sitting low down in one of the large trees.
Barn Owl 18 Mar 2017 Cienfuegos Botanic Garden © Tim Norriss
The Scaly-breasted Munias were again in evidence feeding in the bamboos with Yellow-faced Grass-quits.
But other than that we saw little new today in the Botanic Garden and our search for the two Hairstreaks drew a blank. A fly over White-collared Swift late in the day near the hotel was a good sighting and only the second time I have seen one in Cuba. They are a rare permanent resident in the mountains of the island though they are also widespread in Central and South America. We saw them, again only briefly, in the Sierra Maestra mountains in the south-east in March 2015.
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