In hundred-degree heat (forty degrees Celsius) we slogged through a brutal expanse of swamp on a day we'd remember as hell. Attacked by relentless mosquitoes, we wrenched our boots from the mud, step by step. A horizon of pink pulled us forward until our quarry came clearly into view: some 70,000 nesting Caribbean flamingos and countless chicks, the largest colony of these magnificent birds in the Western Hemisphere. I sat on an abandoned nest and readied my gear. Nearby, on a conical mound of mud, a flamingo bent toward its chick to offer a broth of fats and proteins. Undisturbed by my camera, the pair carried on, allowing me to capture the intimate touch of two beaks poised with grace and purpose.
That moment redeemed the day for me and for my friend Juan Soy, who called our visit to the breeding ground spectacular. A biologist at the University of Havana, Soy works with Cuba's flora and fauna division to help oversee 48 of the country's 263 protected natural areas, which cover nearly 22 percent of Cuba's territory. The critical flamingo nesting grounds lie within Humedal Río Máximo-Cagüey, which recently became one of six places in Cuba added to the Ramsar Convention's list of Wetlands of International Importance. The site's daunting inaccessibility may be its salvation. The same could be said of Cuba's vast-and largely unknown-natural riches.
Before this trip, Cuba for me meant Castro and cigars, alluring beaches and intoxicating Afro-Cuban rhythms. I now know it as a place of unimagined biodiversity. With help from Cuba's Ministry of Science, Technology, and the Environment, I gained unprecedented access to some of the most pristine island wilderness in the world. Traveling thousands of zigzagging miles over five months, I photographed some rarely documented wildlife behaviors and came to view Cuba as another Galápagos, preserved by its lack of development and by the will of a people committed to conservation.
Stretching for 750 miles (1,200 kilometers), Cuba embraces the greatest diversity of landscapes and life in the West Indies. These habitats arose from soils born of various kinds of rocks cobbled together as the Caribbean plate smashed against the North American plate, creating a submarine ridge that eventually gave rise to the Greater Antilles. It's a long, narrow land of extremes-and I experienced my share of them.
In winding mogote caves I held the crumbling bones of extinct mammals, long ago done in by human hunting, disease, and predation. I watched one of the world's tiniest frogs scrambling through the leaf litter of a riverine forest. I joined a fruitless two-week search for the nocturnal solenodon, an insect-eating mammal hunted to near extinction by feral dogs and cats. Dangling from a rope 150 feet (45 meters) off the ground, I photographed an endemic ceibón tree growing straight out from the face of a cliff.
And then, of course, there were the swamps. At 1.5 million acres (15,000 hectares) the Ciénaga de Zapata Biosphere Reserve is Cuba's largest protected area, designated as a Wetland of International Importance, mainly for aquatic birds. But I had come for the crocs. One remote and still unprotected corner of the Zapata swamp is home to more than 3,000 Cuban crocodiles, the largest remaining population of this endangered-and fierce-species.
