Counting orbit points in coverings of negatively curved manifolds and Hausdorff dimension of cusp excursions

We study the growth of fibers of coverings of pinched negatively curved Riemannian manifolds. The applications include counting estimates for horoballs in the universal cover of geometrically finite manifolds with cusps. Continuing our work on diophantine approximation in negatively curved manifolds started in an earlier paper (Math. Zeit. 241 (2002), 181-226), we prove a Khintchine-Sullivan-type theorem giving the Hausdorff measure of the geodesic lines starting from a cusp that are well approximated by the cusp returning ones.