BirdsCaribbean is excited to announce the release of The Complete Checklist of the Birds of the West Indies! Jeff Gerbracht and Anthony Levesque, in consultation with experts across the region, have compiled important details for all of the bird species observed in the West Indies, including abundance, seasonality, breeding status, endemism and establishment.

The goal of The Checklist is to provide consistent, accurate and up-to-date information for use by researchers, conservationists and policy makers.  The taxonomy of species follows the current version of the Clements Checklist of birds of the world. The most recent version of the checklist can be downloaded here and consists of two different documents:

1. 1. The first document includes the introduction and explanatory text, definitions used and a summarized version of the species list as a pdf.
   2. The second is a more detailed checklist in an excel spreadsheet.  Providing the checklist as a spreadsheet enables you to easily sort and summarize the checklist by the columns you are most interested in, such as ‘Endemic Region’ or ‘Abundance’.

The Caribbean is home to over 700 species of bird, including 171 species that are endemic to the region and found nowhere else in the world. You can use the checklist to explore the many birds that are endemic to the Greater Antilles (109 species), to learn about the migrants and visitors that rely on the Caribbean habitats (334 species), or to check just how rare it is to see a Common Ringed Plover (very rare).

The excel spreadsheet is an invaluable resource, allowing you to manipulate the checklist and extract important information for your research, grant proposals, or personal interest. For example, how many endangered bird species are there in the Dominican Republic? Using the sort functions in excel, we see that there are six, with five of them endemic to Hispaniola: Ridgway’s Hawk, White-fronted Quail-Dove, Bay-breasted Cuckoo, La Selle Thrush, Hispaniolan Crossbill, and Black-capped Petrel.

At the BirdsCaribbean 21^st International Conference in Guadeloupe, Jeff and Anthony facilitated a West Indies Checklist Working Group meeting. During the meeting we announced the release of the first checklist and quickly reviewed the format and types of information contained in the checklist.  There was great interest in this initial release and we had several lively discussions about the future direction and expansion of the checklist. Creating country and island versions of the checklist is our next step in expanding the checklist coverage and a number of representatives agreed to begin work on country lists. Additionally, there was strong interest in expanding the checklist to cover subspecies (the current version of the checklist covers birds at the species level only). Everyone agreed that this checklist fills a much-needed void in open access to information on birds in the region and the enthusiasm around moving it forward was exciting and bodes well for the future of this working group.

When you are birding, remember to record all your observations in eBird Caribbean as those records will be used to keep this checklist up to date.