Landbird Monitoring and Conservation in the Caribbean – We Need your Help!

Their entire population of Prairie Warblers spends the winter either in the Caribbean or Florida, making this a very important region for the species. During the winter Prairie Warblers like to live in coastal dry forests, mangroves, woodlands, orchards, and coffee farms; they may even show up in your garden!

BirdsCaribbean’s Bird Monitoring Group Working Group is developing an exciting new regional project to build capacity for more landbird monitoring in the Caribbean. It is essential to increase our knowledge about the status, trends, and habitat use of landbird populations as many species continue to decline. This includes our resident and endemic birds, as well as over 100 migratory species, many of them of conservation concern.

We plan to focus on developing a regional landbird monitoring program (modeled after our successful Caribbean Waterbird Census program). This will include training and resources to carry out:

Standardized Surveys – with different levels of monitoring available, depending on the questions and capacity of local partners,
Bird Banding – assisting partners ready for this step to establish banding stations to answer more detailed questions about movement patterns, habitat use and quality, abundance, survival, etc., and
Motus Tracking – expanding the network of Motus towers in the Caribbean to monitor migrant and resident birds. (the Motus Wildlife Tracking System is an exciting collaborative research network that uses coordinated automated radio telemetry arrays to study movements of small animals – learn more here)

Each of the three areas of monitoring have their strengths and weaknesses and are suited to answering different types of questions about our bird populations. To ensure that we are meeting the needs of local researchers, managers, and communities, we would like to gather information from those who are currently monitoring and/or banding landbirds in the Caribbean, that have done so in the past, or are interested in doing so in the future.

You can help us plan our work by letting us know who you are, what you do, where your activities take place, and how the Bird Monitoring Working group can help you. Just fill out our survey here:

English version: http://bit.ly/LandbirdSurveyEnglish
Spanish version: http://bit.ly/LandbirdSurveySpanish
French version: coming soon!

Your input will help us to design our project with everyone’s background, expertise, and research needs incorporated into the project.The success of this project will depend on the involvement of our many partners across the region, including wildlife professionals, scientists, educators, students, and volunteers/ citizen scientists.

Thank you in advance for your time and help!!!

Note: We recognize that most landbird work will likely be affected by the Covid-19 pandemic, and we understand that your activities this year will be very different from any other year: when filling out the survey, just let us know what you would have done in a ‘normal’ year. Most importantly, we hope that everyone is safe.

Why Landbirds?

The beautiful White-crown Pigeon is an important bird in the Caribbean. It eats fruits of many hardwood trees and helps to regenerate forests by spreading seeds. (photo by Erika Gates)

Landbirds face many threats, including destruction and degradation of their habitats from human causes, such as inappropriate development, deforestation for agriculture, pollution, and invasive species. Severe hurricanes, droughts, and forest fires are also increasing, likely due to climate change. It is vital that we work together to monitor our landbird species so that we can identify the highest priority sites for conservation, restore habitats, and assess the impacts from threats and effectiveness of our conservation actions.

About the Bird Monitoring Working Group

The BirdsCaribbean Bird Monitoring Working Group is a committee that works to promote and support monitoring efforts throughout the Caribbean. The long-term vision of the group is to enable Caribbean stakeholders to build high-quality bird monitoring and training programs that have regional relevance and significance because of shared species and habitats. Within this context, the goals of the Working Group are to:

Foster inter-island cooperation and collaboration in the regional monitoring of shared species of birds (including neotropical migrants) and their associated habitats;
Work to significantly increase the number of skilled field biologists living in the region;
Build regional capacity to carry out standardized monitoring and training programs, including bird banding.

You can find more information on the objectives, history, and activities of the Bird Monitoring Working Group here.

Any questions about the survey, please contact Maya Wilson or Lisa Sorenson.

For more information on Caribbean birds visit:

Complete Checklist of the Birds of the West Indies

Endemic Bird of the Day – natural history information, photos, videos, puzzles, activities, and more on 50 of our 171 Caribbean endemics

Migratory Bird of the Day – natural history information, photos, videos, puzzles, activities, and more on than 35 migratory species in the Caribbean.