As the title of this post clearly states, ‘May is Puerto Rico Month on 10,000 Birds’. Which means what exactly?

Regular readers will perhaps remember that in January’s ‘Parrot Month’ we trialled a new idea on the blog - taking a subject we’re particularly interested in and devoting a whole month to posting as many articles and as much information as we can get our hands on in the form of a ‘theme’. Parrot Month went extremely well considering it was our first attempt at blanket coverage (no-one complained anyway), and we ended up with just under forty posts that spread into February and March (and we’re still tagging related posts to make finding them easier).

Mike and Corey followed ‘Parrot Month’ with ‘MesoAmerican Month’ in March, reporting mostly on two fabulous trips they made to Guatemala and Honduras, and totting up a similar number of posts (in fact Corey is still writing about his visit to Honduras, so ‘Month’ is a rather flexible concept on 10,000 Birds, but - again - no-one’s complained so far so we’ll just continue ploughing our own furrow as it were…).

Now, we’re turning our attention on to Puerto Rico.

Why? During Parrot Month (when we featured the Critically Endangered Puerto Rican Parrot) we were contacted by Hector Claudio, a passionate birder on Puerto Rico, asking us what else we knew about Puerto Rico’s birds. Not very much as it turned out (and in my case very little indeed). Despite it being an “unincorporated territory” of the United States, and very easy to get to from North America, of the three of us here at 10,000 Birds only Mike had been, and none of us could name all the island’s endemic bird species. If we couldn’t, we (hopefully) reasonably assumed, then many of our readers wouldn’t be able to either. And we really ought to know our neighbours. Plans for ‘Puerto Rico Month’ were laid…

With a land area of just 3,425 square miles (8,870 km²) Puerto Rico is the smallest island in the Caribbean’s Greater Antilles but has a remarkable EIGHTEEN (seventeen depending on which authority you use - I prefer the one which gives me more!) endemic bird species of which two - the aforementioned Puerto Rican Parrot and the Puerto Rican Nightjar - are Critically Endangered, one - Yellow-shouldered Blackbird - is Endangered, and another - the Elfin-woods Warbler with an estimated population below 2000 individuals - is Vulnerable. A whole subset of scarce or localised Antillean species and subspecies also occur on the island, and many interesting West Indies species are also relatively easy to see. The island is also home to at least thirty endemic reptiles or amphibia (many of which are Endangered), a host of endemic plants, and what has to be the most amazing bioluminescent bay in the world (at Mosquito Bay in Vieques Island) …

Puerto Rico is evidently a hugely important area for biodiversity then, packed full of exciting wildlife and natural history, and well worth featuring on the blog (of course).

Before we dive headlong into Puerto Rico itself, though, it’s worth setting this wealth of biodiversity in to a geographical context. The island is, of course, in the Caribbean, and looking at the region’s biodiversity as a whole is remarkably revealing (see eg Caribbean IBAs on the BirdLife international website).

 

Endemism in the Caribbean
	Total	Endemics	Endemism
Bird species	564	148	26%
Mammal species	164	49	30%
Reptile species	497	418	84%
Amphibian species	189	164	87%
Plant species	12,000	7,000	58%

Species endemism is exceptionally high within the Caribbean (it’s one of the top six of the 25 global biodiversity conservation “hotspots”), yet the land area of the insular Caribbean (which for the purpose of this post includes Bermuda and all islands of the Bahamas, Greater Antilles (Cuba, Hispaniola, Jamaica and Puerto Rico), Virgin Islands, Cayman Islands, Lesser Antilles, Netherlands Antilles, and Trinidad and Tobago) is just c. 280,000 km².

Relatively small it may be, but BirdLife International and its Partners (and a range of other organisations) have identified 283 internationally significant Important Bird Areas (IBAs) in the Caribbean - 43% of which are wholly outside formally protected areas (and, quoting David Wege, BirdLife’s Caribbean Programme Manager, “Not only do almost half the sites lack any kind of protection, but a number of areas described as parks have no proper infrastructure or staff, and many lack management plans”).

Of the 770 bird species occurring in the Caribbean 148 are endemic, with 105 confined to single islands (as an aside the world’s smallest bird, the Near Threatened Bee Hummingbird Mellisuga helenae, is found within the region on Cuba).

More than 120 bird species migrate from their breeding grounds in North America to winter in the Caribbean, and it’s the most important (and sometimes the exclusive) wintering ground for a number of North American dendroica including the declining Cape May Warbler, Northern Parula, Black-throated Blue Warbler, Palm Warbler and Prairie Warbler. The Caribbean is also the only wintering ground for globally threatened migrants such as Kirtland’s Warbler, Bicknell’s Thrush and (the possibly extinct?) Bachman’s Warbler.

With increasing pressure from an expanding human population (c. 35 million, growing at >2.5% per year), islands throughout the region face the continuing erosion of pristine habitats, the problem of invasive alien species, hunting, illegal trade and more. As a result, only around 10% of the region’s original habitat remains putting the region’s biodiversity at serious risk of multiple species extinctions in the short to medium term through the destruction of individual, relatively small patches of important biodiversity habitat that remain.

The Caribbean is evidently a hugely important area with particular interest to North American birders then.

Much as we would like to wrap the whole of the Caribbean in the warm embrace of 10,000 Birds, we really don’t have the a) time, b) contacts, or c) data to hand to do so. However we do (at least we do now thanks in the main to Hector Claudio) have the time, contacts, and data to cover a fair chunk of Puerto Rico’s biodiversity, and that’s as good a starting-point for delving into the Caribbean as I could have hoped for…

So what are we planning to cover during ‘Puerto Rico Month’? Well, as you might expect from a blog run by three over-committed part-timers like ourselves we’re not 100% sure right now, but I can tell you that we’ll looking at as many of the island’s eighteen endemic birds as we can, we have some superb, mostly unpublished photos of the island’s birds (like Alberto López-Torres’s gorgeous endemic Puerto Rican Tody Todus mexicanus, above) and scenery to post, we have interviews planned, book reviews on the way, we’ll be looking at important conservation NGOs like the BirdLife International Partner ‘Sociedad Ornitológica Puertorriqueña, Inc.‘ (SOPI) and (hopefully) the Conservation Trust of Puerto Rico, AND we’ll be GIVING AWAY a tour to Puerto Rico courtesy of WildSide Nature Tours! (Will we just be posting about Puerto Rico during May I hear one or two voices asking? Frankly I ought to ignore such ungrateful people, but - no - we’ll be keeping up the usual flow of posts covering whatever takes our fancy as we go along so stay with us, eh…)

Tomorrow we’ll be posting an overview of Puerto Rico and it’s full-steam ahead from then on. I hope we will welcome as many of you along for the ride as possible…

If you live in Puerto Rico or have visited PR and would like to contribute photos or a guest post (return traffic to your blog/website should be good, folks) then please mail charlie10000birds AT gmail DOT com

Like to see what else we’ve posted for ‘Puerto Rico Month’? Just click http://10000birds.com/tag/puerto-rico-month

How would you and a partner/friend like to win a 5 day ‘Endemic Dash’ around Puerto Rico with Kevin Loughlin’s WildSide Nature Tours?

You would? Read on…

Kevin (whose photographs of Puerto Rican Woodpecker and Green-throated Carib grace this post) has been organising trips to the Caribbean for many years and is generously offering two places on an Endemic Dash, one of his popular short trips around Puerto Rico on which participants will be taken to as many of the island’s endemics as possible.

The Tour starts in San Juan so you’ll need to get there (flights are frequent and cheap from many major US cities) but all guiding fees, accommodations, ground transportation, and meals from dinner on day of arrival through breakfast on day of departure are included!

That would normally cost two people around 2500USD - enter and win and it’ll cost you just your passport fees, airport taxes, alcoholic beverages, laundry, phone calls or anything else of a purely personal nature! Which - if you go easy on the celebratory beers, wear the same socks for a few days, and keep short the gloating phone calls to your jealous mates back home - really won’t amount to very much at all…

We’ll be posting more info about this fantastic competition during Puerto Rico Month - yes, okay, not posting the questions now is our way of making sure you come back to visit us, but why would you want to miss some truly exceptional photographs of Puerto Rico’s endemics and some of the most up-to-date info on Puerto Rico’s biodiversity on the net anyway?