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May was ‘Puerto Rico Month‘ on 10,000 Birds and - hopefully - we managed to provide some quality and interesting content (we certainly tried anyway). I guess we’d probably be fooling ourselves though if we didn’t admit that the most exciting feature of ‘PR Month’ was the offer of a FREE ‘Endemic Dash’ holiday on [...]

Our Puerto Rico Month is almost over (having said that we’ll probably keep it going for a while yet as I’m really enjoying writing about an island I knew virtually nothing about and which turns out be so darn interesting!), and I’m extremely grateful to Mike aka Noflickster, author of the wonderful The Feather and [...]

Yes, we’ve procrastinated long enough, and as part of our month-long celebration of Puerto Rico’s biodiversity it’s now time to give away a superb “endemic bird dash” around Puerto Rico worth about 2500USD courtesy of Kevin Loughlin of Wildside Nature Tours (actually we kind of hoped if we delayed for long enough readers might forget [...]

When we ran our Parrot Month in January, one of my most pleasant surprises was discovering how willing some experts in the ‘parrot-field’ were to provide us with information, allowing us to reproduce their articles, photographs and data etc. Leading conservationists like Jamie Gilardi of the World Parrot Trust and Stewart Metz of the Indonesian [...]

When we starting thinking about Puerto Rico as a possible ‘theme’ on 10,000 Birds we asked ourselves a number of questions: is it an area that might benefit from coverage on a bird blog (there’s not much point in spending a month talking about somewhere well-known that is already all over the internet), are [...]

So far in Puerto Rico Month we’ve looked at some of the island’s wonderful endemic birds (eg the Puerto Rican Tody and Adelaide’s Warbler), its endemic frogs, reviewed Mark Oberle’s wonderful field-guide, the Caribbean’s very own Tai Haku has asked what could fill the gap left by DeBooy’s Rail, and Mike has re-posted three short [...]

The last Puerto Rican endemic species we wrote about was the rather lovely but fierce-looking Puerto Rican Screech-owl Megascops nudipes, and in that account we said that, “Birders on Puerto Rico have a chance of seeing two endemic night birds…” And we were correct, because if you’re a very fortunate birder indeed you might [...]

Isla Verde is OK for casinos and clubs but hardly offers a sufficient survey of Puerto Rico’s amazing avifauna. The birding centerpiece of our brief Puerto Rican trip was a morning excursion to El Yunque Caribbean National Forest. For a country so blessed with avian diversity, Puerto Rico seemed woefully light in the birding tour [...]

Current U.S. Territory and potential 51st state, Puerto Rico boasts 349 bird species, including 17 or so endemics, as well as the second highest alcohol consumption per capita in the world, behind only Russia. Sara and I traveled there in November 2004 for a weekend wedding, but also attempted a whirlwind tour of the northeastern [...]

Birders on Puerto Rico have a chance of seeing two endemic night birds: one, the Puerto Rican Screech-owl Megascops nudipes, is widespread (with another [disputed] subspecies, newtoni, from the Virgin Islands either Critically Endangered or Extinct) and most insomniacs will at least hear its guttural, trilling purr if they try hard enough; the other, the [...]

Whilst the posts in our ‘Puerto Rico Month‘ theme have so far concentrated entirely on the islands’ avifauna, our intention right from the planning stages has always been to cover as much of Puerto Rico’s bio-diversity as possible. The archipelago is home to a huge range of important and threatened animals and plants, and we’re [...]

There are birds that even if you have no idea at all what they look like or where they’re found have names that instantly transport you on a journey into dense forests and far-away places (eg Cherry-throated Tanager or Metallic-winged Sunbird), and there are birds with names that while hinting at something perhaps interesting don’t [...]

How, might readers who think about the hours I’ve spent putting these Puerto Rico posts together (odd how us bloggers ‘talk’ to an imaginary audience that we fondly imagine share in every drop of sweat we exude while putting our blogs online - in the nicest possible way it has to be said that we’re [...]

One of the more intriguing of Puerto Rico’s endemic species (one amongst many actually) is the slightly unhelpfully named Puerto Rican Spindalis Spindalis portoricensis (called Reina Mora de Puerto Rico in Spanish). Even Latin scholars might be hard put to imagine what a Spindalis might look like - the previous name of Stripe-headed Tanager at [...]

Photo left © Kevin Loughin, WildSide Nature Tours

Visitors to Puerto Rico have the opportunity to see two closely-related sharp-billed, beady-eyed cuckoos on their birding holidays: one, the Mangrove Cuckoo Coccyzus minor, is a fair bit easier to see on the island than in coastal southern Florida (as thankless hours spent searching for one while donating [...]

When Jon Curson et al published their beautiful “New World Warblers” (Helm 1994) fifteen years ago they followed an accepted taxonomy that described Adelaide’s Warbler Dendroica adelaidae (or Reinita Mariposera as it’s called in Spanish) as a West Indies endemic superspecies containing three “yellow-throated” warblers found in isolated populations: on Puerto Rico D. a. adelaidae, [...]

Whilst the weekend’s post (Puerto Rico: A quick overview) gave - as the title suggested - an overview of Puerto Rico’s biodiversity (and, yes, it was quick - the post could have been three times as long), we are a bird blog primarily, so it’s definitely time to focus on the archipelago’s birds and to [...]

Officially the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico (Spanish: “Estado Libre Asociado de Puerto Rico” — Associated Free State of Puerto Rico), the main island of Puerto Rico is the smallest by land area and second smallest by population among the four Greater Antilles, which also include the birding hot-spots of Cuba, Hispaniola, and Jamaica. As [...]

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 [...]

Next month we’re turning our focus on to Puerto Rico, with our pertinently named ‘Puerto Rico Month’. Over the course of May we’ll be looking at the amazing bio-diversity of this small Caribbean island, with a particular emphasis on its special birds - and there are many! We’ll also be holding a fantastic free-to-enter competition [...]