Mangroves in Monte Cristi, Dominican Republic.
Mangroves in Monte Cristi, Dominican Republic.
BirdsCaribbean
Map of the Caribbean Islands, featuring some of the over 560 bird species that can be found there. Illustration by Chelsea Connor.
Few places in the world face development pressures as intense as the Caribbean islands. “Every time a new hotel or marina or golf course or airport is built, it’s usually in an area that has wetlands,” says Lisa Sorenson, the executive director of BirdsCaribbean, a nonprofit that for over 30 years that has been working to conserving Caribbean birds and their habitats. Many of those birds – 176 species out of a known 565 – are found nowhere else in the world.
“There have already been so many wetlands lost to development,” Sorenson adds. “It’s so important to save the ones remaining.”
These include places like Sur de Los Palacios, in Cuba, home to the fiddler crab-loving Wilson’s Plovers in its nonbreeding months. Or Monte Cristi in northwestern Dominican Republic, beneath the El Morro headland, where extensive mangrove swamps hold herons, egrets, spoonbills, and ibis, and saline lagoons are chock full of American Flamingos. In the fall, Greater and Lesser Yellowlegs and Semipalmated Sandpipers forage in its salt pans. Or Ashton Lagoon, in Saint Vincent, the Grenadines’ largest natural bay and mangrove ecosystem, which BirdsCaribbean helped local NGO SusGren to restore after a failed development project threatened to destroy it. Or the Cargill Salt Ponds of Bonaire, designated a Western Hemisphere Shorebird Reserve Network (WHSRN) site of Regional Importance in 2018. BirdsCaribbean and local partners had been monitoring the site since 2015 and found that more than 20,000 shorebirds visit these wetlands annually, including a significant number of the threatened Red Knot.
The victories are few and far between, Sorenson says, and always hard-won. Several years ago, for instance, BirdsCaribbean and partners like Jamaica Environment Trust were able to convince Jamaica’s prime minister to stop a transshipment port from being built by a Chinese logistics company at Goat Islands, an ecologically sensitive area of mangroves and coral reefs and part of the largest nature reserve on the island. This year, BirdsCaribbean has been fighting three different Grenadian developments proposed for three different wetlands, says Sorenson. Their local partners have sued the government for not following proper environmental practices. Areas which are protected on paper can still end up in the hands of developers.
The Caribbean Islands have important and unique habitats, including mangroves, salt flats, and forests, and are home to many endemic and migratory birds. Illustration by Chelsea Connor.
BirdsCaribbean, through its network of local partners, also seeks to raise awareness of how longtime practices, from the caged bird trade to hunting, spell disaster for birds. In Cuba, a recent study by BirdsCaribbean showed that during the Covid-19 pandemic over two dozen Facebook groups popped up selling Cuban birds, thousands of them trapped each month – resident birds as well as migratory ones like Painted Buntings, Rose-breasted and Blue Grosbeaks, and warblers. In several French-owned islands, shorebird hunting remains a long-standing and legal practice. Thousands are believed to be shot annually for recreation; this tradition came into public attention a decade ago after two tracked Whimbrels, first netted in Virginia, survived tropical storms in the Atlantic only to be shot and killed on the island of Guadeloupe. It was reported at the time that Barbados alone was responsible for the death of around 30,000 shorebirds each year, the likes of Greater and Lesser Yellowlegs, Pectoral Sandpiper, Stilt Sandpiper, and American Golden-Plover.
Lesser Yellowlegs, photo by Mick Thompson, licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0.
In fact, the last verified record of an Eskimo Curlew was one shot in Barbados in 1963. In recent years, however, BirdsCaribbean has been working with hunters to turn their shooting swamps into reserves managed for shorebirds.
“I made two trips to Barbados last year and met with hunter groups and the fact that some of them are willing to change is pretty incredible,” Sorenson says. “Many of these hunters are older and this is something they’ve done their whole life. But they’re now saying, ‘I don’t know why I killed so many birds.’ It’s like they’re having a change of heart and are now interested in conservation, which is wonderful.”
Sorenson, who is an adjunct professor at Boston University, began studying waterfowl and wetland ecology in the Caribbean in the late 1980s and wondered if she would ever witness such a profound cultural shift. She arrived as a duck specialist. As an undergraduate at the University of California, Davis she took a class on waterfowl ecology that prompted interest in the social behavior of ducks. She attended the University of Minnesota for graduate school, studying with a professor who had received a grant to study White-cheeked Pintails in the Bahamas. Every winter she’d escape the Minneapolis cold to study these elegant ducks with their red and black bills and big white cheeks, spending thousands of hours in a blind watching their behavior. Once she finished her research and earned her PhD, she attended her first BirdsCaribbean meeting in 1996.
Back then BirdsCaribbean was known as the Society for Caribbean Ornithology, and it was a small group that met once a year and published a journal but was not involved in conservation projects. Sorenson attended a workshop on the significant decline in the West Indian Whistling-Duck, one of the rarest ducks in the Americas, a bird with beautiful black eyes and long wings and its eponymous call, and it ultimately fell to her to write a grant to seek funding for a wetlands conservation project. With that money, they wrote a 267-page book for educators to use in their curriculum to teach students about wetlands, their functions, their values, and the measures to protect them.
West Indian Whistling-Duck at Bayahibe, Dominican Republic, photo by ZankaM, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.
Alabama is one of America’s most biodiverse states, with landscapes ranging from its Gulf Coast migratory pit-stop to plateau country in the north, from coastal plain to mountains, and in between the rolling plains of the Black Belt region. Except Ansel Payne, the executive director of the 75-year-old Alabama Audubon, believes relatively few birders and nature lovers are aware of that – a realization he himself came to only fairly recently.
“I think the truth is, if people were only thinking about birds and nature, this would be on every birder’s wishlist,” he says. “There are just too many good things to see in one spot. Where else can you see Cerulean Warblers and then drive a couple hours and see Painted Buntings and Scissor-tailed Flycatchers?”
He pauses. “Nowhere!”
Payne moved to Alabama in the summer of 2015 after his wife received a professorship at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa. He grew up in West Virginia, an hour north of Charleston, attended college in New England, and continued his studies at the Museum of Natural History in New York City. A year into his Alabama residence, he got a job as a naturalist for Alabama Audubon, and months later became its outreach director. He’s now a champion for the state and its birds.
Dave Ewert doing field research in The Bahamas, where Kirtland's Warblers winter.
Photo courtesy of ABC.
“I was hesitant to move here, frankly. Here’s the thing, though,” he says. “People have to overcome what they think Alabama means to them. That’s our history. I wish people would recognize the complexity of the state, and how so many of the terrible stories of American history happened here, but also the heroic response to those terrible stories also happened here.”
Birmingham Audubon Society, as the organization was known when Payne joined (he led its name change last year), had been run by dedicated volunteers until 2013, but with significant support from the estate of a local family, it has grown its staff and its ambitions. With federal and state money, too, it opened a field office on the Gulf Coast to manage the protection and monitoring of beach-nesting birds there. Payne became executive director in the spring of 2018; their staff is now up to 10 employees, with several coastal biologists plus a conservation director.
“I think we’re developing a reputation as a national leader among Audubon organizations,” he says.
LaFond saw the need to do something. In 2010, while volunteering on a local winter raptor survey, she learned about a large parcel of farmland that was going to be sold and subdivided into tract housing, fragmenting the unbroken habitat that grassland birds need to survive. A few years earlier, New York State’s Department of Environmental Conservation (NYSDEC) had purchased almost 300 acres of critical habitat within the IBA in Fort Edward, and they were considering protecting another 180 acres, but town officials opposed further acquisitions. The state did not pay taxes on the land – although it was open to it, since it did so already in the Catskills and Adirondacks – and the town worried about that financial loss.
LaFond realized that a non-profit land trust was needed. She founded the Friends of the IBA, which would later be renamed Grassland Bird Trust, and in 2011 the organization held its first event, a Winter Raptor Fest. More than a thousand people showed up at a large dairy barn in the middle of snow-covered grasslands. Buoyed by this support, LaFond sprung into action.
Part of that reputation comes from their efforts to make Alabama Audubon more representative of the state. For decades, Payne says, the organization would run field trips to the Black Belt Prairie Region, or Black Belt, a crescent-shaped, biologically and geologically distinct area that extends from southwestern Tennessee through east-central Mississippi and then across central Alabama. The Black Belt owes its name to its rich soil but also the agricultural slave economy that grew there because of this fertile land. Later, Civil Rights struggles played out in towns like Selma and Greensboro. Today, it remains extremely poor.
“This region is characterized by weathered rolling plains of relatively low relief developed on chalk and marl of the Cretaceous Selma chalk,” according to one ecological assessment. “Historically, the natural communities of the Black Belt consisted of a mosaic of various hardwood and mixed hardwood/pine forests, chalk outcrops and prairies.”
Kirtland's Warbler. Photo by Joel Trick, USFWS.
To learn more about the organization and its efforts, as well as to contribute directly, please visit the Grassland Bird Trust website or click the donateb
Still going strong over 20 years later, this program has trained over 3,800 educators in 21 countries/islands, and the West Indian Whistling-Duck, which lives in fresh and salty wetlands of the northern West Indies, is the flagship for BirdsCaribbean’s conservation work. Since then, they’ve developed the Caribbean Waterbird Census Program to survey the more than 185 species of waterbirds – seabirds, wading birds, marsh birds, waterfowl, and shorebirds – which can be found in the Caribbean, including endemic and globally threatened species and many migrants.
Sorenson began working full-time in the Caribbean in 2002. Through grants and working groups, BirdsCaribbean has been able to make a difference where little conservation work was being done. Much of this comes through its partnerships with NGOs, governmental agencies, and universities all over the islands. BirdsCaribbean began hosting a Caribbean Endemic Bird Festival to raise awareness and appreciation of the region’s unique bird life, and also created a Caribbean Birding Trail, which has grown to over 130 sites in 24 countries. They’ve offered training to would-be birding guides and raised money to help sponsor some to start their business. Tourism is the main economic driver of the Caribbean, and BirdsCaribbean wants visitors to experience the rich bird life and natural areas of the region while ensuring sustainable livelihoods for local tour guides.
Antillean Crested Hummingbird, photo by Don Faulkner. licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.
“We’re trying to highlight through the Caribbean Birding Trail that the birds are fabulous, yes, but it’s more than that,” Sorenson says. “It’s the unique cultures, the food and music and other wildlife you see that are part of the natural heritage that we’re trying to protect. And birds are our hook or our springboard because they’re easy to see. They’re all around us, they’re colorful and they’re interesting.”
Map of the Caribbean Islands, featuring some of the over 560 bird species that can be found there. Illustration by Chelsea Connor.
Few places in the world face development pressures as intense as the Caribbean islands. “Every time a new hotel or marina or golf course or airport is built, it’s usually in an area that has wetlands,” says Lisa Sorenson, the executive director of BirdsCaribbean, a nonprofit that for over 30 years that has been working to conserving Caribbean birds and their habitats. Many of those birds – 176 species out of a known 565 – are found nowhere else in the world.
“There have already been so many wetlands lost to development,” Sorenson adds. “It’s so important to save the ones remaining.”
These include places like Sur de Los Palacios, in Cuba, home to the fiddler crab-loving Wilson’s Plovers in its nonbreeding months. Or Monte Cristi in northwestern Dominican Republic, beneath the El Morro headland, where extensive mangrove swamps hold herons, egrets, spoonbills, and ibis, and saline lagoons are chock full of American Flamingos. In the fall, Greater and Lesser Yellowlegs and Semipalmated Sandpipers forage in its salt pans. Or Ashton Lagoon, in Saint Vincent, the Grenadines’ largest natural bay and mangrove ecosystem, which BirdsCaribbean helped local NGO SusGren to restore after a failed development project threatened to destroy it. Or the Cargill Salt Ponds of Bonaire, designated a Western Hemisphere Shorebird Reserve Network (WHSRN) site of Regional Importance in 2018. BirdsCaribbean and local partners had been monitoring the site since 2015 and found that more than 20,000 shorebirds visit these wetlands annually, including a significant number of the threatened Red Knot.
The Caribbean Islands have important and unique habitats, including mangroves, salt flats, and forests, and are home to many endemic and migratory birds. Illustration by Chelsea Connor.
The victories are few and far between, Sorenson says, and always hard-won. Several years ago, for instance, BirdsCaribbean and partners like Jamaica Environment Trust were able to convince Jamaica’s prime minister to stop a transshipment port from being built by a Chinese logistics company at Goat Islands, an ecologically sensitive area of mangroves and coral reefs and part of the largest nature reserve on the island. This year, BirdsCaribbean has been fighting three different Grenadian developments proposed for three different wetlands, says Sorenson. Their local partners have sued the government for not following proper environmental practices. Areas which are protected on paper can still end up in the hands of developers.
BirdsCaribbean, through its network of local partners, also seeks to raise awareness of how longtime practices, from the caged bird trade to hunting, spell disaster for birds. In Cuba, a recent study by BirdsCaribbean showed that during the Covid-19 pandemic over two dozen Facebook groups popped up selling Cuban birds, thousands of them trapped each month – resident birds as well as migratory ones like Painted Buntings, Rose-breasted and Blue Grosbeaks, and warblers. In several French-owned islands, shorebird hunting remains a long-standing and legal practice. Thousands are believed to be shot annually for recreation; this tradition came into public attention a decade ago after two tracked Whimbrels, first netted in Virginia, survived tropical storms in the Atlantic only to be shot and killed on the island of Guadeloupe. It was reported at the time that Barbados alone was responsible for the death of around 30,000 shorebirds each year, the likes of Greater and Lesser Yellowlegs, Pectoral Sandpiper, Stilt Sandpiper, and American Golden-Plover.
Kirtland's Warbler. Photo by Joel Trick, USFWS.
Lesser Yellowlegs, photo by Mick Thompson, licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0.
In fact, the last verified record of an Eskimo Curlew was one shot in Barbados in 1963. In recent years, however, BirdsCaribbean has been working with hunters to turn their shooting swamps into reserves managed for shorebirds.
“I made two trips to Barbados last year and met with hunter groups and the fact that some of them are willing to change is pretty incredible,” Sorenson says. “Many of these hunters are older and this is something they’ve done their whole life. But they’re now saying, ‘I don’t know why I killed so many birds.’ It’s like they’re having a change of heart and are now interested in conservation, which is wonderful.”
Sorenson, who is an adjunct professor at Boston University, began studying waterfowl and wetland ecology in the Caribbean in the late1980s and wondered if she would ever witness such a profound cultural shift. She arrived as a duck specialist. As an undergraduate at the University of California, Davis she took a class on waterfowl ecology that prompted interest in the social behavior of ducks. She attended the University of Minnesota for graduate school, studying with a professor who had received a grant to study White-cheeked Pintails in the Bahamas. Every winter she’d escape the Minneapolis cold to study these elegant ducks with their red and black bills and big white cheeks, spending thousands of hours in a blind watching their behavior. Once she finished her research and earned her PhD, she attended her first BirdsCaribbean meeting in 1996.
West Indian Whistling-Duck at Bayahibe, Dominican Republic, photo by ZankaM, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.
Back then BirdsCaribbean was known as the Society for Caribbean Ornithology, and it was a small group that met once a year and published a journal but was not involved in conservation projects. Sorenson attended a workshop on the significant decline in the West Indian Whistling-Duck, one of the rarest ducks in the Americas, a bird with beautiful black eyes and long wings and its eponymous call, and it ultimately fell to her to write a grant to seek funding for a wetlands conservation project. With that money, they wrote a 267-page book for educators to use in their curriculum to teach students about wetlands, their functions, their values, and the measures to protect them.
Still going strong over 20 years later, this program has trained over 3,800 educators in 21 countries/islands, and the West Indian Whistling-Duck, which lives in fresh and salty wetlands of the northern West Indies, is the flagship for BirdsCaribbean’s conservation work. Since then, they’ve developed the Caribbean Waterbirds Census Program to survey the more than 185 species of waterbirds – seabirds, wading birds, marsh birds, waterfowl, and shorebirds – which can be found in the Caribbean, including endemic and globally threatened species and many migrants.
Antillean Crested Hummingbird, photo by Don Faulkner. licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.
Sorenson began working full-time in the Caribbean in 2002. Through grants and working groups, BirdsCaribbean has been able to make a difference where little conservation work was being done. Much of this comes through its partnerships with NGOs, governmental agencies, and universities all over the islands. BirdsCaribbean began hosting a Caribbean Endemic Bird Festival to raise awareness and appreciation of the region’s unique bird life, and also created a Caribbean Birding Trail, which has grown to over 130 sites in 24 countries. They’ve offered training to would-be birding guides and raised money to help sponsor some to start their business. Tourism is the main economic driver of the Caribbean, and BirdsCaribbean wants visitors to experience the rich bird life and natural areas of the region while ensuring sustainable livelihoods for local tour guides.
“We’re trying to highlight through the Caribbean Birding Trail that the birds are fabulous, yes, but it’s more than that,” Sorenson says. “It’s the unique cultures, the food and music and other wildlife you see that are part of the natural heritage that we’re trying to protect. And birds are our hook or our springboard because they’re easy to see. They’re all around us, they’re colorful and they’re interesting.”
To learn more about BirdsCaribbean, as well as to contribute directly, please visit its website or click the DONATE button below.
BirdsCaribbean is a nonprofit organization committed to studying and conserving birds and their habitats throughout the Caribbean, and engaging people of all ages in learning about birds and the importance of protecting them.