David C. Wege/BirdLife Birdwatching is a popular activity for visitors to the Caribbean Zoom In

Caribbean birdwatchers urged to submit their sightings

09-01-2007

Past and present visitors to the Caribbean are being asked to dust off their notebooks and dig out their holiday bird sightings in a bid to increase knowledge and understanding of bird distribution and status in the Caribbean.

The Caribbean islands are renowned for their birds - over 560 different species occur there, 148 of which are found nowhere else on Earth - yet good information on abundance and distribution of these birds is still lacking for many of these species.

Conservationists within the BirdLife Caribbean Program are looking to the birdwatching world to help reverse this trend by submitting their sightings on Caribbean Birds, part of a global internet-based recording facility.

"Birdwatchers record an enormous number of birds but often their records end up ‘lost’, sitting in notebooks, lists or unpublished trip reports" said David Wege, Caribbean Program Manager at BirdLife International. "There are probably millions of records that fit into this category, many of them for countries, like those in the Caribbean, that have high bird diversity but lack proper systems for monitoring their numbers."

"With such a wealth of birds in the Caribbean every bit of information we can retrieve has the potential to make a difference in our conservation efforts" —David Wege, Caribbean Program Manager, BirdLife International

The Caribbean Birds initiative enables users to store and manage their own observations, extract reports and print or download maps. As well as contributing their own observations, visitors to the website can also view other people's records; a potentially important resource for a region that is popular with nature tourists keen on seeing the region’s numerous bird species.

"With such a wealth of birds in the Caribbean every bit of information we can retrieve has the potential to make a difference in our conservation efforts" commented Wege.