Bird Checklist of the West Indies

Facilitated by Jeff Gerbracht* and Anthony Levesque**. *Cornell Lab of Ornithology/ BirdsCaribbean, **AMAZONA/BirdsCaribbean. Emails: jag73@cornell.edu, anthony.levesque@wanadoo.fr

Purpose: To engage BirdsCaribbean members in a final review of the checklist of the Birds of the West Indies/Caribbean. Put in place processes for annual updates to the checklist. The participants in the workshop will also begin the creation of country-based checklists based on the West Indies checklist.

Background: At the 2013 BirdsCaribbean meeting in Grenada we began an effort to create a comprehensive checklist of birds for the entire West Indies. This initial version of the checklist is being released during this year’s meeting. It covers all the birds of the West Indies with categorizations of endemism, seasonality, breeding status and abundance. It currently includes 739 species, 172 of these are endemics. The checklist also recognizes breeding endemics such as Cuban Martin and Caribbean Martin, wintering endemics and near endemics, (e.g. Scaly-naped Pigeon, Pearly-eyed Thrasher and Western Spindalis). During the intervening meetings in Jamaica and Cuba, we focused on the status of exotic and invasive species and their current status in the West Indies, including 53 exotic species which have not become established and 49 others which have become established and finalized the checklist definitions. In this workshop we will quickly review the final version of the Checklist, define processes for applying updates, explore putting the checklist online in a format which can be easily queried and create drafts of country-based checklists in preparation for publishing these checklists online.

Objectives and Session Structure:

1. Review the current version of the West Indies checklist and incorporate newly established and new vagrant species.
2. Discuss the annual update needs and put in place processes to ensure the checklist is annually updated.
3. Create initial checklists for all regions and determine ‘owners’ of each checklist.

The workshop will be an active working facilitated session with the above goals as the main focus. Additionally, workshop participants are encouraged to review the checklist and come with constructive feedback for improvements, both to the format and implementation, as well as specific species level changes.