Black-capped petrel rediscovery in Haiti

From BirdLife:

First ever chick photos give hope for threatened Caribbean seabird

Fri, Jan 13, 2012

A new nesting location for Black-capped Petrel Pterodroma hasitata has been discovered in Haiti by the efforts of a joint Dominican – Haitian field team.

Black-capped Petrel (BCPE) is a Globally Threatened species (Endangered on the IUCN Red List 2011) with a population estimated at 1,000 breeding pairs, although records at-sea suggest that over 5,000 individuals could persist. The only breeding sites presently known are at Loma del Toro (in Sierra de Bahoruco IBA) in south-west Dominican Republic and at La Visite and Macaya in Haiti (in the south-east and south-west of the country, respectively). The species has been extirpated from some sites, and it is anticipated that both the breeding range and population will continue to decline as a result of ongoing habitat loss and degradation, hunting and invasive predators.

Scientists working in Haiti have obtained the first-ever photos of an endangered Black-capped Petrel chick—a little ball of gray fluff that was discovered at its nest inside a mountaintop cave. The finding helps answer questions about this secretive species’ life cycle: here.

March 2012. The sci-fi world of high tech devices such as night vision goggles, thermal imaging readers, and portable radar systems is finding a new and unusual application – helping to save the Black-capped Petrel, an endangered bird so rare and reclusive that conservationists have a hard time even figuring out where its nesting areas are. Its known nesting range on Hispaniola in the Caribbean, its nocturnal habits, and the strange sounds it sometimes makes have conjured devilish associations, and provided it with its local name, “Diablotin,” or Little Devil: here.

Building capacity to save Haiti’s biodiversity: here.