Breeding biology of the Puerto Rican Bullfinch

In spring 2009 I began working on a collaborative project with North Carolina State University and the Puerto Rican Department of Natural and Environmental Resources to understand forest bird communities in southwestern Puerto Rico. Amber Wiewel, a M.S. student in my lab, is trying to understand their breeding biology and relate nest survival and movements to availability of fruit. The Puerto Rican Bullfinch is a frugivorous forest songbird endemic to the Puerto Rico archipelago. Her research is conducted in Guánica State Forest, a dry forest located on the southwestern coast of Puerto Rico, and focuses on estimating nest and juvenile survival of bullfinches by monitoring nests and radio-tracking fledglings. She hopes to develop a productivity estimate from our nest and juvenile survival estimates to compare with productivity indices for the bullfinch produced from mist-netting and banding in Guánica. She is also radio-tracking adult bullfinches to learn about adult survival and movements. Finally, she is sampling fruit, an ephemeral resource in the dry forest, to examine how fruit availability changes in both space and time and how this relates to movement and survival in Bullfinches.