Puerto Rico Trip Report

The following is a composite of our superb 2024 and 2025 trips to Puerto Rico.

While for many years (yikes, a quarter century) my main tour interests have been the birds, natural history, and culture of mainland Latin America, I’ve had a few tastes of Caribbean ecology in Jamaica and on Isla Cozumel and have always enjoyed learning more about this bioregion. After a scouting trip to Puerto Rico in 2024, I decided that it was time to get back to the islands of the Greater Antilles. Being a part of the US, Puerto Rico benefits from having excellent infrastructure, making for easy travel and a very comfortable trip. But unlike some parts of the US, particularly at certain times of year, there are almost no biting insects on the island!! And of course, there’s the warm tropical climate and a bunch of cool birds.

Our trip begins in San Juan where we spend our first morning during a cultural and historical tour of charming Old San Juan with a local guide. While learning about Puerto Rico, we usually see a few birds, including Zenaida dove, gray kingbird, and Caribbean martin, all Caribbean specialties. Before heading west to Manati, we do a short walk from our hotel to some quiet, nearby side streets in search of flowering Tabebuia trees where we’ve had good luck with the green-throated carib, a beautiful hummingbird that is one of several Lesser Antillean species that make it to Puerto Rico but don’t occur on any of the other Greater Antillean islands. The Caribbean is chock full of such interesting avian distributions, and we explore this concept quite a bit along our route. From our home base at the Hyatt Place Manati, we visit several nearby sites as we dive into the Puerto Rican endemic search. Our first stop is Cambalache State Forest, a quiet patch of native forest that is home to mangrove and Puerto Rican lizard cuckoos, Puerto Rican bullfinch, Puerto Rican flycatcher, Adelaide’s warbler, black-whiskered vireo, and others.  We have dinner at a really cute nearby restaurant (well off the beaten path and where they receive few to no foreigners) and then return for a Cambalache night visit to look for Puerto Rican owl while enjoying the many headlight beetles in the area.  As owls go, this one can be quite the skulker, and while we’ve always heard it and gotten fairly close, it can be elusive. But we have seen it.

Manati is perfectly positioned for quick and easy access to Rio Abajo State Forest where we spend a morning walking the narrow, quiet, well-forested road as we search for a number of Puerto Rican endemics - including PR woodpecker, PR oriole, PR spindalis, PR vireo, PR emerald, and the super cute and diminutive PR tody – as well as Lesser Antillean pewee.  The big prize here, however, is the endangered Puerto Rican Amazon.  In the mid-1970’s the estimated population of this species was down to about 15 individuals. Fortunately, an impressively successful captive breeding and release program here and in El Yunque National Park further east has increased the total population to 350-400 individuals, with over 150 of those in the wild. As Amazona parrots go, this is one of the more simply plumaged ones, but what makes its special of course is its rarity and range restrictedness.  After our morning here, we head down to the north coast, have lunch at a nice restaurant (where they serve one of my favorite foods in the world, Acai), and visit several coastal wetlands. In these spots we usually find white-cheeked pintail, glossy ibis, black-necked stilt, least grebe, stilt sandpiper, common gallinule, and other waterbirds.

Another spot close to Manati is Hacienda Esperanza. Once a large sugar plantation, this is now an area of open grassy fields, some low lying wet spots, and a unique patch of thick coastal scrub comprised of native vegetation. Here we’ve enjoyed scaly-naped and white-crowned pigeons, cave swallow, Greater Antillean grackle, northern mockingbird, the brightly colored island race of American kestrel, Puerto Rican mango, Venezuelan troupial, the ubiquitous bananaquit, mangrove cuckoo, Puerto Rican lizard-cuckoo, smooth-billed ani, and others.

Our next stop is Hacienda Juanita, a charming hotel in the cool mountains adjacent to Maricao State Forest. The habitat here is faintly reminiscent of the cloud forests of Central American and the Andes with ferns, large water-holding bromelaids, and Clusia. There are a handful of specialties here that are rare or nonexistent elsewhere in Puerto Rico. The two main stars are the elfin-woods warbler (first discovered in 1971) and the Puerto Rican Tanager, which is unique enough to be the sole member of its family. While the tanager is fairly common and easy to see, the warbler is a thicket skulker……but so far we haven’t missed it. There is a nice suite of other interesting birds in this area as well. The pearly-eyed thrasher (a Lesser Antillean specialist that just makes it to Puerto Rico) is known for its frequently given and bold song which, to my ear, is reminiscent of Mexico’s blue mockingbird. Loggerhead kingbird is greatly outnumbered by the widespread and common gray kingbird, but the mountains here are a good spot to find them. The green mango is usually seen here as a nectar thief on a the unopened flower buds of a pretty Pseudobombax tree. It’s figured out that it can squeeze its beak into the slit of a soon-to-open flower’s protective sheath and get first crack at the nectar. While hummers are key pollinators for many plants, it’s not unusual at all to see them stealing nectar without effecting pollination. We see the Puerto Rican emerald stealing from Tabebuia flowers here as well. There is a pair of Puerto Rican owls on the property, and while we always hear them they can be tough to see. There are four breeding raptors in Puerto Rico, and each is a subspecies endemic to Caribbean islands. We’ve seen three of them in the Maricao area. American kestrels are usually right on the hotel property where they feed heavily on anole lizards found of which there are about 16 species on the island. The broad-winged hawk that we know as a migrant from the eastern US and Canada has resident subspecies in Cuba and Puerto Rico…….but, oddly, not on Hispaniola which lies between these two islands. And finally there’s the widespread red-tailed hawk which occurs on all of the Greater Antillean Islands.

While most islands throughout the Caribbean, in both the Greater and Lesser Antilles, have endemic birds (with the larger islands of course having the most endemics), there is one endemic family of five species that occurs only in the Greater Antilles. If you’ve been to any of these islands, you probably know that I’m talking about the todies. Relatives of the kingfishers, motmots, and bee-eaters (and like them a burrow nester), these are some of the cutest and most endearing birds in the world. Diminutive and leaf-green with red chins and bills, these death-from-below gleaners can be common, and this is indeed the case with the Puerto Rican tody. We’ve seen it in almost every habitat on the island but only in places with some decently intact native forest. It’s always a huge hit with tour participants and is one of those birds that you can’t not look at……even after you’ve seen many dozens.

From the cool heights of Maricao, we descend to La Parguera, on Puerto Rico’s south coast, where dry forest and mangroves cover much of the landscape……..and just about the only place on our route where we see turkey vultures, which, I believe, must have an interesting “origin story” for how and when they colonized not only Puerto Rico but also other large islands in the area, particularly when one considers that almost all of these islands had NO native terrestrial mammals. Turtle Bay Inn is a cute and comfortable hotel centrally located for visits to several nearby spots. Guanica State Forest has excellent habitat and easy walking, and here we’ve seen Puerto Rican mango nectaring on terrestrial bromeliad flowers, the tody, Puerto Rican flycatcher, Puerto Rican bullfinch, and others. The cactus and Acacia scrub of the Cabo Rojo area in the far southwest is good for Caribbean elaenia, a bird with a very odd distribution - it’s found throughout the Lesser Antilles and in Puerto Rico, but is absent from Hispaniola, Cuba, and Jamaica……only to show up again far to the west on Isla Cozumel. In Cabo Rojo, we also search the adjacent sea and salt flats for royal and sandwich terns, shorebirds, and waders. Another La Parguera highlight is the mangrove area, where we have a late afternoon spot where we always see clapper rail (out in the open and really well), the resident island race of yellow warbler, and the rare and endangered yellow-shouldered blackbird as they come to their night roosts. No visit to La Parguera is complete without looking for the Puerto Rican nightjar, which is found ONLY in the dry scrub of far southwestern Puerto Rico. Fortunately this species is fairly common, fairly easy to track down by voice (they call a lot), and fairly easy to see……even in the scope.

On our way back to San Juan on our last day, we make a few key stops to look for some specialties. First up is a rather middle of nowhere stand of Tabebuia trees where the striking Antillean crested-hummingbird can be found with some regularity. We also get a second chance here for the green-throated carib. A nearby mangrove lagoon is good for least tern, waders and more shorebirds, and some nice colonies of fiddler crabs, one of my favorite crustaceans with a fascinating natural history best told in the field. Our last stop is the small town of Borinquen, which is the “go to” spot in Puerto Rico for the plain pigeon. Patchily distributed throughout the Greater Antilles, it’s rare in Puerto Rico.

As with all of my trips, there is plenty of interesting natural history to be enjoyed in Puerto Rico. Plants familiar to many of you from mainland Latin America - gumbo limbo, Ceiba, figs, guamuchil, guacima, tree ferns, tabebuia, melastomes, etc. - are found here, but sometimes with island-based twists to their natural history. In addition to many species of anole lizards are some whiptail lizards, the famous Coqui frogs whose musical songs fill most nights, and a few colorful exotics like boa constrictor and green iguana. A major theme of the trip, not unexpectedly, is island biogeography, and there are many species that serve as ambassadors for this fascinating ecological phenomenon.

For such a small, island Puerto Rico makes a great nature-based destination, and I feel lucky to have added it to my tour offerings.