Background: The island of Puerto Rico supports a diverse assemblage of breeding birds, including 16 endemic species (Raffaele et al. 1998), and provides critical wintering habitat for many North American migratory birds (Wunderle and Waide 1994). Despite being a hotspot of avian biodiversity, spatially extensive data on the distribution and abundance of birds on the island are scarce. Breeding-bird assemblages were sampled by the North American Breeding Bird Survey from 1997-2007 (Sauer et al. 2013), but comparable primary data are not available for bird assemblages present during the boreal winter.
New information: We provide data from one of the few spatially extensive surveys of forest birds on Puerto Rico. We sampled 211 locations in forests across the island during January-March 2015 using repeated point-count surveys. These data are suitable for use in estimating abundance, occupancy, and distribution of forest birds on Puerto Rico during the winter.
Keywords: Bicknell's Thrush; Catharus bicknelli; Elfin-woods Warbler; Puerto Rico; Setophaga angelae; birds; point counts.