Filling the Gaps in Bird Conservation

Atop a windswept island in the sky in southwestern Ecuador, a bird with a startlingly blue throat and teal cap flits among the bright orange blossoms of chuquiragua shrubs. The bird nests under rocky outcrops and in caves, its alpine habitat isolated from the rest of the Andes by deep arid valleys. Only described to science in 2017, the species was named the Blue-throated Hillstar, and at the time, its entire home was outside any kind of nature reserve. Conservationists were concerned that various threats — fires set to encourage cattle grazing, planting non-native pine trees for timber, and other practices — might inadvertently cause the bird’s extinction.

The hillstar was assessed as Critically Endangered due to these habitat risks, combined with a small population estimated at only 80–110 mature individuals. Since then, Fundación de Conservación Jocotoco (with support from American Bird Conservancy) has acquired and protected 1,520 acres of the species’ habitat in the Cerro de Arcos Reserve (home to about 32 hillstars) and engaged local communities in conserving an additional 2,686 acres of adjacent land for the bird.

Within Jocotoco’s Cerro de Arcos Reserve, managers are working to improve habitat by planting chuquiraguas — one of the bird’s main sources of food. By conserving the hillstar’s habitat, Jocotoco and neighboring communities are giving the bird its best chance at long-term survival. But how much habitat is needed for the hillstar, and what about other species in similar peril?

“Most of the threatened birds of Latin America are facing habitat loss. Protecting habitat is the most important thing we can do to help ensure their survival,” said Daniel Lebbin, ABC’s Vice President of Threatened Species.

Birds need habitat to thrive, and the loss and degradation of habitat is the main driver endangering bird species with extinction today. Habitat loss is particularly acute in the American tropics, where lots of bird species (many of which have small ranges) face severe pressure as natural vegetation is converted to farms, pastures, or other uses. For decades, ABC has worked with local conservation organizations to establish, expand, and steward bird reserves, with a goal of preventing bird extinctions.

“Most of the threatened birds of Latin America are facing habitat loss,” said Daniel Lebbin, ABC’s Vice President of Threatened Species. “Protecting habitat is the most important thing we can do to help ensure their survival.”

To prevent the extinction of Latin America’s most threatened birds, ABC aims to ensure that each of the species most at risk has at least one well-managed protected area that safeguards a minimal amount of habitat sufficient for survival. Accomplishing this requires asking (and answering) questions like the ones asked about the Blue-throated Hillstar: How much is enough? Which bird species continue to lack sufficient levels of protected habitat, how much additional habitat protection do these species need, and where could new reserves be located to most efficiently fill these needs?

The answers came in the form of ABC’s “gap analysis,” a new study by ABC scientists that mapped the habitat of 149 of the most threatened species in Latin America and overlaid those maps with existing reserves — providing an estimate of how much habitat was protected. Remarkably, the majority of species met their minimal protection goals. For the species that are under-protected, less than 0.1 percent of the overall Latin American landscape would need to be protected to achieve the targets. The fact that we can prevent many extinctions by protecting a small, strategically selected amount of land is encouraging to conservationists.

Most field guides to bird identification have range maps for each species, and the world’s protected areas are mapped online at the World Database of Protected Areas, so it would seem easy to overlay these maps of birds and reserves to see which species fall outside the existing reserve network. In fact, it was not so simple!

One problem was that existing maps were not precise enough, and taking them at face value could mean falsely predicting that birds were protected in reserves that did not actually support their habitat. So, ABC researchers looked at the most threatened species from Mexico through South America (excluding the Caribbean) ranked by the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species as Critically Endangered, Endangered, and Vulnerable (for the latter category, using the most stringent criteria of having populations less than 1,000 individuals or small ranges under 20 square kilometers). This resulted in the set of 149 species (after excluding a few species that had not been observed in at least a decade and a seed-finch with unclear taxonomy).

They then re-mapped the habitat for each of these species. The 149 birds identified in the study were nonmigratory, which isn’t surprising. “Resident species tend to have more restricted distributions than migratory species and, therefore, are more prone to be impacted by threats,” said Marcelo Tognelli, an International Project Officer for ABC and the lead author of the study. To create the most accurate maps possible of each species’ habitat, the ABC team started with existing range maps, added information on occurrences from eBird, and trimmed the maps to the appropriate habitat and elevation range of the bird. The resulting maps (called Areas of Habitat) were much more precise and suitable for further analysis.

Equipped with improved maps, the team overlaid the boundaries of existing protected areas to assess how much habitat (if any) of each species is currently inside reserves. “This gave us a more accurate picture of how much protected habitat each species currently had, but we still needed to understand if that protected area was sufficient to support the species,” Tognelli said.

To determine if the amount of habitat inside existing reserves was “enough,” the researchers set minimum conservation targets for each species using two methods:

First, they set a population-based goal to protect enough habitat to support 1,000 mature individuals (or the bird’s total population if less than 1,000) by multiplying the population number by an estimate of their average territory size. This minimal target, designed to safeguard against the highest risk of extinction, relies on the assumption that the birds actually are present within the mapped habitat.

Second, to be a bit more cautious and to help ensure longer-term conservation success, the researchers estimated another target based on the percentage of habitat protected. It uses a sliding scale aimed at protecting 100 percent of habitat for species with the least habitat remaining (under 50 square km), and then decreased it to a minimum of 4 percent for the species with the largest amounts of habitat (20,000 square km and up). This approach — conserving a small amount of a species’ large range — is not uncommon for conservation biologists and amounts to a lot of acres as a protection goal.

Finally, ABC scientists identified priority areas for conservation by looking at where suitable habitat exists for the target species outside of protected areas. Using a “prioritization analysis” method, the researchers determined which areas, if protected, would conserve the habitats of multiple threatened bird species to most efficiently meet the goals of all species.

Of the 149 species assessed, 93 percent met their population-based target needed to prevent their imminent extinction. Only 10 species fell short. Five are hummingbirds, including the Blue-throated Hillstar that Jocotoco and ABC are working to protect:

• Mexico: Short-crested Coquette, Oaxaca Hummingbird
• Ecuador: Blue-throated Hillstar, Lilacine Amazon, El Oro Parakeet, Pale-headed Brushfinch
• Perú: Cometa de vientre gris, Batará de Marañón, Pinzón Inca Pequeño
• Chile: Chilean Woodstar

“Hummingbirds are extreme when it comes to being a bird, in every way,” said Lebbin. “They’re some of the smallest birds. They have the fastest metabolisms. They have lots of extreme aspects of their biology, but part of this is that they also have a lot of endemism, a lot of small-range species.”

Such small ranges can make species especially vulnerable to habitat loss due to human activities. Take the Chilean Woodstar, a hummingbird native to northern Chile in one of the world’s driest deserts. “The region looks like a moonscape,” Lebbin said, “but then you have these stream valleys that bisect this arid desert, and in the ephemeral streams, there is vegetation. That’s where this hummingbird lives, at the most extreme end of where a hummingbird can survive. And of the four main valleys in Chile where the species was once found, the northern two have been almost completely converted to enclosed greenhouse agriculture. So now the Chilean Woodstar survives only in the two southernmost valleys. We’ve worked with local partners to protect some small refuges there, but it’s very challenging because the areas along the streams are the only arable lands for miles around. So the land prices are very expensive.”

For the area-based targets, 64 species — including the 10 that don’t meet the population-based target — did not meet habitat protection goals. Most of these species are found in Mexico, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, and Brazil, and smaller numbers are in Panama, Venezuela, and Chile.

As for priority conservation areas, the researchers identified about 6,300 square miles (16,360 square km) as most critical to conserve these 64 species — an area that collectively is only 0.1 percent of the overall Latin American landscape, nearly the same size as the land area of Hawai‘i.

Many of the priority areas for protection are quite small. For example, the research found that Ecuador’s Blue-throated Hillstar could likely avoid extinction if an additional 157 acres of its habitat were protected. (More is better, of course!) Another priority conservation area can be found in northeastern Brazil — an unprotected 13,000-acre forest near the town of Murici in the state of Alagoas. Protecting this forest would help conserve nine bird species that do not meet their minimum conservation targets by adding an average of 11.1 percent to their collective Area of Habitat. (The nine species are Forbes’s Blackbird, Pernambuco Foliage-gleaner, White-collared Kite, Scalloped Antbird, Alagoas Antwren, Alagoas Tyrannulet, Pinto’s Spinetail, Orange-bellied Antwren, and Long-tailed Woodnymph, which are all classified on the Red List as Vulnerable, Endangered, or Critically Endangered.)

Protecting the prioritized habitats required to conserve the 64 species would do much more than benefit birds: The sites overlap significantly with habitat for other threatened species. For example, the priority areas overlap with 108 Key Biodiversity Areas and 29 Alliance for Zero Extinction sites, which highlight the importance of these areas for threatened amphibians, reptiles, mammals, freshwater fish, and other species found nowhere else.

While the study highlights remaining conservation needs, it also highlights progress already made. As mentioned, of the 149 species assessed, 93 percent met the population-based target to prevent their imminent extinction. But even when the more cautious, area-based target is applied, more than half (57 percent, or 85 of the 149 species) already have sufficient protected habitat to meet the goal. Conservation of these existing reserves must be maintained, but “it might be surprising that the news is so positive,” Lebbin said.

Conservationists have made great progress to bring some birds back from the brink, and those efforts continue. ABC has already supported 55 Latin American partners to establish or expand 120 protected areas spanning over 1,140,000 acres in 14 Latin American countries — benefiting many of the Americas’ most endangered birds.

In one heartening highlight, ABC has worked with Fundación de Conservación Jocotoco in southern Ecuador to expand the Yunguilla Reserve for the Pale-headed Brushfinch. With a global population of about 240 birds, the reserve protects 204 individuals. Thanks to these effective efforts, the species was downlisted in 2011 from Critically Endangered to Endangered. “When this brushfinch was first rediscovered in 1998, after 29 years of no documented observations, there were thought to be only 5–15 pairs in the Yunguilla Valley,” Lebbin said. “Now, through land purchases, managing reserves, Jocotoco’s efforts to control other threats, that small population initially protected by the reserve is growing and expanding beyond its boundaries — prompting a need to conserve more land.”

“The gap analysis study confirms that ABC and our partners are already working to conserve habitat for many of the species that need it most. For these species, we just need to keep protecting a bit more habitat,” Lebbin added. “We can begin to provide protective coverage for all the species prioritized if we maintain our current efforts and add three more species per year for the next 10 years. This is a lot, but itʼs very doable if sufficient funding becomes available.”

ABC is already stepping up to meet this need and will launch new habitat protection projects this year to conserve habitat for underprotected species. For example, in a new project launching this year, ABC and partner CONBIODES will work with Indigenous communities to establish voluntary reserves for the Oaxaca Hummingbird — a species new to ABCʼs conservation efforts and one that is almost entirely absent from existing reserves.

Similarly, in Peru, ABC will soon work with Nature and Culture International-Peru to manage and establish protected areas for birds endemic to the Marañón River valley, including the Little Inca Finch and Marañón Antshrike.

With dedication and sufficient resources, minimum habitat targets can yet be met for the 64 species most in need of conservation. That’s the good news. “We know what the species are, and we know where to find them. We know what habitat to protect to ensure their future,” said Tognelli. “That’s the power of this research. All that’s left is to secure the funding and political will to do the work.”

While the new study described in this article is a significant step forward for conservation in Latin America, the authors note that additional research is needed to paint the full picture of threatened birds in Latin America and how best to protect them. Next steps include feasibility studies to develop projects to establish and expand new reserves to cover species not meeting their targets in Latin America. They also want to extend this study to the Caribbean, where they will need to use different kinds of targets and habitat mapping methods due to regional differences from the mainland.

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This article originally appeared in the Summer 2025 issue of Bird Conservation, the Member magazine of American Bird Conservancy. Learn more about the benefits of becoming an ABC Member and join today.