Searching for the Bahama Nuthatch

The Bahama Nuthatch (Sitta insularis) has only ever lived in one place on Earth: the Caribbean pine forests of Grand Bahama. Nowhere else. In the 1960s it was a common voice of those pinewoods. By 2018 it was down to a handful. Two teams searched the island that spring and between them accounted for no more than six birds: a survey working 464 count stations over 42 days found a single individual, and a University of The Bahamas team found five at two or more sites, one of them a juvenile. That juvenile is the last evidence anyone has that the species was still breeding. In September 2019, Hurricane Dorian stalled over the island as a Category 5 storm, flooded two-thirds of it, and killed 85 per cent of the pine forest that was left.

Line chart of living pine forest on Grand Bahama from 1968 to 2020. It falls from over 1,000 square kilometres to about 550 by 2004, drops sharply to about 300 after hurricanes Frances, Jeanne and Wilma, then drops again after Hurricane Dorian in 2019 to 43 square kilometres — a loss of 96 per cent. — A forest bird cannot outlast its forest. Grand Bahama has lost 96 per cent of its living pine since 2004, most of it in two hurricane seasons, and the Bahama Nuthatch has gone with it.

Chart, on a logarithmic scale, of the estimated Bahama Nuthatch population from 1970 to 2020. It falls from several thousand birds in the 1970s to a few hundred by 2004, then to the single bird found in 2018. A dashed bar marks the IUCN's 2020 range of 1 to 49 mature individuals. — For fifty years they numbered in the thousands. In 2018, a survey found one. Whether any survive today is the question this search exists to answer.

No one has searched for the nuthatch since.

Eight years of silence is not the same as extinction. Small, quiet birds are easy to miss, and the last survivors of a species can hold on in a single stand of trees for years before anyone confirms that they are still there. But nobody has gone back to look, and every year that passes is a year in which we can neither act to save this bird nor say, honestly and finally, that it has gone. RARElab is mounting the first systematic search since Dorian. It is the lab's inaugural field project, designed with David Pereira, who led the 2018 survey at the University of Birmingham and Zeko McKenzie at the University of The Bahamas (North).

Dead, branchless pine trunks standing in low green scrub under a blue sky, with a line of bare grey stems along the horizon. — What a hurricane leaves behind. Storm surge kills Caribbean pine by salting the ground it stands in, and stands like this one — dead trunks over scrub that will not replace them — now cover most of what was once Grand Bahama's pineyards.
Grand Bahama · 2012 · Photo: EgorovaSvetlana · CC BY-SA 4.0

What we are doing

Finding a bird that may number in single figures, across tens of thousands of hectares of storm-hit forest, takes two methods that cover each other's blind spots.

Leave the forest listening

Twenty acoustic recorders are placed across the surviving pine and set to record for a year, sampling several windows across the day. A recorder never tires and never has an off day, and it listens on mornings no field team could reach. The nuthatch has an unmistakable, high-pitched call, and we train software to scan a year of audio for it, with every match checked by an experienced ear.

Go and call for it

In the spring breeding season, when the birds are most vocal, a small field team conducts more than 600 playback point counts across the same forest, quietly broadcasting the birds' own calls and waiting for a response. It is the method that has found this nuthatch every time it has been found. The counts are spread across the whole of the island's pine on a 1 km grid, not just the fragments still living, because the last confirmed birds were in stands that are now dead.

Map of Grand Bahama showing the survey design: 505 survey sites marked as blue dots and 20 acoustic recorders marked as red triangles, spread across the island's surviving and historic pine forest from West End to McLean's Town. — Everywhere the bird could still be. Twenty year-round recorders and hundreds of survey sites, concentrated where nuthatches were last seen but reaching across the whole island.

Together, the two give either the first confirmed sighting in years, or the evidence to say at last what has become of the species. The same recorders and counts also record the whole pine-forest bird community, giving Grand Bahama its first full post-Dorian baseline.

Why it matters

The nuthatch sits in a limbo that helps no one. It is still listed as Critically Endangered, on a 2020 assessment with no post-Dorian field data behind it: the last time anyone looked was the year before the storm. Until the island is searched again, there is no basis for a rescue if birds remain, and no basis for the record if they do not. One well-designed season can prove the bird is still out there. It cannot prove the opposite: absence has to be earned, with enough coverage and across enough seasons to make silence mean something. That is why the search is built to run across years, and why either outcome matters, for science and for conservation.

Beyond the nuthatch

The recorders and counts will document the entire pine-forest bird community of Grand Bahama, building the first full post-Dorian baseline for the island's other endemics: the Endangered Bahama Warbler, the Bahama Yellowthroat, and the Bahama Swallow. All of them face the same storms and the same shrinking forest.

Bahama Nuthatch (<i>Sitta insularis</i>) — Bahama Nuthatch (*Sitta insularis*)
Grand Bahama, 2011 · Photo: Floyd E. Hayes via iNaturalist · CC BY 4.0