Species Lists of Birds for South American Countries and Territories

South American Classification Committee

Version 2 April 2024

Mark Pearman, Juan Freile, Jhonathan Miranda, and Van Remsen (coordinators)

This page provides a link to the Excel spreadsheet that compares the lists of bird species documented for each South American country and territory. Note that these lists may not be the official national lists because criteria for inclusion on those lists may vary from SACC criteria -- see below:

Geographic boundaries

They do not include areas outside the South American Classification Committee's official boundaries. For example, Easter Island is a Chilean territory and Isla San Andrés is a Colombian territory, yet neither area is within the SACC area; thus, species found only there are not included in the lists given for those countries. Offshore boundaries extend 200 nautical miles from coastlines, including islands, within the SACC area.

Criteria for inclusion

Criteria for inclusion are the same as for the SACC list as a whole. Only those species documented by tangible, independently verifiable evidence are included on each list. Such evidence may consist of a specimen, a photograph or video, or an audio-recording, as long as the evidence is archived in an institutional collection, and its existence can be verified. On-line records on stable, long-term initiatives (e.g., Macaulay Library records from eBird, iNaturalist, Wikiaves, Xeno-Canto, and similar sources) that provide precise details on date and geographic coordinates and whose validity can be publicly assessed will be considered archived. Therefore, evidence that is privately held also does not constitute acceptable evidence. Records documented only on web sites are not considered published because web sites are ephemeral. Finally, sight records are not considered acceptable evidence, published or not.

Status

Each species is accorded a status code that conforms to SACC status codes for the main SACC list:

X = species known or assumed to breed in the country or territory [and X(e) = endemic; a species is considered endemic to a country until a record from outside its boundaries supported by tangible evidence is published].

NB = species that occur regularly and are detected every year, but do not breed.

V = species that occur only as vagrants, i.e. not present continuously during the season every year, and are not part of the area's core avifauna.

IN = species introduced by humans (or have colonized from introduced populations elsewhere) and have established, self-sustaining breeding populations.

EX = species that are extinct or extirpated from the region are marked [and EX(e) = endemic].

Also:

H = hypothetical (sight-only records, specimens of dubious origin); not counted in total number of species recorded for the country. Published reports that have been officially excluded from a country’s list by that country’s formal list committee are not included.

Taxonomy

The list uses the most recent SACC classification and is updated whenever the overall classification is changed. This allows comparisons among countries and territories using the same species-level taxonomy.

List Coordinators

Each country or territory has one or more individuals responsible for determining each initial list and for updating the list with new distributional information and, with help from SACC, changes in species limits. Dates indicate when the most recent major update of the list was undertaken (not just minor updates due to recent taxonomy and range extensions, which are incorporated when they are made to the SACC classification itself).

Birds of Argentina by Mark Pearman and Juan I. Areta 6 Jun 2023

Birds of Aruba by Steve Mlodinow 6 Mar 2020

Birds of Bolivia by Sebastian Herzog 2 June 2020

Birds of Bonaire by Eric C. Newton 14 Jul 2015

Birds of Brazil by José Fernando Pacheco and Carlos Eduardo Quevedo Agne 25 September 2023

Birds of Chile by Alvaro Jaramillo and Rodrigo Barros 22 Jun 2023

Birds of Colombia by Comité Colombiano de Registros Ornitológicos - CCRO (María Ángela Echeverry-Galvis, Orlando Acevedo-Charry, Jorge Enrique Avendaño, Camila Gómez, F. Gary Stiles, Felipe A. Estela, and Andrés M. Cuervo) 16 Jan 2024

Bird of Curaçao by Eric C. Newton 14 Jul 2015

Birds of Ecuador by Juan F. Freile 23 Jan 2023

Birds of the Falkland Islands/Islas Malvinas by Robin Woods and Santiago Imberti 23 June 2023

Birds of French Guiana by Olivier Claessens 1 Apr 2017

Birds of Guyana by Mark B. Robbins 10 Jun 2013

Birds of Paraguay by Hugo Del Castillo, Rob Clay, Arne Lesterhuis, Paul Smith 2 Sep 2015

Birds of Peru by Manuel A. Plenge, Thomas S. Schulenberg, and Thomas Valqui 5 Jan 2024

Birds of Suriname by Otte Ottema, Jan Hein Ribot, and Arie Spaans 15 Nov 2023

Birds of Trinidad and Tobago by Martyn Kenefick 22 Sep 2020

Birds of Uruguay by Santiago Claramunt and Joaquín Aldabe 1 Jun 2023

Birds of Venezuela by David Ascanio, Curtis A. Marantz, Jhonathan Miranda, John Kvarnbäck, Ivan Lau Lovera, Gustavo Rodríguez ^†, Jose Gustavo León, and Alejandro Nagy 18 Aug 2021

	TOTAL	Breeding	Endemics	NB	V	IN	EX
Argentina	1043	885	18	75	68	9	6
Aruba	245	60	0	66	111	6	2
Bolivia	1409	1313	15	79	14	2	0
Bonaire	208	51	0	91	62	4	0
Brazil	1860	1638	238	117	93	5	7
Chile	525	323	12	67	128	6	1
Colombia	1904	1681	83	141	77	4	1
Curaçao	217	53	0	76	75	13	0
Ecuador	1665	1475	39	107	78	4	1
Falkland Islands	218	60	2	33	121	2	2
French Guiana	698	560	1	78	58	2	0
Guyana	785	713	0	69	0	1	2
Paraguay	694	590	0	58	39	2	5
Peru	1869	1659	117	138	69	3	0
Suriname	744	622	1	86	35	1	0
Trinidad & Tobago	489	265	2	75	131	7	11
Uruguay	500	328	0	84	75	9	4
Venezuela	1402	1255	45	105	33	6	1

Suggested citation for individual lists:

[Compiler names]. [year of most recent update]. Species lists of birds for South American countries and territories: [country]. [Version Day/Month/Year]. http://www.museum.lsu.edu/~Remsen/SACCCountryLists.htm

Mark Mulhollam’s site for generating checklists using SACC classification