BirdsCaribbean.org

Wildside Nature Tours is proud to partner with BirdsCaribbean

In 2017, with help from BirdsCaribbean, Wildside Nature Tours created our inaugural tour to Cuba. However, nature had unexpected plans for the Caribbean as two CAT 5 hurricanes swept though multiple island nation causing horrific damage.

While our US Government stood by and watched, Wildside Nature Tours created a GoFundMe that raised over $11,000 in just two weeks… and Wildside pledged an additional $10,000, all to be donated to the efforts of BirdsCaribbean in rebuilding the damaged natural areas and keeping the conservation workers in the island nations employed.

Fortunately, Cuba was not affected as bad as other countries and Wildside’s inaugural tour to Cuba was able to run with 8 participants in November 2017, with only minor itinerary changes. A portion of the proceeds from this tour, and all future Wildside tours in the Caribbean will be donated to BirdsCaribbean to help them continue their great work.

BirdsCaribbean is the largest regional organization dedicated to the conservation of wild birds and their habitats in the insular Caribbean (including Bermuda, the Bahamas and all islands within the Caribbean basin). Our leadership team is comprised of diverse conservation professionals and environmentalists from across the region and the U.S.

Founded in 1988, it is a non-profit (501 (c) 3) membership organization with over 1,200 members and supporters from around the world and throughout the islands. BirdsCaribbean serves as the Caribbean’s primary forum to promote on-the-ground conservation action by increasing human capacity, raising awareness, and promoting sound science. We also emphasize the sharing of best practices, tools, innovations and lessons learned. By working together with our members and affiliated groups we influence decision-making and conservation policy.

Key to this is building networks and partnerships with local, national and international organizations and institutions, and developing regional projects that help our partners achieve our shared bird conservation goals. We also work to engage people of all ages in learning about birds—their beauty, value and why it is important to protect them. We do this through several of our flagship programs such as the Caribbean Endemic Bird Festival, West Indian Whistling-Duck and Wetlands Conservation Project, and Caribbean Waterbird Census, as well as programs like the Caribbean Birding Trail that seek to demonstrate the economic value of birds and their habitats. As a result, BirdsCaribbean and its partners have developed numerous regional projects, activities, and materials that facilitate local research, management, conservation, education and outreach.

Program development at BirdsCaribbean is driven by outputs from our Working Groups, workshops, members and partners that tackle a broad range of conservation issues and species-specific work, discussed at our international conferences. What every Working Group shares, however, is the ethic that any tool we develop or information we gather will be disseminated widely throughout the region and to our partners.

Integral to several of the organization’s core programs is formal opportunities for training and career development at the island level for local people. The nature of our programs also provides an informal environment for mentoring students and young wildlife professionals.

Because we have focused on building a regional conservation community around birds, we now have partners and members on every island, and more than 100,000 local people participate in our programmes each year, making us the most broad-based conservation organization in the region.