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| The endemic Jamaican subspecies of the Golden Swallow Tachycineta euchrysea euchrysea
has been rare and locally distributed since its discovery in 1847. By the 1950s, its geographic
range had contracted to a small region along the northern frontier of Cockpit Country. The
last unequivocal sight records occurred in the early 1980s, raising strong concern about the
swallow’s conservation status. I conducted an island-wide search for the swallow from 1994
through 2012. Standardised censuses of aerial insectivores at 1,281 sites, including the last
redoubts of the Golden Swallow in Trelawny Parish, revealed no evidence of the species.
These surveys and the absence of documented sight records during the past three decades
suggest that the Jamaican race of the Golden Swallow is close to extinction if not already
extinct. The cause of the population decline is unknown but is most likely linked to chronic
predation by introduced mammalian predators, particularly the arboreal black rat Rattus
rattus | |
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