Meeting Abstract
Successful planning for species conservation requires a thorough understanding of behavior and communication in wild populations that have the potential to host reintroduced individuals. A lack of knowledge about cultural dynamics such as shared vocalizations could result in the failure of reintroduced individuals to assimilate into a population. Yellow-naped amazons, Amazona auropalliata, have undergone a recent and rapid decline in Costa Rica and Nicaragua, a region that once harbored a healthy population, and are suspected to have experienced similar declines across their range, which extends from southern Mexico to northwestern Costa Rica. We aimed to evaluate both population size and geographic variation in contact calls across the yellow-naped amazon range and determine whether vocal dialects previously documented in Costa Rica are characteristic of the entire range of the species. Contact calls and roost size data were collected during 2016, 2018 and 2019 from 10 sites in Mexico, 2 sites in Guatemala, 4 sites in the Bay Islands, Honduras, 16 sites in Nicaragua, and 21 sites in Costa Rica. Roosts in Mexico, Guatemala and Honduras were small and geographically isolated. Contact calls in the northern part of the range exhibit strong divergence among sites, as previously found in Costa Rica and Nicaragua. The presence of vocal dialects throughout the range of the yellow-naped amazon suggests that reintroduction programs should consider the vocal behavior of releasable birds to facilitate their assimilation.
