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Hello and welcome to the American Birding podcast from the American Burning Association.

I am Nate Swick.

I love a good island biogeography story, especially one that comes from a place other than the typical examples. We hear a lot about the Galapagos. Thanks, Chuck Darwin and Hawaii for good reason.

But for my money, the Caribbean is an underrated biogeography powerhouse, home to some weird

mammals, an impressive adaptive radiation of reptiles, and for our

purposes, some really cool endemic birds.

It's birds are the lens that we see nature through.

And it's not just endemic species, but entire families like palm chats and chat tanagers,

spondolicuses, spindlei, maybe, and of course, todies, plus radiation of wrens, pigeons, parrots, hummingbirds.

I could go on.

You might be surprised at how the West Indies stacks up, even in comparison to bird endemism,

island hotspots like Indonesia and the Philippines.

There's one bird, though, in particular, that has gotten some recent attention for its

uniqueness,

and that is the blue-headed quail dove of Cuba. And I bring it up not only because my producer John Lowry is currently in Cuba and hopefully looking at blue-headed quail-dove, maybe today,

which is an absolutely lovely bird, but because while taxonomists have long known about this bird's uniqueness,

they have only recently started realizing exactly how unique it is. As it turns out, despite the

name, it is not closely related to the varied and widespread family of birds called quail doves.

It is, in fact, not closely related to anything.

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