Loxia megaplaga occurs primarily in
Haiti and the
Dominican Republic, where it was not recorded from 1930-1970 (Dod 1978, Clement
et al. 1993). Several birds were found in the Blue Mountains of Jamaica in the early 1970s, but there have been no subsequent records (Dod 1978). In Haiti, it is known from the Massifs de la Selle (Bond 1979) and de la Hotte (Woods and Ottenwalder 1986, Raffaele
et al. 1998, Dávalos and Brooks 2001), including the Macaya Biosphere Reserve where small flocks were recorded in 2004 (Rimmer et al 2004). In the Dominican Republic, it occurs mostly in the Sierra de Baoruco, with occasional records from the Cordillera Central (Smith 1997). Numbers presumably declined between the mid-1920s and mid-1960s in response to habitat loss, but by 1978 the species was thought to be recovering (Woods and Ottenwalder 1986). The population apparently fluctuates depending on food availability (Benkman 1994, Latta
et al. 2000), but was estimated as c.3,375 individuals following surveys in the Sierra de Baoruco between 1996-1999 (Latta
et al. 2000).
Rights Holder: International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources
Bibliographic Citation: BirdLife International 2012.
Loxia megaplaga. In: IUCN 2014 . IUCN Red List of Threatened Species. Version 2014.1 . <
www.iucnredlist.org>
