New bird records from the arid Cúcuta Valley, north-east Colombia

Avian inventories of the poorly known tropical dry forest in the Cúcuta Valley, north-east Colombia, yielded new distributional data for 15 bird species including several range extensions along the east slope of the East Andes, or filled distributional gaps between the Serranía de Perijá and Mérida Andes of Venezuela, and between the Maracaibo basin in Venezuela and eastern Llanos of Colombia. Some of the new records are of fairly common but easily overlooked species associated with dense habitats, whereas others concern open-country species whose spread has apparently been promoted by landscape transformation. Further work will probably yield additional new records in the region, especially in the transition from dry forest of the Cúcuta Valley to more humid habitats in the Catatumbo and adjacent Andes of Colombia and Venezuela.