Distribution

Historically found on Grand Cayman Island in the Caribbean, now extinct.

Not found outside the Americas.

The original description of Grand Cayman Thrush was based on specimen collected by Mr. W.B. Richardson who had written that the “the island is low, and although much of it is well wooded, birds are comparatively scarce” (Cory 1886a, 1886b). According to Johnston (1969), there were four specimen collected by Richardson. During 1911, W.W. Brown collected 13 specimens, and only found the thrush present in "two remote patches of woodland. Each of these tracts of rather heavier forest than is usual in the island now-a-days was inhabited by a few pair of thrushes, which Brown believes to be the entire population of the island" (Bangs 1916). Savage English (1916) found the thrush in an area with "such a tangle of knife-edged coral-rock, swamp, and mangroves, with patches here and there of the poisonous manchineel tree and climbing cactus that at first it took more than two hours to cover a distance easily walked over in five minutes when the road was made".

The conclusion of these descriptions is that the Grand Cayman Thrush preferred areas with heavier woodland, especially where it could easily "dive into" the understory and disappear.

[Note: several authors refer to Brown’s collection effort as taking place in 1916. However, the publication describing the collection (Bangs 1916) states 1911 and is labeled as "printed for the museum" in March 1916, i.e., several month before the collection effort would have ended (month of July) had it taken place in 1916.]

Grand Cayman Thrush went extinct during the last 100 years: the last sighting was of a single bird in 1938 (C.B. Lewis in litt. to Johnston 1969, also mentioned in Bond 1956:128).

No fossil remains of this species havebeen detected (Morgan 1994, personal communication).