This seamount southeast of Florida and north of Cuba is a giant sandbar at the point where the Gulf Stream splits and heads primarily north towards Florida with that small stream moving east along Cuba's Coast. The bank has fantastic coral reef ecosystems and a series of limestone cays around the edge of the bank. Because it is remote and inhospitable to humans, it retains large seabird populations.
The dean of Bahamian ornithologists, Alexander "Sandy" Sprunt, who recently passed away, estimated a total of 800 Bridled Terns, 20,000 Sooty Terns, and 3,500 Brown Noddies nesting on the cays on the bank in 1996. No formal surveys have been conducted since then, but we do have reports from Haitian refugees who were stranded on one of the cays and survived by eating Audubon's Shearwaters.
This site is known for its birds and its coral. Both are in danger from the oil spill. I hope we can get some survey teams out this summer to assess the status there.
Bruce Hallett and Tony White, two experts on the birds of the Bahamas did visit Cay Sal Bank in 1999. In his chapter on the Seabirds of the Bahamas for Bradley and Norton's 2009 book(http://www.amazon.com/Inventory-Breeding-Seabirds-Caribbean/dp/0813033292), Hallett refers to an April trip to the cays where they found 6 nesting pairs of Audubon's Shearwaters and hundreds of dead shearwaters at Elbow Cay. These numbers indicate that a large population of shearwaters is nesting there. As to the piles of carcasses that Bruce attributed to Cuban refugees surviving on the island, I can't say . . .
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