Birds of Greenland

Greenland is home to 58 species of annually breeding birds, with about 50 more non-breeding species occurring regularly. To these numbers can be added a large number of visitors and vagrants, and if these are included, a total of 269 species of birds have been recorded in Greenland. Following a brief introduction to Greenland’s history, politics, climate, and geography, and a description of Greenland’s ornithology, this annotated and updated checklist records the occurrence of all the bird species encountered in Greenland up to May 2026. Distribution maps are presented for the regularly breeding species, based on the author’s own observations as well as published and unpublished accounts from Greenland, totalling more than 13,000 records. Since the previous list issued by the author in 1994, three species have established viable breeding populations in Greenland. In addition, vagrants have been recorded from as far away as the Pacific, Mongolia, Southeast Europe and the subtropical US. The occurrence of new vagrants such as these in Greenland may be related to climate change. The taxonomy is updated according to international practice, which means that several subspecies from the previous list now are treated as species.