Molt is a difficult topic for most ornithologists to comprehend, yet it is a vital component of almost all aspects of avian natural history. Conservation of birds will necessitate protecting locations and habitats for molt, but because birds become very retiring while molting we have almost no understanding of their requirements for this process on a species-specific basis. Our ability to determine the age and sex of birds, essential to tracking population demography, also depends almost entirely on an understanding of molt. In North America and Europe we are slowly making progress on this subject, but for the Neotropical Region we are still in the dark. For the 2006 North American Ornithological Congress in Veracruz, Mexico, I reviewed the literature and my unpublished notes and calculated that we had some (but often very little) information on molt for only 24% of 934 species of resident neotropical landbirds, and for only 8% of the species did we have information on both extent and timing of molts.