Two New Birds

From Rocky Ridge, Ohio, Kenn writes: If you’ve traveled much in North America, especially in the West, your life list may soon go up by two species.

Something to sing about: we may have three meadowlark species.

The October 2008 issue of The Auk, the scientific journal of the American Ornithologists’ Union (AOU), was mailed late, and I just received my copy. But among the technical papers in this issue were two that could affect how some birds are classified. One study presented evidence that North America has three species of meadowlarks, not two. Another paper gave evidence that the Western Scrub-Jay should be split into two species.

Changes like this won’t become official until they’re voted on by the AOU’s Committee on Classification and Nomenclature (more affectionately known as the AOU Check-list Committee). This is the committee that establishes the standardized names and species limits that we see in field guides and bird checklists for North and Central America. But with the publication of these two new studies, it becomes likely that the committee will split these birds, perhaps as early as next July.

Meadowlarks in North America have long been divided into two species: the Western Meadowlark (Sturnella neglecta) in the West (naturally), and the Eastern Meadlowlark (Sturnella magna) in the East as well as in desert grasslands of the Southwest. Many experts have already pointed out that the desert-grassland "Easterns" look and sound somewhat different from those in the East. It had been suggested that they might represent a separate species. Now there’s good evidence for that: Keith Barker, Arion Vandergon, and Scott Lanyon studied mitochondrial DNA and other genetic markers for meadowlarks from all parts of their range, and found that the desert-grassland population was very distinct. Sturnella lilianae would be the scientific name of the "new" species; its English name might be Lilian’s Meadowlark, but the AOU will have to decide. Whatever it’s called, if you’ve seen "Eastern Meadowlarks" in southern Arizona or New Mexico or far western Texas, you can count them as this new species as soon as it’s officially "split."

Western Scrub-Jay: scrub that name, replace it with two others.

As recently as the 1980s, we had just one species of "Scrub Jay" in North America. Then the Florida Scrub-Jay and the Island Scrub-Jay (of Santa Cruz Island, California) were classified as separate species. Now there’s good reason to say that the remaining population, currently called Western Scrub-Jay, is really two species. Kathleen Delaney, Saba Zafar, and Robert Wayne studied the DNA of these jays and found that they divided into two groups that probably have been isolated from each other for more than 300,000 years. These authors suggest dividing Western Scrub-Jay into two species: California Scrub-Jay (Aphelocoma californica), a more richly colored bird found from extreme southern Washington south to Baja, and Woodhouse’s Scrub-Jay (Aphelocoma woodhouseii), a duller and grayer bird found from Nevada and extreme eastern California east to Texas. (Brian Small and I will be talking about this split in our "I.D. Tips" column in the March-April 2009 issue of Birder’s World.) There's a messy spot in western Nevada where the two may be interbreeding, and there's a population in southern Mexico that may be yet another separate species, Sumichrast's Scrub-Jay. But the split of the Western looks likely.

Again, neither of these splits will be official until the AOU's committee votes on them. But if you’ve seen them, you can count them as soon as the split is formalized -- so don’t pass up a chance to see birds like this and, so to speak, "put them in the bank." Or just enjoy such subtle variations, whether they count for any kind of list or not!

Changes at National Audubon

From Oak Harbor, Ohio, Kenn writes: It’s not easy being the president of the National Audubon Society (NAS). This is a very large and very decentralized organization, with hundreds of local chapters that often act autonomously. Many of these chapters have been in existence for a very long time and have developed very strong personalities, so to speak, and in some cases there has been friction between the chapters and the national office for decades. Then there’s an identity problem: the media may think of Audubon as a birdwatching organization, but the birdwatchers think of it as an environmental organization. The truth is that it’s somewhere in between, an environmental org focused on birds, wildlife, and their habitat. The president of this group has to juggle all kinds of conflicting personalities, and at the same time, try to save the world.

I have worked for National Audubon (not as an employee, but continuously on contract) for 25 years now, first as associate editor of American Birds (which they published until the late 1990s) and more recently as a field editor for Audubon Magazine. For the last 15 years of that time, the president of Audubon has been a dynamic, hard-working individual named John Flicker. Despite being named for a bird, he’s not mainly a bird person. He was trained in law and he did impressive things with The Nature Conservancy before coming to NAS. But when the situation called for it, John would get out there in the field with the Audubon troops, pursuing bird sightings with zest and energy. He did everything with zest and energy, and he accomplished a lot in his time at Audubon.

Left: John Flicker. Right: Northern Flicker. Illustrations not to scale.

The news this week was that Flicker is stepping down as NAS president, going on to do different things. Already, some people are offering assessments of his term. John was a major believer in the value of Audubon Centers, and he pushed an initiative called a “2020 Vision” that aimed to open a thousand such centers by the year 2020. I don’t think the initiative is on track to hit that one thousand mark (after all, that would be about one per week for 20 years), but many Audubon Centers have opened and they are already having a fabulous positive influence -- for example, here in Ohio, the Grange Insurance Audubon Center, right in the heart of Columbus, is perfectly situated to reach a large urban audience and teach them about nature. Many other centers are also up and running. So even if the effort falls short of 1,000 by 2020, it would be totally wrong to call it a failure.

I’ve heard a few people comment that NAS lost members during John Flicker’s term. That’s true in a narrow sense, but the fact is that the majority of membership organizations and publications have declined in the last 15 years, as people have gotten more and more of the same benefits from joining online communities. I think it’s a credit to Flicker that Audubon is still as strong as it is.
National Audubon is launching a search for the next president. But in the meantime, big news for birders is that the interim head of NAS will be Dr. Frank Gill, Audubon’s senior scientist. Frank is a world-class ornithologist and a remarkable dynamo who has done so many things that it’s hard to keep track of them all. Like some of the very best ornithologists, he started off as a rabid kid birder, and he went on to do research that took him all over the world: studying sunbirds in Africa, white-eyes and seabirds on islands in the Indian Ocean, hermit hummingbirds in South America, as well as landmark studies of warblers and chickadees in North America. He headed up the bird department at the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia for several years before going to Audubon as senior vice-president for science. While at the Academy, he started project VIREO (the world’s foremost scientific collection of bird photos) and launched the Birds of North America project (now online at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology). He was responsible for the worldwide list of standardized bird names of the International Ornithological Congress. His textbook on Ornithology, now in its third edition, is a standard college text.

I could go on about what he’s done. But mainly I wanted to add a personal note. Frank has been a friend of mine since the late 1980s, when I worked for him at the Academy for a couple of years; and in addition to being a great ornithologist, he’s also a great birder, and tons of fun to hang out with. At the Academy and later at the Audubon offices, a familiar sound was Frank’s booming laugh echoing down the hallway. Conversation with him is always a dizzying experience; he comes up with enough new ideas in a day to keep a normal person occupied for a year. A day in the field with him is a combination of perceptive birding, deep insights, and crazy jokes, in about equal measures. Frank Gill is brilliant, dynamic, down-to-earth, and totally dedicated to birds. He’s only the interim president of Audubon, but while he’s in charge there, the organization is definitely in good hands.

The press release from NAS is here:

Diversity and the Future of Birding, part 2

From Oak Harbor, Ohio, Kenn writes: A few days ago (August 24) I wrote about the lack of diversity in the birdwatching community. This issue has bugged me for some time, but on the other hand, I’m encouraged to know some individuals who are actively doing something about it.

John C. Robinson has been a friend for several years. We had corresponded before we met, so I knew he was an expert birder before I knew he was African-American. John has been a writer and consultant on a number of topics, but with his status as a black bird expert, it was perhaps only natural that he would become a spokesperson on the issue of diversity in birding and outdoor recreation. At a conservation summit before the Midwest Birding Symposium in 2003, I heard John speak on this subject, and he was very persuasive and compelling. More recently he has published a book that addresses the same issue, Birding for Everyone: Encouraging People of Color to Become Birdwatchers. It’s a thought-provoking work that offers some real solutions.

More than a decade ago I was already an admirer of Dudley Edmondson’s spectacular nature photography, especially of the birds of prey. Indeed, I arranged to use some of his images in my Kaufman Field Guide to Birds of North America, published nine years ago. Later I found out that this very successful professional nature photographer also was African-American, and had begun to turn his camera toward human subjects as well. He felt that the lack of diversity in the outdoors was partly because people of color didn’t see role models taking part in birdwatching and other outdoor activities, so Dudley has made a point of finding, photographing, and interviewing the exceptions. One result of this work is his fine book, Black and Brown Faces in America’s Wild Places, which is accomplishing great things by highlighting a diverse set of "outdoor role models."

These two guys are both dedicated to this cause of increasing diversity in the field. Here’s just one random piece of evidence: when I was struggling to get my North American bird guide translated into Spanish and then published, John Robinson and Dudley Edmondson were both very encouraging. I hadn’t even met Dudley at that point, but as soon as he heard about the project, he called me up to offer moral support.

Speaking of the Spanish-language bird guide, another person who is doing great things for outdoors diversity is Tamberly Conway, at Stephen F. Austin State University in Texas. She has been working with the U.S. Forest Service in Texas to promote a program called "Latino Legacy: Amigos del Bosque" (Friends of the Forest). This innovative program has had great success in reaching out to the Hispanic community and getting families to connect with nature on National Forest lands. We haven’t met her yet, but she and her colleague Maricruz Flores, one of the team leaders for Amigos del Bosque, will be coming to Ohio - - along with John Robinson and Dudley Edmondson - - to speak at our conference, Diversity in Outdoor Recreation: The Many Faces of Conservation, September 26 in Toledo. You can read all about that event on the Black Swamp Bird Observatory website here.

ABA: Inclusiveness

Mallard on the park pond, Yellow-bellied Flycatcher at the migrant trap, Wandering Albatross over the Drake Passage: would you enjoy looking at any of these birds? If so, you're a good birder.

From Oak Harbor, Ohio, Kenn writes: The intense discussions this summer regarding the future of the American Birding Association (ABA) have led some people to question just who the organization should be for. Predictably, a few have suggested that it should be a group designed for "good birders." I have strong opinions about that idea, I’ve expressed them in the past in other settings, and I want to repeat them here.

Forgive me if it seems immodest for me to quote from myself. But I wrote something a long time ago that still seems relevant:

"Birding is something that we do for enjoyment; so if you enjoy it, you’re a good birder. If you enjoy it a lot, you’re a great birder."

I wrote that back in the 1980s, and apparently it rang a bell with some people. The editors of British Birds were kind enough to quote it in their fine magazine. Roger Tory Peterson quoted it in the introduction to the 1990 edition of his Field Guide to Western Birds. (Peterson had been my lifelong role model, and you can imagine what a thrill it was to be quoted by my own hero, the man who was the world’s most influential birder at the time.) Later I used this same phrase in the introduction to my own Kaufman Field Guide to Birds of North America. So the thought has been out there for a while, but I wanted to repeat it.

Birding is something that we do for enjoyment, so if you enjoy it, you’re a good birder. If you enjoy it a lot, you’re a great birder. I think the American Birding Association will need to adopt that attitude as they go forward. Become a group for all those good birders -- for everyone who enjoys it -- and try to make them into great birders by helping them to enjoy it even more. In fact, the ABA could claim to have some initial ownership of the idea, because I first thought of it after taking part in a panel discussion at an ABA convention. I wrote it in a letter to Jim Tucker, who was then still the executive director of ABA, and he liked it enough that he printed it in Birding magazine as a letter to the editor. So it first saw the light of day in ABA’s magazine.

Do you enjoy birding? If your answer is "yes," it doesn’t matter whether you’re watching the finches in the back yard or trekking off to Borneo to look for Bristleheads, you’re one of us. You’re a good birder. I hope the American Birding Association will make a strong comeback and offer an enhanced experience to all of us.

A Link to the Falklands

From cyberspace, Kenn writes: If we're on schedule, today we'll be on the Falklands, those cold but beautiful rocky islands east of the southern tip of South America. We probably won't be able to post from out there. But for a taste of what we might be seeing, you can check out Alan Henry's blog, Birding in the Falkland Islands. Alan has lived in the Falklands since 1987 and is an expert on the birdlife there. Naturally, it's exciting for him to find birds that are rare on the islands -- including visitors that would be common for us in North America, like Barn Swallow and Lesser Yellowlegs. But he also includes photos of his everyday local birds, like Falkland Steamer Ducks and Rockhopper Penguins!

Thanks For The Mammal Reads

From Oak Harbor, Ohio, Kenn writes: Way back last year -- on December 25th -- I wrote a post about a wild animal that we observed at our bird feeder. In case you don’t remember or didn’t see the post, here’s another picture of this wily creature:

Actually, if you didn’t read it, I’d like you to scroll back to Dec. 25 and read that post and tell me: could you tell that I was trying to be humorous, or was it just too subtle?

The reason I ask is that, in that post, I didn’t mention what kind of squirrel it was. I was trying to strike a familiar chord with all those people who have had their bird feeders emptied by voracious squirrels. This has happened to a lot of people, but it isn’t always the same kind of squirrel. In the U.S. and Canada there are at least eight species of tree squirrels, plus various ground squirrels and chipmunks, that will come to bird feeders at least occasionally. If I had started to get technical about the particular type of squirrel that was chowing down at our feeder, the post would have bogged down in detail.

It was sort of like saying: "Don’t you hate it when your neighbor’s dog barks all night?" instead of saying, "Don’t you hate it when your neighbor’s three-year-old female beagle-spaniel mix with three white paws and one brown paw barks all night?" If your statement is more general, it’s easier for people to relate.

Anyway, after that blog post was published, I got three anonymous comments -- one mild, two (not published) pointedly snarky -- taking me to task for not identifying the species of squirrel. "Do you think all squirrels are the same kind?" "Are you so narrow-minded that you can’t even identify the squirrels in your own yard?"

So -- okay, the animal at our feeder was an Eastern Fox Squirrel. Our area of northwest Ohio also hosts Eastern Gray Squirrel and Red Squirrel, as well as Southern Flying Squirrel, but the Eastern Fox Squirrel is more common out in the farm country with scattered towns and scattered groves of trees.

To quote from published information: "Very common in many areas east of the Rockies, in open woods and parklike areas with large scattered trees and an open understory. It is often found in the same forests as the Eastern Gray Squirrel, but because it favors more open habitats, it is more numerous in the midwest ... Less arboreal than some of its relatives, this squirrel spends a lot of time foraging on the ground ... Like most tree squirrels, Eastern Fox Squirrels have a varied diet. Acorns and other nuts are staple items, but they also eat flowers, buds, seeds, bark, fungi, birds’ eggs, insects, and sometimes carrion. They also raid bird feeders, but because they are not as agile as Eastern Gray Squirrels, they are more easily foiled by strategic placement of feeders in places they can’t reach."

I’m happy to say that the source of that information is the Kaufman Field Guide to Mammals of North America, written by Nora Bowers, Rick Bowers, and myself, published in 2004 with a slight update in 2007. So, um, to answer the question from one person who commented on the Dec. 25 post: Yes, I do know what kind of squirrel it was.

The book’s treatment of Eastern Fox Squirrel includes a full page of text, a range map, a diagram of the tracks, and six color illustrations. That’s more detail than some species receive, but every North American mammal is treated in the book. I hope I don’t sound too horribly conceited in mentioning this book, but I'm proud of the way it turned out. It’s an excellent guide -- not because of me, but because of hard work by Nora and Rick Bowers as writers and photographers, by Stacy Fobar as managing editor for the project, by Eric Powell on digital graphics, by expert consultants Christine Hass, Nancy Mann, and Ronnie Sidner, by my editor Lisa White at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, and by more than 50 photographers who contributed to the book. If you’re interested in wildlife, I would encourage you to consider picking up a copy.

Okay, enough of this. Who cares about mammals, anyway? Let’s get back to birds!

Eagle Grabs Baby: stupidity goes viral

Unlike the bird in the viral video, this actually is a Golden Eagle.

From Oak Harbor, Ohio, Kenn writes:  I have spent my whole life trying to teach people about nature.  When I see someone intentionally misleading the public with dangerously false ideas, and others repeating the misinformation without even attempting to fact-check it, I can’t help but be angry. 

Late at night on December 18, a video showed up on YouTube that purported to show a Golden Eagle swooping in to snatch a small child in a park in Montreal.  After a few labored wingbeats, gaining several feet off the ground, the eagle drops the child and flies away, while the videographer (screen name “MrNuclearCat”) rushes over for a closeup of the scene. 

After a few shares on Facebook, the video went viral, exploding all over the Internet.  By the morning of the 19th, the clip was being played on television news shows, and millions of people had seen it. 

But it’s faked. 

To determine that, you don’t have to know anything about computer graphics, or about the weight-lifting capacity of eagles.  All you have to do is look at the bird in the video.  A Golden Eagle in Montreal would be a notable rarity, but this bird is not a Golden Eagle at all.  The pattern of white in the wings immediately rules that out.  The exact identity of the bird is still being studied, but whatever it was—assuming it was a real bird at all, and not entirely computer-generated—it wasn’t anything native to North America. 

The sport of falconry—keeping hawks, falcons, or eagles in captivity, and training them to fly after prey—is still practiced.  Some falconers have exotic raptors that don’t occur in North America, or hybrids that don’t exist in the wild at all.  The bird in the video looks most similar to certain eagles in Asia or Australia.  The most likely explanation is that this was a falconer’s bird, and that it was trained to perform this stunt for the video. 

So:  was it a real baby in the video?  If so, using the child for this stupid stunt was a crime of child endangerment, and the authorities should be looking for “MrNuclearCat.”

Was a falconer’s bird trained to swoop in and pick up a doll that looks like a child?  If so, that is insanely stupid; it would never be safe to take that bird out in public again. 

Were large parts of the video simply done with computer graphics?  If so, why?  Why would anyone do this at all?  People in modern society are too far removed from nature as it is, and all too ready to believe scary stories about wild animals.  Why go to all this effort to create fear about harmless and beautiful birds?

Perhaps the most disheartening thing is the way the story spread, the way people were so willing to believe it.  Let me emphasize that I don't fault the individuals who saw it online and shared it; at first viewing, for most people, it probably looked both scary and realistic.  But I can't understand why several morning “news” shows on American television ran the video as if it were legitimate.  What ever happened to principles of journalism?  What ever happened to fact-checking? 

By now, a little over 12 hours after the video first appeared, it is being questioned in some online media.  I just spoke with Curtis Rush from the Toronto Star, who has already questioned the video online and is working on a second story, and this may help to get the facts out.  It would be wonderful if “MrNuclearCat” would post a follow-up, to explain how he made the video and to clarify that eagles don’t pose a threat to children. 

But people have limited attention spans, and any retraction or correction will never have the reach of the original video.  Vast numbers of people, only peripherally aware of nature in the first place, will come away with the lingering impression that eagles sometimes carry away babies, that nature is dangerous.  And that will represent one more sad break with reality, one more piece of damage done, one more falsehood to carry us all farther away from a real understanding of the natural world. 

UPDATE: It has just been confirmed that the video was produced for a class assignment by three students at Centre NAD, a school in Montreal.  Both the "eagle" and the baby were completely computer-generated.  More information at this link:

So no actual children were harmed or threatened in the making of this video.  But my final complaint about the video still stands; many people will never see the retraction, and they will be forever rendered a little more suspicious and fearful of the natural world, thus darkening their lives and the lives of their children.  

Never again would birds' song be the same

From Oak Harbor, Ohio, Kenn writes: It isn’t often that ornithologists get to document an abrupt change in the song of an entire species of bird, but this is exactly what happened less than four years ago.
Moreover, it happened with a very common bird, the White-throated Sparrow. This beautifully marked native sparrow nests across the eastern two-thirds of Canada and parts of the northeastern United States, winters commonly in most eastern states, with small numbers throughout the west. It’s a backyard bird for literally millions of bird watchers. You would expect that a sudden change in its song would command the attention of legions of birders. But as far as I know, only one reference book has documented this change in vocal pattern.

That reference (I must admit) was my own field guide. It was published in 2000 as the Kaufman Focus Guide to Birds of North America, with a brightly colored cover featuring a Scarlet Tanager. In 2004, however, the marketing department at the publishing company decided that they should change the name of the series from Kaufman Focus Guides to Kaufman Field Guides. So they designed a new cover, the current one that features a bright Yellow Warbler on a white background, and it was issued in early 2005.

I insisted that if we were going to change the cover design, I had to make some improvements to the interior of the book as well. They didn’t want me to do a complete revised edition (and besides, we were busy with the Kaufman Field Guide to Insects), but they said I could make essential changes: adding 8 pages to the introduction, improving a few illustrations, updating some maps, changing some scientific names to conform to the latest pronouncements of the American Ornithologists’ Union. And making an important change to the description of one bird’s voice.

If you find yourself in a position to compare the editions of the focus / field guide, look up the White-throated Sparrow. In the older edition it’s on p. 350, and its song is described as Oh, sweet, Canada-Canada-Canada. In the newer edition, White-throated Sparrow is on p. 358, and its song has changed to Oh, sweet, Kimberly-Kimberly-Kimberly.

Sorry, Canada, but those are the facts.

This morning Kim called me to the window. In the garden was a White-throated Sparrow, foraging on the ground, crisp and bright among the new frost. It had not been there the eve before, and this seemed a gift of this special day, as if song or laughter had carried it aloft and placed it here. The bird wasn’t singing but in my heart I could hear it anyway.

Invasion of the Thistle Snatchers

From Oak Harbor, Ohio, Kenn writes: The title from this post came from an e-mail we got yesterday, passed along from a naturalist at a nature center farther east in Ohio. Thistle snatchers -- yeah, they're talking about Pine Siskins. These sturdy little nomads have been showing up all over the place, little flocks bouncing around the fields and woodland edges all over the Midwest. I wrote about these birds back on October 14th -- see that post for more info.

It doesn't look like it at first glance, but the Pine Siskin is closely related to the American Goldfinch. In my Kaufman Field Guide to Birds of North America, I described it as looking "like a goldfinch in camouflage." And like the goldfinch, it's a major seed-eater. It likes the seeds of wild thistles, but it will come to bird feeders (often in the company of goldfinches) to eat Nyjer seed, which is often marketed as "thistle seed." One thing you'll notice, if you get siskins at your feeder, is that they're fearless. Goldfinches may get nervous and fly away if you approach within 20 feet, but the Pine Siskins will just glance at you with a bored expression -- "hunhh, who are you ..." -- and then go back to eating. Often you can walk right up and admire them up close. The streaky look, thin spiky bill, and flashes of yellow in the wings and tail will tell you for sure that you've got Pine Siskins. And this is the year to see them; they're still moving south in massive numbers. I expect we'll probably see some when we go to Cape May, New Jersey, later this week.

Bird Photo Quiz Quiz

From Birding Central, Kenn writes: Back when "publishing" always involved ink and paper, a Photo Quiz was popular in various bird magazines. A challenging photo (or two or three) would be presented in one issue of the magazine, with the answer(s) to be revealed in the next issue. Birders would study the photos and their field guides, discuss the quiz with their pals, then wait a month or two or three for the next issue to see if they’d gotten the answer right.

Today, in the age of online publishing, photo quizzes are legion. There are literally dozens of "mystery bird" photos posted every week on websites and blogs. Followers of these quizzes wait only days for the answers, not weeks or months. Other things have changed as well: birders researching a tricky photo today are more likely to look for pictures on the internet, and a fair percentage of those online photos will be misidentified or mislabelled. And when the online quiz posts its answer, there’s a chance that the answer will be wrong. So there’s a new kind of edgy challenge to the game.

Quizzes in print have a longer history. In the 1970s (when I was a rabid kid birder) we got our photo-quiz fix by looking at British Birds, a fine monthly that was then publishing more on identification than all the North American periodicals put together. A few of us crazed American and Canadian birders pored over every issue of British Birds, tried to work out the photo quiz, and then eagerly read the detailed answer to the previous month’s quiz. It was such an educational feature that we wondered why North American bird journals didn’t follow suit. But not until 1980 did Birding, the magazine of the American Birding Association, begin to run a regular photo quiz feature (a feature that continues today, by the way). I have warm feelings about the Birding photo quiz because I was in charge of it, writing the answers for almost every issue, for ten years, starting in the mid-1980s. But that wasn’t my first experience with writing photo quiz answers.

We’re not going to add one more online mystery photo to this week’s crop. Instead, we have a different kind of challenge, one that will test your knowledge of photography, publications, and the history of the birding community.

Here’s the question: What was the first publication in North America to run a regular bird photo identification quiz?

If you think you know the answer, or if you want to guess, send us a comment. If no one gets it, we’ll post the answer in a week. (Of course, a week from now is the 24th, and the guys will all be out doing their last-minute Christmas shopping, but ... ) The answer is sort of surprising. To entice you to enter, we’ll offer a prize (perhaps an autographed copy of a rare historical birding publication!).

BTB

From Oak Harbor, Ohio, Kenn writes: It’s an awfully small bird to have such a big name. The Black-throated Blue Warbler is maybe five inches long from the tip of its bill to the end of its tail. It weighs less than an ounce, even when it’s fattened up for its biggest journey of the year, which is happening right now. This warbler is on its way south, and by this date in late September, most of its kind have already headed to more southerly latitudes.

Birders and non-birders could be separated on the basis of their experience with warblers. Everyone has seen birds like geese, and everyone notices pelicans or eagles if they’re arround. But warblers are different: they mostly go unnoticed by most people, even while many birders regard them as favorites. North America has more than 50 kinds of warblers – small, active, colorful birds that flit among the leaves, feeding on insects. Most of them spend the winter in the tropics, coming north in a rush in spring, while birders rush out to look for them. Their southward migration in fall is not so celebrated, partly because many of them change into a duller fall plumage, making them harder to tell apart. But the male Black-throated Blue Warbler has a black throat and a blue back all year long.

Every species of warbler has its own distinct range. This male Black-throated Blue, which paused out behind the Black Swamp Bird Observatory in northern Ohio today, probably had come from somewhere in southern Canada, and it was almost certainly headed for wintering grounds somewhere in the Caribbean. Once when I was in Jamaica in winter I was amazed at how many Black-throated Blue Warblers I saw in the woods. These little migratory birds represent a shared treasure, to be enjoyed by citizens of several nations on their seasonal travels.

The new AOU Check-list supplement: more work for you speakers of Latin

A male Purple Finch pauses in mid-crunch to ask himself, "How do you pronounce Haemorhous, anyway?"

From Oak Harbor, Ohio, Kenn writes:  Every year now, birders in North America eagerly await the annual publication of the American Ornithologists' Union's Committee on Classification and Nomenclature - better known as the AOU Check-list Committee.  This is the committee of experts that makes the decisions about how our birds are classified, what is a full species and what is merely a subspecies, and what their official names should be.  Birders usually love it when a species is "split" (it could make our lists larger!) and hate it when two species are "lumped" (which could have the opposite effect).  And although the committee is not secretive about their deliberations, we never know for sure how things are going to turn out until the annual supplement in published, in the July issue of the AOU's journal, The Auk.

The supplement for 2012 has just appeared, and the changes this time are fairly conservative.  There's one split that increases the number of species recorded in North America north of the Mexican border, and no lumps this time.  The most notable changes are in the scientific names of several birds.  Those of us who enjoy memorizing these Latin names now will have to relearn several of them. 

First, the "split."  The little Pacific seabird called Xantus's Murrelet has been ripe for a split for quite some time: birders recognized that it had two populations with distinctly different face patterns.  Now those two will be regarded as separate species.  The one that breeds on islands off the coast of southern California and northwestern Baja, with a mostly dark face pattern, will now be called Scripps's Murrelet (Synthliboramphus scrippsi).  The one that breeds mainly on islands off of western Baja (and wanders north into California waters), with more white around the eye, will be called Guadalupe Murrelet (Synthliboramphus hypoleucus).

This split is well supported: both of these birds nest on San Benito Island off Baja without interbreeding, and they differ in face pattern, voice, and genetics.  The bad thing about the split, of course, is the loss of the name "Xantus's."  That could be a problem when we're playing word games with birds!

The other changes this time focus on changes in scientific names.  As ornithologists continue to learn more about relationships among birds, various birds are being moved from one genus to another.  Here's a brief rundown of just those name changes involving birds found north of the Mexican border.

Gray Hawk:
Buteo nitidus becomes Buteo plagiatus.
(Split from South American "Gray-lined Hawk," which keeps the name nitidus.)

Purple Gallinule:
Porphyrio martinica becomes Porphyrio martinicus.
(I know - earth-shaking, isn't it?)

Chuck-will's-widow:
Caprimulgus carolinensis becomes Antrostomus carolinensis.
Eastern Whip-poor-will:
Caprimulgus vociferus becomes Antrostomus vociferus.
Mexican Whip-poor-will:
Caprimulgus arizonae becomes Antrostomus arizonae.
(Sorry to see these taken out of the genus Caprimulgus, "milker of goats," because that was always a good name for weirding people out.  Incidentally, Eastern and Mexican whip-poor-wills were just split a couple of years ago.)

Calliope Hummingbird:
Stellula calliope becomes Selasphorus calliope.
(It always seemed as if it belonged with the Rufous types, and now it's official.)

Sage Sparrow:
Amphispiza belli becomes Artemisiospiza belli.
(Had been placed in the same genus with Black-throated Sparrow for a long time, but its different behavior, including its tail-bobbing and its habit of running on the ground with its tail raised, had suggested that it might not be a close relative.)

Purple Finch:
Carpodacus purpureus becomes Haemorhous purpureus.
Cassin's Finch:
Carpodacus cassinii becomes Haemorhous cassinii.
House Finch:
Carpodacus mexicanus becomes Haemorhous mexicanus.
(The latest information suggests that these birds are not closely related to the rosefinches, genus Carpodacus, of the Old World. The Common Rosefinch, which strays to Alaska, is still in its old genus.)

There are other changes that will affect your list if you bird south of the Mexican border, including changes in names of a number of wrens, an official split for the Galapagos Shearwater, and other alterations.  For the full text of the latest AOU supplement, here's a link:


One final note:  as Roger Troutman pointed out to me in an email, what could be considered the most significant change in the supplement is a change in the sequence.  Two major groups of birds - falcons and parrots - are being uprooted from their current position in the checklist, and moved to a completely different spot.  Falcons have been placed right after the typical hawks in the checklist sequence, and just before the cranes.  Parrots have been placed a little later in the list, after the doves but before the cuckoos, and still well before the owls, hummingbirds, swifts, and woodpeckers, all of which come before the huge group of songbirds.  Well - that's about to change.  Falcons and parrots are going to be placed after the woodpeckers, and just before the songbirds.

Say what?  Falcons not considered relatives of hawks?  Parrots considered to be practically songbirds?  This is going to call for a major shift in our thinking!  It also calls into question the practice of some field guides in slavishly following the official checklist order, rather than placing similar birds close together in the book.  I think I'll write something about that in a separate post.