Tag: birds
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Should the Red Grouse be split from Willow Ptarmigan?
There’s some part of me that couldn’t help but get a bit patriotic when the IOC announced that the Red Grouse (Lagopus (lagopus) scotica) would be split from the Willow Ptarmigan (Lagopus lagopus). On face value, it seemed an obvious choice, with large moult and plumage differences between the two putative species. The sources used…
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In defence of splitters: ‘taxonomy gone crazy’ or exciting advances in scientific understanding?
After reading two papers providing compelling evidence for a three-way dunnock split, satisfied with the methods and conclusions reached, I sat down, downloaded the PDFs of each of the papers and got ready to annotate them, ready to draft a new post on the blog. However, a quick google search later, and I quickly became…
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Taxonomy of the Lesser Whitethroat complex: a review of the current literature
Desert Whitethroat (Curruca minula), Hume’s Whitethroat (C. althaea) and Lesser Whitethroat (C. curruca) have been lumped by the IOC just years after their initial split. What new research, if any, supports this decision? And what research justified their initial split in the first place? This time last year, a sleep deprived me found himself in…
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Mediterranean Shearwater lump: no more Yelkouan and Balearic?
As a kid studying my battered copy of Collins Bird Guide, shearwaters and petrels always confused me. The prospect of a pelagic or even a scope to use for seawatching seemed impossible to me, so my only choice was to read about them and compare plates instead of actually going out and seeking them. A…
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The Lesser Sand Plover split: a review of the supporting literature and identification of the resulting species.
UPDATE: I managed to get iframe embeds to work, so you no longer have to click quite as many links The IOC has recently accepted the proposed split of Lesser Sand Plover (Charadrius mongolus) into Siberian Sand Plover (C. mongolus) and Tibetan Sand Plover (C. atrifrons). Sand Plovers have always been notoriously hard to identify,…