Ray:
>I think it's helpful to people
>just getting into the area to keep a commonly used name like scrub jay
>for the main body of birds and to use geogrpahical attachments, where
>aprropriate, to describe the split. Thus Florida and Santa Cruz Island
>would be the best desciptive words to put in front of jay here.

I think this is particularly true in this case, where the two isolated
populations are relatively small and are separated from the bulk of
the members of the current species. The proposal here is to
carve an island population and a southeastern population which is
isolated by what, a couple of thousand miles of terrain into two
species distinct from the bulk of the population.

So, it makes sense to me to keep the current name for the big chunk
of the population, and invent meaningful geographically based
(geographically-based?) names for the two "splinter groups".

- Don Baccus, Portland OR <donb at rational.com>