Subject: Re: solitary vireo split
Date: Sep 27 20:55:32 1997
From: Hal Opperman - halop at accessone.com


>Paul Duval writes:
>
>> Could anyone suggest a reference to llok up a few of these changes,
>>some of which may also have been overlooked.
>
>Paul [says Michael Price], there's a website with all the recent changes
>on it >plus the complete North American checklist in the newer sequence:

http://www.bcpl.lib.md.us/~tross/nabirds.html

A word of caution:

The "official" check-list is the one maintained by the American
Ornithologists' Union (AOU), and they do not put it out on a web site.
Until the seventh edition of their Check-list is published, probably early
next year, the "official" list is the sixth edition (1983) as modified by
the Supplements that appear in the July issue of Auk in each odd-numbered
year. The most recent of these details numerous radical changes in the
ordering of families, genera, and species. It also hints at other such
radical changes that will appear in the forthcoming new edition of the
Check-list, but does not spell these out.

The check-list in the above referenced web site is *not* an official AOU
list, nor is any of the several other, more or less similar lists that can
be found on other web sites. The one above differs from the "authentic"
(i.e., published) AOU list notably in the sequence of the waterfowl
(Anseriformes). This is one of the cases where the July 1997 Supplement in
Auk does indeed state that a rearrangment will occur in the seventh
edition, but (maddeningly) does not reveal what the actual arrangement is
going to be. For the Anseriformes,the author of the above check-list is
basing himself on scuttlebut (which will probably turn out to be accurate
scuttlebut). Nonetheless, until the new AOU Check-list is actually
published, the canonical sequence of the waterfowl species remains as it
was before, i.e., the way we are used to seeing it and *not* the way it
appears on this web site.

***************************************************************
Hal Opperman - P. O. Box 286 - Medina, Washington 98039 - USA
halop at accessone.com - phone (425) 635-0503 - fax (425) 635-0271
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