Hi Tweets,

>An issue that seems to have been overlooked by everyone discussing all
>of these issues regarding molt/plumage terminology is that the
>Humphrey-Parkes system was developed specifically as a means to
>identify and assign names to EVOLUTIONARILY HOMOLOGOUS
>plumages.

Unfortunately, you use this term without explaining it and I'm a bit blinded
by the science. I'm curious what it might mean or what it describes. Perhaps
you could expand on this to the list?

>Conceptually, this is what distinguishes H-P from all other
>nomenclatural systems. Trying to find OTHER rules for figuring out how
>to assign H-P names is doomed to failure.

I'm not sure this is quite so, Chris. Its basic concept seems quite
straightforward and accessible to amateurs, whatever more technical purposes
ornithologists use it for. Tell me if I'm wrong, but past the juvenile
feather-suite, the bird is in Basic or Alternate or molt between them,
whatever the components of that molt, whatever the finer-point reasonings
behind the terminology or its advanced applications. For ageing and ID, it
seems to work quite well even in the hands of amateurs such as myself.

>Which nomenclatural system
>one chooses to use depends in part on what your purpose/goal is. For
>me, as a scientist who is interested in the evolutiuon in molt/plumage
>patterns, the H-P system is clearly the best. For birders who may not
>care about evolutionary homology of plumages within species (e.g.
>between sexes), other systems may work fine.

Well, most birders are similarly interested in molt/plumage patterns, as
knowledge of those are are vital to successful identification. I've been
using HP (not on me chips, though; just on me birds) for almost a decade,
with a good degree of success, for the purposes of ageing the birds I see,
particularly shorebirds and gulls, where many species have transitional
plumages not illustrated in standard literature. I've found by experience
with these transitional plumages that using the H-P method helps me to
determine their current position in the species molt-sequence and age them
successfully, and that usually turns out to mean ID'ing them correctly
around 95% of the time. Using the other popular terminologies, that would
often be a hopeless task.

Another use, a personal, hopelessly unscientific one but an esthetic
one--and, dare I say it, even ultimately spiritual, if we follow the late
Joseph Campbell's definition of spirituality as being how the individual
relates to the universe-- is to try to attain a sense of observing the bird
as another individual creature living its life in the world, changing as it
does through the year, in company with all its brothers and sisters as they
live and move through our region in their great yearly cycles, of trying to
see *its* spirit in the mind's eye-- I'll stop there; it's way too easy to
get quite fulsome and overblown about that kind of stuff. The H-P system
was, for me, the first and so far only set of terms which gave me access to
something besides the bird's ID, and it was from its use that the other 98%
of the bird and its larger context began to emerge. For that alone, I'm
grateful it was invented.

>Regardless, to
>understand and apply the H-P system, one MUST go read the original
>paper (Auk 1959, no. 1 pages 1-31).

Well, Chris, I don't quite know what to say here. Perhaps 'should' is a more
apt term. I've been using the method successfully and correctly, so far as
is possible for a non-scientist, for years without reading the original
paper. I began using it after reading an article in ABA's 'Birding' in the
mid-1980's (perhaps someone could remember the issue?) which digested and
generalised the original H-P paper for the purposes of birders, and
described it as an alternative to the other various terminologies. At the
time it struck me as such a sensible system compared to the others that I
adopted it there and then, and learned it (making the usual amateur errors,
of course, and trying to learn from them). Personal experience with it
indicates it's maybe a more accessible method than you're stating, at least
at the amateur level of usage, for amateur purposes.

Michael Price A brave world, Sir,
Vancouver BC Canada full of religion, knavery, and change;
mprice at mindlink.net we shall shortly see better days.
Aphra Behn (1640-1689)