Subject: Taxonomical Stuff (was: American Pipits)
Date: Apr 23 22:27:28 1999
From: Michael Price - mprice at mindlink.bc.ca


Hi Tweets,

Please forgive any typos; my keyboard's slowly developing some kind of weird
aphasia. The resulting incoherencies, unlike my earlier ones, are
unintentional. '-)

Bill Rietveld writes:

>I can't find American Pipits Anthus rubescens in either "Field Guide
>to Birds of North America" or "Golden Books". In a first addition
>Peterson's I found American Pipit listed as Anthus Spinoletta. Is this a
>new classification?

Yep, Bill, some years ago, when the prevailing ornithological paradigm
stressed the similarities of species to the expense of their differences,
lumping similar taxa was the fashion. Then DNA and other types of molecular
work for the most part demonstrated the singular nature of many of the
members of a 'lumped' group and the resulting effect was a new wave of
'splitting'.

In that context, until the 1970's and 1980's, the majority scientific
opinion considered Water Pipit Anthus spinoletta to be a circum-hemispheric
species with a number of different races. About a decade or so ago,
ornithological judgement changed and deemed there to be no justification to
keep the Palearctic races and the Nearctic races lumped and accordingly
split the North American race off and renamed it American Pipit
(Buff-breasted in the UK) Anthus rubescens. They retained the name Water
Pipit and its nominate taxonomic A. spinoletta spinoletta for one of the two
races found in Britain, the other is Rock Pipit A.s. petrosus. I can't
remember if they split those guys up, too. Seems to me there was a
East-Euro/Baltic race in this stew as well, A.s. littoralis, but I don't
know how that one works. Someone with the new Handbook of the Birds of the
Western Palaearctic (BWP) CD would be more up to speed on the contemporary
relationships within that group.

So, as you have just had a first lesson, Bill, the interesting result is
that the term 'standardised' as applied to Latin taxonomic and colloquial
bird names, as in 'standardised bird names', is another example of Birders'
English, that is, incorrect usage. By definition, a standard cannot be
changed, only replaced, but scientists change those names seemingly as
frequently as the rest of us change our socks. The adjective 'provisional'
would be more accurate. A Latin bird name which has survived unaltered for
even as short a time as a quarter of a century is a comparative taxonomic
greybeard. The consequence of that is that to a greater or lesser extent,
any field guide is, from a nomenclatural point of view, already old news on
the day it's published.

In Europe, there is currently a large, multinational study of the big
white-headed Larus gulls in process, which includes intensive study of the
very complex relationships among the *many* races and types of Herring Gull
L. argentatus, many of which seem to be actual species. I can tell you, it's
a real mess there, with all kinds of ongoing range-expansions, new
hybridisms/intergradations, hard looks at DNA relationships, migrational
dynamics, plumage and structural differences, and everything else. Birders
are annoyed that the men and women conducting it won't publish immediately.
They were told flatly that there was no point in releasing the data
piecemeal and forcing semiannual revisions of field-guides, but instead the
study groups will release its finding and conclusions in entirety but only
when the work is done and digested. That way, there will be a that
long-overdue comprehensive overhaul of that argentatus complex, which is
currently a dog's-breakfast of hybrids, intergrades, and many, many races
where the educated guess is as much a natural part of the day's
gull-watching as a definitive identification. A tough-minded, intelligent
approach that I'm sure has the field-guide publishers on their knees every
night before beddiebyes thanking the Little Lord Jesus they will have to do
only one big revision rather than listening to eight or ten years' worth of
grumbling from the buying public that they're getting rich on the backs of
birders by always bringing out a new guide every year.

Is there a similar study of our own gull species' tangles? Not that I've
heard of.

That's the short answer.

Michael Price
Vancouver BC Canada
mprice at mindlink.net