HI ALL:
I thought someone might be interested in this?

Ian "Birdbooker" Paulsen
Bainbridge Is., WA, USA
ipaulsen at linknet.kitsap.lib.wa.us
"Rallidae all the way"

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Fri, 11 May 2001 10:08:25 -0600
From: Barb Beck <barb at BIRDNUT.OBTUSE.COM>
To: BIRDWG01 at LISTSERV.ARIZONA.EDU
Subject: Re: [BIRDWG01] Field Identification of Western Flycatcher sp. in
Alberta

Hi Field ID specialists,

Thank you for all of the informative replies. Dick Cannings has contacted
and his message is at the end of mine.

The fact that a species is mixed up in Alberta is no big surprise. Lots of
species hybridize to a certain extent here and we are a notorious mixing
bowl for eastern and western subspecies. But this problem looks a lot
bigger than just Alberta. Even Kevin Colvers Utah COFL on the Western
Stokes is far different from those from Colorado and much closer to our
birds. In fact Kevin said my bird sounded like an agitated COFL in his
area.

I have not yet seen Dicks paper but have asked for a copy and suggested that
if he is not going to publish it at least put it up on the web.

BTW I am still slogging through 15 years of recordings. In the next cut on
the tape from my bird there is in the background of a Winter Wren song a
WEFL doing a very nice PSFL call - long first part but not as upslurred as
the California birds. Two other background birds found so far seem
intermediate but there is a lot of noise in their recordings.

In my next life I am coming back as a photographer - much easier to sort out
what you have!

Barb Beck
Edmonton

-----Original Message-----
From: Dick Cannings [mailto:dickcannings at home.com]
Sent: May 9, 2001 8:50 AM
To: Barb.Beck at ualberta.ca
Cc: "Eric Tull" <
Subject: Western Flycatchers


Hi Barb:

Eric Tull passed on your message to the Alberta birds group about Western
Flycatcher vocalizations in Alberta. I studied these vocalizations for a
few years back in the late 80s and early 90s and tried to publish a paper in
the Auk about it, but it never got passed Ned Johnson's review. My
contention is that this taxon is nicely separate if you look at coastal vs.
southwest (i.e. Utah and Arizona) birds, but the vocalizations of these
birds in the interior of BC, WA, AB, ID and MT show complete intergradation.
Since vocalizations are innate in Empidonax, that suggests genetic
intergradation as well. The vocalizations change in about a dozen ways, but
these characters change at different rates. Calls are more or less useless
in getting a definitive ID (and even Ned Johnson, who split the species,
admits that), since some birds (e.g. one recording I have from Lake Louise)
give both Cordilleran and Pacific-slope calls back-to-back.

As you can see from the sonagrams, the songs change in several ways, but
only one of these characters changes immediately as you go over the coastal
divide. That is the addition of a new note into the middle of the "ptik"
portion of the song (nicely shown in your Alberta example). Johnson
confuses the issue by describing this in terms of "up-down" (Cordilleran)
vs. "down-up" (Pacific-slope), but what it really is, is a new note that is
higher than the last note in intergrade populations and on equal pitch in
pure Cordilleran populations. I could send you my rejected manuscript if
you like to give you more detail on this.

In a nutshell, I recorded over 40 songs from the interior of BC, AB and WA,
and only one could be considered pure Pacific-slope; none were pure
Cordilleran.

You could pass this on to the Alberta birders listserve if you like.

Dick Cannings
1330 Debeck Road
S11, C96, RR#1
Naramata, BC
V0H 1N0

250-496-4049