Subject: Long-billed Murrelet article
Date: Feb 4 17:00:08 2004
From: Scott Atkinson - scottratkinson at hotmail.com


Ian and others:

An interesting note, and one that squares with my experience. While
Long-billed Murrelet may be recognized as a full species here, over in the
Russian Far East they retain the same Latin binomial that we have for
Marbled Murrelet, and so, although they have always used the common name
Long-billed, they do not recognize the split of the two. When I learned
this awhile back I wrote a friend in Kamchatka and joked that this was so
unlike them, I mean, they split everything, like Dusky/Naumann's Thrushes,
Yellow-backed/Yellow Wagtail, etc.! For the Russians, I guess it's a
situation not unlike the one for most of us Northwesterners on the AOU
retaining the NW Crow despite most of us not recognizing it, at least as
indicated in CBC data. LB Murrelet is fairly common along the shores of
s.e. Kamchatka; my own field experience (based on many trips there in the
90s) was that there was a lot more overlap with the Marbled Murrelet than
current field guides suggest. For example, other than the note Ian found, I
saw a number of fall birds that lacked the light nape spot ascribed to the
taxon, and bill lengths do not always appear to be uniformly elongate as
shown in our field guides. Other than bill length (sometimes), most birds
struck me as indistinguishable from our Marbleds, in either basic or
alternate. In this age of splitting, this one might well be a good case for
lumping.

Scott Atkinson
Lake Stevens
mail to: scottratkinson at hotmail.com


>From: Ian Paulsen <birdbooker at zipcon.net>
>Reply-To: birdbooker at zipcon.net
>To: BIRDWG01 at LISTSERV.ARIZONA.EDU
>CC: tweeters at u.washington.edu
>Subject: Long-billed Murrelet article
>Date: Wed, 4 Feb 2004 14:44:26 -0800 (PST)
>
>HI:
> I saw this article in the latest WESTERN BIRDS:
>
>Specimen record of a Long-billed Murrelet from Eastern Washington, with
>notes on plumage and morphometric differences between long-billed and
>marbled murrelets. Christopher Thompson, Kevin J. Pullen, Richard E.
>Johnson, and Eric Cummins. Page 157-168.
>
>The main identification point: "Contrary to many recent publications
>stating that long-billed and marbled murrelets have white and brown under
>wing coverts, respectively, we confirmed that both species typically have
>white under wing coverts prior to definitive prebasic molt and brown under
>wing coverts after this molt."
>
>--
>Ian Paulsen
>Bainbridge Island, WA, USA
>A.K.A.: "Birdbooker"
>"Rallidae all the way!"

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