I can't resist adding a few comments. First, Linda, I urge you to strongly
resist anyone's attempt to put the list in alphabetical order; as I try to
teach beginners about birding, I I emphasize that they have to start to
organize their thinking around useful ornithological categories, which
formally correspond to the various orders, suborders, families, etc. of the
Class Aves (though, clearly, people don't have to learn the formal names).
It really isn't as hard as it might seem at first, but people who try to
avoid this approach will never be successful birders (by any measure of
success, except maybe a kind of naive enjoyment, as in "Oooh, lookit da
purty liddle birdie!").

Second, I'd use a term such as "taxonomic order" or "systematic order." The
term "phylogenetic order," to me, suggests a kind of contradiction. The
phylogenetic tree of birds, regardless of who draws it, will be a
two-dimensional, branching array, and there's really no way to turn such a
tree into a unique, linear list of species. So as some other folks have
written, it is traditional to get around this fact by first listing what
appears to be the most ancient clade, then the next, and so on. (A clade is
a branch consisting of an ancestral species and all the species that have
subsequently arisen from it.) And then, of course, within a large clade you
have to apply the same procedure to smaller clades and still smaller clades.
If you do this consistently and carefully, you get a list in which closest
relatives--that is, species that have arisen most recently from some common
ancestor--will become nearest neighbors in the list.

The final point is just that people's lists will differ. Patricia Lott
mentioned three lists with significant differences. It's the nature of the
science game. Opinions about phylogeny will change with newer information
and with reliance on different techniques, such as the question of how much
weight to give the DNA-DNA hybridization work of Sibley and Monroe. But if
you've learned the duck-goose-swan category, whether you call it
Anseriformes or not, and if you've learned to observe the differences
between marsh-dabbling and sea-bay-diving ducks (which is critical for
starting to become a good birder), you won't care much whether this clade
appeared earlier or later than the loon clade. And I think you'll forgive
the AOU folks if they occasionally move the various groups around in the
list.

Burt Guttman guttmanb at evergreen.edu
The Evergreen State College
Olympia, WA 98505 360-456-8447
Home: 7334 Holmes Island Road S.E., Olympia 98503