Tweets:

Steve Mlodinow and Michael Fleming both noticed a major oversight in the species count in my previous posting: I missed including the split of Blue Grouse into Dusky and Sooty Grouse.

Which would push the total to 500 species, right?

Wrong, because I also missed the fact (pointed out by Steve) that sometime between 2003 and now the WBRC revoked the citizenship of Mute Swan. So we're right back at 499.

That's the bad news. The good news is, you still could be the birder who bags number 500, so get out there!

For the record, the baseline is the 478 species in the annotated checklist at the back of the ABA Washington guide (published 2003). This was in squeaky clean conformity with WBRC decisions as of, I think, the end of 2002.

The authority I took for the current list is the one revised this month by Dennis Paulson and posted to the Slater Museum website, as announced on Tweeters. I used it rather than the "official" WBRC checklist available on the WOS website because the latter has not been revised since April 2008. The omission of the extra grouse, and the failure to delete the swan, are my errors, not Dennis's.

Hal Opperman
Medina, Washington
hal at catharus.net