Renee Robinette Ha at the University of Washington seems to be the only person doing work on the Northwestern Crow.

At the last talk I saw her give (at REI Flagship store on Thursday, February 17, 2011 - I recorded this talk) she presented pretty good mitochodrial DNA evidence for the Northwestern Crow being a distinct species. I talked to her after the talk and she said funding was a problem for this work (her primary interest is animal behavior) and it really needed some nuclear DNA work to confirm the result before publication but funding was tight.

Her paper on these results

Ha, R.R., Walsh, H., Diniz, F.M., Bentzen, P. The biogeography of north american crows based on control region mtDNA.

is still "in preparation".

Still it's the best data I've seen for Northwestern Crow being a distinct species.

From what she said in the talk the best location for Northwestern Crow is on beaches/intertidal zones in the northern Puget Sound e.g. Whidbey Island and north into BC and up the Inside Passage to southern AK.

Her other Corvus caurinus papers are at http://faculty.washington.edu/robinet/rlrcrow.htm

Otherwise the most comprehensive overview is in BNA with a similar distribution

http://bna.birds.cornell.edu/bna/species/407/articles/introduction

or free access if you have a Seattle Public Library card

http://bna.birds.cornell.edu.ezproxy.spl.org:2048/bna/species/407/articles/introduction

The Priorities for Future Research makes interesting reading if you wish to "adopt a species" for a project.
--
Kevin Purcell (Capitol Hill, Seattle, WA)
kevinpurcell at pobox.com
http://kevinpurcell.posterous.com
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