Subject: [Tweeters] Northwestern Crow hybrid zone study published
Date: Wed Feb 12 10:51:06 PST 2020
From: Dave Slager - dave.slager at gmail.com

Hi Tweeters,

Since I know many of you are very interested in this topic, I'm happy
to pass along the word that my UW PhD research on the
American/Northwestern crow hybrid zone has now been peer reviewed and
published in a scientific journal. If you're interested in reading the
full research article, email me and I'll gladly send you a PDF copy.

It was also picked up yesterday by the online news site Gizmodo, which
wrote up a pretty nice summary of the research under the very
memorable headline "These Crows Evolved Into a New Species, Boned the
Old Species Too Much, Now Back Where They Started".

https://gizmodo.com/these-crows-evolved-into-a-new-species-boned-the-old-s-1841608425

Many of you are probably wondering what this means for listing crows
in Washington. Now that it's published, the American Ornithological
Society checklist committee will soon weigh whether it might be best
to lump Northwestern Crow into American Crow. If they decide to do
this (around July), eBird would automatically lump crow records
(around August), similar to what happened with Thayer's Gull a while
back. Until then, it's probably best to just stay the course and
report your sightings of American, Northwestern, or
American/Northwestern crows to eBird in your usual way.

Good birding,
Dave Slager
Seattle