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Do nine-primaried oscines represent 16 different families?

10,000 Birds

Because this group is so rich in species, so readily able to exploit a wide range of environments and food sources, debates about how to classify these birds have smouldered for decades. Some scientists have lumped them all into one enormous family (e.g., Summer Tanager ( Piranga rubra ) by David J. Barker et al.

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Birds of Belize & Birds of Costa Rica: A Field Guide Review Doubleheader

10,000 Birds

An associated issue is that the Belize and Costa Rica guides share many of the same descriptions of species, written by Howell. Similarly, descriptions of species repeated across volumes do not lose their accuracy with each publication. Other species are splits and lumped and have had their names changed. Why are these issues?

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Birding Dongfang and Dongzhai on Hainan

10,000 Birds

The HBW reports that until recently several subspecies were commonly recognized, notably brevipes , ocularis , micronesiae , minima , leucophrys , meeki and tannensis , but that the differences are slight and the species is now treated as monotypic. I guess the red bill is the bird’s equivalent of wearing Playboy branded clothes.

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Rename All Birds Named After White People

10,000 Birds

This is the same history of conquest and despoliation which now puts many of these very species in danger of extinction. … Most birds were named by now dead white men who didn’t appreciate that most of the species they were “discovering” had already been discovered and had names. Well, no more!

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Peterson Field Guide to Birds of North America, Second Edition: A Field Guide Review

10,000 Birds

A Field Guide to the Birds: Giving Field Marks of All Species Found in Eastern North America was published in 1934 by Houghton Mifflin (note–Peterson was 26 years old), after being rejected by four publishers. Adding the 76 new species in the Hawaii section, this makes coverage of approximately 884 species.

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Emerald Ash Borers vs. Woodpeckers (and Nuthatches)

10,000 Birds

And with no natural predators or resistant trees in their adopted territory, things have been looking pretty grim. This research suggests that the boom isn’t due to an influx of newcomers, but rather because more local birds are flourishing and successfully rearing families. Enter the woodpecker.

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Bring back the Blue Tit

10,000 Birds

I pushed for Wikipedia to adopt them, and then to follow the taxonomy, and given the dominance of Wikipedia in Google search results, this is no small thing. Then someone decided that the Canary Island birds were a separate species. Later, the North African ones were moved to the Canarian species. But the Blue Tit was different.

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