[texbirds] More on names, lists etc. (longish again).
- From: Stephen Gast <segast23@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: "brushfreeman@xxxxxxxxx" <brushfreeman@xxxxxxxxx>, steve mayes <sgmayes@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Mon, 23 Sep 2013 00:40:51 -0700 (PDT)
OK, so my last statement on my previous email said I hadn't looked at the
statistics of differences in the lists.
Well..........I wasted the last 6 hours or so looking in detail at them. Note -
all of these numbers are plus or minus one or two - I just did this to get an
idea of how much difference there is and not to really get a perfect number,
however I might have gotten lucky and gotten some of them exact. Here goes.
Clements world list stands at about 10,239. The IOC list stands at about 10,640
(it changes rapidly and I am not sure I had the latest)
So the IOC has about 401 species more than Clements, however Clements has 38
species that IOC does not recognize, plus 9 that IOC does not include because
they are presumed extinct. So IOC actually has 448 species that Clements does
not have.
So what about the AOU? As Jack Eitniear pointed out, that is the list that
counts for many since that is the basis for the ABA list. Well I made one
assumption that may not be perfectly correct, but it is maybe close. I assumed
that Clements and AOU were in more or less perfect agreement. So I could have
missed a few things in the unusual situation where IOC and AOU agreed, but
Clements was independent of both. But also with respect to the exact
differences between AOU and IOC - same caveat - a close but not perfect
accounting. And if someone wants to compare Clements directly with AOU - let me
know your results. I am done for the time being. I have to be productive
tomorrow. So here goes again -
The AOU has a published list with 2090 species for the North American AOU
region, which includes Bermuda, the Caribbean, Central America and Hawaii. Of
these:
54 would be impacted by name changes due to splits per the IOC list resulting
in the addition of roughly 42 adds to the AOU list, with the remainder being
species on other continents which have precedence over the name if split and
which have not occurred in the AOU region (I did not research this aspect
completely and there is likely errors here - but you get the idea). In the
negative column, 2 species are not on IOC's list that are on AOU's, one lump (a
trogon), and one presumed extinct (in Hawaii).
Now, as to name changes without affecting numbers of species, which was what
started all this off ( well actually it was capital letters but.....),
According to IOC 15 taxa on the AOU list should have different Genus names
assigned, and 4 have errors in species name endings - that is, a 'us' should be
changed to an 'a' or vice versa at the end of the word to be grammatically
correct in Latin.
In the English name category it gets pretty strange. The IOC folks have a
decided aversion to hyphens and to spelling the color 'gray' with an 'a'. And
so 160 English names have been changed only to eliminate hyphens and to change
'gray' to 'grey'. I guess this is really throwing a bone to the British, who
started naming all the birds around the world before we were a country over
here. I kind of agree with the hyphen thing though.
And finally, 76 names are proposed for English name changes. Some simply adding
the name American or Northern or Mexican (for example there are Grey and Dusky
Flycatchers and a Yellow Warbler in Africa as well), some to agree with the
name of the same species elsewhere (such as Great Grey Shrike instead of
Northern Shrike - Brits named this one first too) and changing some English
names to better coincide with some Genus names (e.g. all the Amazona parrots go
from 'Parrots' to 'Amazons', some Nightjars to Poorwills, and some Hummingbirds
to Mountaingems). A few name changes seem rather arbitrary, but I am sure
somebody has some reason somewhere.
So in summary - the AOU list as measured by the (more aggressive?/liberal?) IOC
list could be increased by about 2% if all splits went through. About 3.5% of
the AOU English names could be changed yet, while the Genus and species names
(excluding splits) are pretty settled down with only about .075% in play at
present. By comparison the world list has about 4.25% of species in play and a
lot higher percentage of name changes in play as well.
Early this year I have also did a comparison chart of different treatments of
Family orders in the various world lists (when Parrots and Falcons went
together after Woodpeckers). I can share that off-line with anyone that might
be interested. But you can also find a treatment of this in the last volume of
Handbook of Birds of the World which just came out.
(Maybe I should have just put this out to the Ornithology listserv - apologies
to those who aren't interested.)
Steve Gast
Houston, Texas
segast23@xxxxxxxxx
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