[texbirds] Re: More on names, lists etc. (longish again).
- From: Jim Sinclair <jim.sinclair@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: segast23@xxxxxxxxx
- Date: Mon, 23 Sep 2013 07:52:21 -0500
Steve,
I, for one, greatly appreciate these two posts. I learned a lot, and was
pointed to a new and valuable resource. I actually spend quite a bit of
time working with tax lists of seven different Classes in North America
(including Mexico). It's tough to stay up with them.
Thanks!
On Mon, Sep 23, 2013 at 2:40 AM, Stephen Gast <segast23@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> 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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>
--
Jim Sinclair (TX-ESA)
TOS Life Member
Kingsville, TX
"The significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of
thinking we were at when we created them." - Albert Einstein
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