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Stejneger's Stonechat (2 Viewers)

Richard Klim said:
Unfortunately Dorf is just German for village. So it's presumably a village in Kurdistan - and therefore could theoretically be in Turkey, Iraq, Iran or Armenia (all partly within the range of armenicus), but perhaps now officially known by an alternative name used by the modern nation...?
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With no evidence or justification whatever I'm going to drop an Arabic-sounding prefix, change some pronunciation a bit, and end up with Şirvan, a town in the Kurdish part of south-eastern Turkey.
 
Armenicus

Paul Clapham said:
With no evidence or justification whatever I'm going to drop an Arabic-sounding prefix, change some pronunciation a bit, and end up with Şirvan, a town in the Kurdish part of south-eastern Turkey.
Click to expand...
Sounds plausible, Paul. But Şirvan/Şêrwan (in Siirt Province) is probably near the westernmost limit for armenicus. And I've belatedly noticed the account in Roselaar 1995 (Songbirds of Turkey)...
S. t. armenica Stegmann, 1935, 'Adshafana, Kurdistan' (near the border of Iran, Iraq, and Turkey). ...
Click to expand...
 
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l_raty wrote "It'd be interesting to know how Stegmann wrote it." I have seen Аджарана, Курдистан. Not 100 percent sure this is Adshafana, Kurdistan, as I only dabbled with Ukrainian twenty years ago!
 
That would be "Adzharana" rather than "Adshafana". It wouldn't be hard to mistake an "r" for an "f" in handwriting in a Latin script, harder at any rate than the same mistake in a Cyrillic script ("р" mistaken for "ф").
 
Germans transcribe "ж" as "sch", which would be as transcribed "sh" into English.
This then leaves one error or typo (f for r).
 
Caspian stonechats

sanderbot said:
The type locality of variegatus is not Şamaxı, Azerbaijan but Bandar-e Anzali, Iran:
http://www.nm.cz/admin/files/PM/download/zivotopisy-publikace/mlikovsky261-2011-mlikovsky-gmelin.pdf
This is in armenicus range, so armenicus should be called variegatus, and the population now known as variegatus shloud be called amaliae according the link above.
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Svensson, Shirihai, Frahnert & Dickinson 2012. Taxonomy and nomenclature of the Stonechat complex Saxicola torquatus sensu lato in the Caspian region. Bull BOC 132(4): 260–269.
SUMMARY.—We discuss the taxonomy of the Stonechat, the accepted broad species Saxicola torquatus, and find convincing reasons for recognising three species: European Stonechat S. rubicola, Eastern Stonechat S. maurus and African Stonechat S. torquatus. The nomenclature of the taxa breeding in the Caspian region is revisited and, based on an analysis of the original type descriptions and all relevant literature, and of four preserved specimens of Ehrenberg's taxon hemprichii from 1833 now in Berlin, we conclude that the name variegatus should not be applied to the taxon breeding north of the Caucasus but instead to the population in eastern Turkey and Transcaucasia, present-day armenicus. This places armenicus in the synonymy of variegatus, the latter having priority. Thirdly, a name is required for the north Caspian population. The name hemprichii is the oldest available and valid name for this population.
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[So, hemprichii (not variegatus) should be on the British List.]​
 
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Richard Klim said:
Svensson, Shirihai, Frahnert & Dickinson 2012. Taxonomy and nomenclature of the Stonechat complex Saxicola torquatus sensu lato in the Caspian region. Bull BOC 132(4): 260–269.
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Hi Richard,

Is this a review of all evidence to date (including previous DNA work) or does it present any new DNA work? Given the length of the paper, I assume the former.

cheers, alan
 
lewis20126 said:
Is this a review of all evidence to date (including previous DNA work) or does it present any new DNA work? Given the length of the paper, I assume the former.
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That's right, Alan. As background, the authors briefly acknowledge the recent genetic studies supporting a three-way split, and note that "the split is backed by consistent morphological differences and the fact that two of the three groups breed in partial sympatry apparently without interbreeding". But the paper is primarily concerned with nomenclature in the Caspian region.
 
Dutch Birding

van den Berg 2013. Lijst van Nederlandse vogelsoorten. Checklist of Dutch bird species. January 2013. Dutch Birding. [pdf]

Splits Stejneger's Stonechat Saxicola [maurus] stejnegeri.
 
Saxicola maurus/rubicola sympatry

Richard Klim said:
Svensson, Shirihai, Frahnert & Dickinson 2012. Taxonomy and nomenclature of the Stonechat complex Saxicola torquatus sensu lato in the Caspian region. Bull BOC 132(4): 260–269.
Click to expand...
Having studied the paper in more detail, one of the most interesting points is the considerable overlap between the breeding ranges of S rubicola and the Caspian taxa of S maurus depicted in Fig 1 – as also mooted in Kirwan et al 2008 (Birds of Turkey). This contrasts with Roselaar 1995 (Songbirds of Turkey), Urquhart & Bowley 2002 (Stonechats) and Porter & Aspinall 2010 (Birds of the Middle East), which all suggest essentially parapatric distributions.
 
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Illera et al 2008

l_raty said:
OTOH (and I don't really know what to do with this): one of the two "basal" Spanish cytb sequences in Illera et al. is clearly a chimera. EU421091: this seq is indicus-like (100% identical to their EU421081), up to a 'N' in position 744 of the entire cytb; the rest is a perfectly standard rubicola sequence (100% identical to their EU421090). (This seq also ends up at the end of an oddly long branch in their tree.)
Click to expand...
Illera, Richardson, Helm, Atienza & Emerson (in press). Corrigendum to "Phylogenetic relationships, biogeography and speciation in the avian genus Saxicola" [Mol. Phylogenet. Evol. 48 (2008) 1145–1154]. Mol Phylogenet Evol. [pdf]

Ref: Illera et al 2008. [pdf]
 
Salewski et al

Salewski, Hochachka & Flinks (in press). Changes in Stonechat Saxicola torquata morphology: a response to climate change? J Ornithol. [abstract]
 
Richard Klim said:
Salewski, Hochachka & Flinks (in press). Changes in Stonechat Saxicola torquata morphology: a response to climate change? J Ornithol. [abstract]
Click to expand...

This appears to be about Saxicola torquata sensu lato, although I note that Hochachka works at Cornell Ornithology Lab. Have Cornell not adopted the S. rubicola approach, restricting torquata largely to continental Africa?
MJB
 
Salewski et al

MJB said:
This appears to be about Saxicola torquata sensu lato, although I note that Hochachka works at Cornell Ornithology Lab. Have Cornell not adopted the S. rubicola approach, restricting torquata largely to continental Africa?
Click to expand...
Salewski et al studied Saxicola (torquatus) rubicola in Nordrhein-Westfalen.

eBird/Clements split S (t) rubicola and S (t) maurus in v6.7 (Sep 2012), but I doubt that all at Cornell are required to agree...

The split is still rather contentious, and hasn't been adopted by (eg) BirdLife, ABC, OBC, OSJ or AOU.
 
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