Bird families (1 Viewer)

I have a (boring?) question which occurred to me when discussing the warbler family with Dennis in the US in another thread. Dennis had asked for people to submit warbler sightings to build up to a list for a year. Among the birds I contributed was zitting cisticola(fan-tailed warbler), and I would have contributed firecrest and goldcrest, if they hadn't already been mentioned . It transpires that Europe and Africa have a different idea from the US of what constitutes a warbler (family sylviidae). As far as Dennis is concerned the 3 I mentioned are not warblers, but to Europe they are.

My question is: is there a worldwide body that decides on these things (and if not why not!)? Personally, I don't actually care whether the birds named are warblers or not but it does seem sensible for everyone to work from the same designations. What does anyone else think. Or do you care?

Hi Robin, as far as I'm aware, there isn't any global body to standardise names (which is a good thing: science doesn't thrive on unanimity).

Disagreements about what bird is in which family come about for several reasons. One of the more recent developments is using DNA-hybridisation and mitochondrial DNA comparisons, which has lead to the changing of taxonomic groupings at the order, family and genus levels.

The "old" family of Muscicapidae, which was classified according to various physical features, has now been split into a variety of families based on genetics similarities, including Turdidae, Sylviidae (Old-world warblers) and Regulidae (Kinglets).

There will be differences between scientists who emphasise DNA evidence, and those who emphasise physical features. There will also be differences between those who follow the phylogenetic species concept, and those who follow the biological species concept (although that has less effect on higher level taxon, but can massively change the number of species within a family or genus).

And the third, but usually the biggest difference is that common names do not reflect taxonomic affinity. Robins are an excellent example (families Muscicapide, Turdidae and Petroicidae all contain Robins).

Hope this helps.

I guess it's like standards in IT where the saying is" Standards - I love 'em - so many to choose from"!

I'd like to add that while there is a "standard" for the actual genus and species name, what gets included is often a matter of discussion. In Botany you will often find a long list of naturally occurring hybrids also. Basically there is only the individual (and there are even problems with that in some of the invertebrates), anything higher is arbitrary. They've added three new kingdoms since I was in school (course we were still clearing out the mammoths back then).