Lesser Antillean Pewee (Contopus latirostris)

Nj,
Everywhere I have looked this one is treated as race brunneicapillus, the others also as races of LAP, i.e. the nominate on Santa Lucia and blancoi on Puerto Rico.

Raffaele et al: Birds of the West Indies treat them as three species; the St Lucia Pewee is treated as a seperate species in Avibase: http://www.bsc-eoc.org/avibase/avibase.jsp
Niels

Niels,
I wonder if people (including Avibase) are not getting mixed up with the Lesser Antillean Flycatcher (Myiarchus oberi)? I ask this as normally if a split is being considered the normal way to do it would be to take the former subspecific name and elevate it to specific name. In this case, they would probably have left (for the St. Lucia bird) Contopus latirostris monotypic and elevating the other two's race names to specific and monotypic. This is the first time that I have heard of the taxon name "oberi" as being associated with the Contopus Pewee. I must admit that I am a little confused. Unfortunately, the SACC Baseline list, the latest revision of new world taxa does not take into consideration the Caribbean members of the various genera.

I have forwarded your question to the AviBase curator. I will come back here if there is an answer.

My own personal answer would be that sometimes in splitting, you go back to the originally used specific names. Strange things can happen if the three taxa were described individually at first, and a fourth name was chosen for the lump ...

Niels

Have now received an answer from Avibase, according to which the split is based on the Field Guide by Raffaele et al. He did seem to have some reservation about the split after the question was raised.

thanks
Niels

Niels,
Denis Lepage has a gargantuan undertaking trying to manage that pretty useful site. It does not surprise me that he might not have everything right and as you know sometimes taxonomic treatments and whether to include them or not are judgment calls.