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  1. Paul Clapham

    New unified list of birds - Avilist

    The Argentines and Chileans don't agree on the names for the steamer duck -- quetro or quetru?
  2. Paul Clapham

    Latest IOC Diary Updates

    Recently SACC has started to use separate proposals for taxonomy changes (splits and lumps) and for English name changes. Too much of a cognitive overload to do both at once, it seems. In this case Proposal 1027 is entitled "Establish English name for the composite species Celeus undatus", while...
  3. Paul Clapham

    Peters' Check-list of birds of the world (machine readable)

    It appears that "a couple" means "upwards of a hundred". Clearly many of them are synonyms which can't be disregarded.
  4. Paul Clapham

    Peters' Check-list of birds of the world (machine readable)

    I can't say that you did anything wrong. I scraped your HTML documents and extracted the relevant data into a text document; I don't have any information about Peters names beyond those documents. As I was going through the document I do recall noticing a couple of Peters species which had been...
  5. Paul Clapham

    Peters' Check-list of birds of the world (machine readable)

    That file I produced contained a certain amount of information matching Peters subspecies with IOC 14.2 subspecies, but it was far from complete. It looked like the original data in the HTML had used some automated process to do that matching, but it didn't match a monotypic species to a...
  6. Paul Clapham

    Sibley/Ahlquist classification

    Yes, that's an accurate description of the book I have on my shelf.
  7. Paul Clapham

    Death to Tyrants (Sic semper tyrannis) - Some Thoughts on Flycatchers

    To clean up my ancient memory, I got the book off the shelf. There's a "Grosbeaks, Finches, Sparrows, Buntings" chapter where many sparrows are found. There's also a "Weaver Finches, etc" chapter which contains only the House Sparrow. So, not at the back of the book, but in a different chapter...
  8. Paul Clapham

    Death to Tyrants (Sic semper tyrannis) - Some Thoughts on Flycatchers

    Yes, this was a problem for me way back when I started birding. I was a grad student in Los Angeles and I had my new Peterson guide. There were all these sparrows around which were surely Black-throated Sparrows, because black throats. But Peterson said they lived in the desert and not in the...
  9. Paul Clapham

    Tyrannides

    The proposal provides a menu with 5 items, so committee members could say YES to any subset of that menu. It could take a while to get agreement on a final subset.
  10. Paul Clapham

    Sylvioidea

    According to my search through Avibase, the answer is "no". (Although it's a bit messy to confirm that for sure.) And it hasn't been recognized as a species by any other taxonomy they have on file either.
  11. Paul Clapham

    Buller's Albatros

    I didn't read that article, but it must be contra Australian Faunal Directory which says the name is unavailable.
  12. Paul Clapham

    New unified list of birds - Avilist

    I don't really understand what you're talking about. The reviewers configure a list of species for the region ("county" in Britain), including recognizable forms, which can reasonably expect to be identified there. Some of them are flagged "rare", which results in the app asking you for a...
  13. Paul Clapham

    New unified list of birds - Avilist

    I suspect that those collections of data were produced by a small group of "elite" birders, especially in places which don't have a tradition of birdwatching. Even here in British Columbia, back in the 1980s I used to write my records on little index cards and periodically ship them off to a...
  14. Paul Clapham

    New unified list of birds - Avilist

    I just tried downloading one of my eBird checklists which includes the ♀ and ♂ symbols in the species comments and they arrived in my computer safely. It's using UTF-8, as it should. When I read the download with the old text editor which I used to like, they show up as ? because the editor...
  15. Paul Clapham

    Peters' Check-list of birds of the world (machine readable)

    I've extracted basic taxonomic information from your files -- resulting text file attached. Not sure what I plan to do with it, I would need to match it with modern data. Which I see you have in there already, but it would need more scraping to extract it.
  16. Paul Clapham

    New unified list of birds - Avilist

    Short answer: no. Long answer: you can use "subspecific groups", which are supposed to be recognizable forms of a particular species. For example Horned Lark Eremophila alpestris (as eBird calls it) has 41 named subspecies. People are unlikely to be able to recognize all of those in the field...
  17. Paul Clapham

    Peters' Check-list of birds of the world (machine readable)

    I'm trying to extract data from these files; JTidy tells me there's an extra < before a="" in lines like this: <span class="genus_synonym" <a="" id="Pterocnemia"></span><span class="prefix">1:6:1254</span><span class="taxonname_author_and_year"> Pterocnemia G. R. Gray, 1871</span>
  18. Paul Clapham

    Single word birds beginning with Z

    Zeledonia. Okay, it's more commonly known as "Wrenthrush" but our Costa Rican guide called it "Zeledonia". (Unfortunately we didn't get to see it.)
  19. Paul Clapham

    Taxonomy in-flux updates

    There is still Milvago chimachima under Falconidae in the species list.
  20. Paul Clapham

    Taxonomy in-flux updates

    Actually Ibycter is not merged with Daptrius in the listing on the Australaves page, although the other genera are. Likewise the Campylorhynchus name changes from December 22 don't appear in the listing on the Certhioidea page. And on December 27 there is "Yellow-lored Tanager Tanager".
  21. Paul Clapham

    Latest IOC Diary Updates

    Historically there's been a variety of opinions of what subspecies comprise Perplexing Scrubwren. Clements always included only virgatus and jobiensis, whereas IOC also included pontifex et al. (from Tropical Scrubwren). It seems that this change is also agreeing upon moving pontifex to Large...
  22. Paul Clapham

    Yet another thread on eponyms... But this one might actually be fun!

    It's true, it never occurred to me to wonder what the Spanish word "aplomado" meant in English. My unfocused guess was "featherless" but obviously "plumbeous" is correct. But there aren't too many names like this. I never knew what "falcated" meant either but I just looked it up and that's...
  23. Paul Clapham

    Yet another thread on eponyms... But this one might actually be fun!

    In the AOS Supplement 65, Rhynchophanes mccownii is changed from "Plectrophane de McCown" to "Plectrophane à ventre gris". There are no other significant changes that I can see.
  24. Paul Clapham

    Latest IOC Diary Updates

    Not so long ago, Northwestern Crow was observed to be a hybrid swarm with respect to American Crow, and so the two were lumped, or at least the contact area between the two was described as such. Northwestern Crow still exists as the subspecies caurinus. Of course there may be significant...
  25. Paul Clapham

    Veraguas or Veraguan Mango?

    I've been going through my large collection of bird names to see how people are following that convention. Like Nightjar61 said, if it's a country's name then maybe the noun form is used and maybe the adjectival form is used, but generally one or the other is used consistently. Although there...
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