'Falklands Snipe' (1 Viewer)

A potentially interesting but somewhat confusing article in the latest issue of Birdwatch magazine suggests that there may be a case for treating 'Falklands Snipe' as a full species in its own right.
[Ref. Hale, W.G. 2008. Species spotlight - Grounds for investigation. Birdwatch 196 (Oct 2008), 44-45.]

The article starts by noting that Gallinago paraguaiae magellanica is sometimes split from South American Snipe as Magellanic Snipe G. magellanica. This taxon is of course the 'standard' snipe in large parts of mainland Argentina and Chile, as well as in the Falkland Islands. But the article makes no mention of the taxon's full range, and the use of the name 'Falklands Snipe' gives the impression that magellanica is a Falklands speciality.

It is unclear to me whether the author's intention is:

• either to simply endorse the split of Magellanic Snipe G. magellanica from G. paraguaiae (in turn split from G. gallinago);
  
• or to suggest a further potential split of the Falklands population ('Falklands Snipe') from (mainland) magellanica.

The 'meat' of the article discusses the separation of magellanica from gallinago (which does not strictly provide support for either of these possibilities). Ultimately the author concludes (slightly ambiguously): "At present ('Falklands Snipe') is best maintained as a race of South American Snipe Gallinago paraguaiae magellanica".

Comments?

Richard

Richard Klim said:

and the use of the name 'Falklands Snipe' gives the impression that magellanica is a Falklands speciality.

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'Haven't seen the article but, in any case, no snipe (be it as a species or as a subspecies) could be a Falklands endemic under the name magellanica, because this name is based on populations from the strait of Magellan. To have a snipe species endemic to the Falklands would probably require it to be described it as a species entirely new to science.

Laurent -

l_raty said:

... no snipe ... could be a Falklands endemic under the name magellanica, because this name is based on populations from the strait of Magellan.

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Yes Laurent, that is essentially the reason for my confusion. It is unclear (at least to me) whether the subject of the article is magellanica sensu lato, or specifically a Falklands variant of magellanica, which (as you correctly say) would require a new name/description.

Richard

Richard Klim said:

whether Hale is discussing magellanica sensu lato, or specifically to a Falklands variant of magellanica

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If the latter, then the concluding sentence you cite - "At present ('Falklands Snipe') is best maintained as a race of South American Snipe Gallinago paraguaiae magellanica" - is at best odd. If what he was discussing was the Falklands population, he should have written something like "best maintained as a population included in the southern race of S Am Snipe"...
By using magellanica as the subspecies name for the Falklands population in his conclusion, he implies that this population is not taxonomically distinct from those of the strait of Magellan.
(But, well - of course, he may have been unaware of this...)

Richard Klim said:

a Falklands variant of magellanica, which would require a new name/description.

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Wow !! a new undescribed ?

Mike Bingham also wonders : http://www.falklands.net/BirdGuideMegallanicSnipe.shtml

Daniel Philippe said:

Mike Bingham also wonders : http://www.falklands.net/BirdGuideMegallanicSnipe.shtml

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But he is not very clear in what he means either...
(Note a.o. that the title is "Magellanic Snipe", but it is "Falklands Snipe" that should possibly be divided into two distinct species in the text...)

Richard, if the central discussion in the article is about the separation of magellanica from gallinago, couldn't the author's intention also be to endorse this split?
(He apparently does not endorse the paraguaiae / magellanica split, in the end... The last sentence would then simply mean that he is stopping short of splitting further.)

l_raty said:

But he is not very clear in what he means either...

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Yes Laurent, Daniel. I had also looked at the Falklands.net site when searching for more information, but concluded that it was equally unclear.

l_raty said:

Richard, if the central discussion in the article is about the separation of magellanica from gallinago, couldn't the author's intention also be to endorse this split?

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Yes, that's another possible interpretation. But it still doesn't explain the specific emphasis on the Falklands rather than the wider Southern Cone (unless this merely reflects where Hale conducted his studies of magellanica?).

Richard

Does the Falklands have any endemics at all? There are any number of its resident passerines that are referred to as "Falkland this" and "Falkland that" when they are essentially the same as species from the tip of South America.

Insularity is certainly endemic in the islands, this may have played a part?

John

Farnboro John said:

Does the Falklands have any endemics at all?

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John,

I know little about Neotropical birds, but I think that the only widely-recognised Falklands endemic species are Falkland Steamer Duck Tachyeres brachypterus and Cobb's Wren Troglodytes cobbi (the latter still lumped within House Wren T. aedon by AOU).

Richard

Farnboro John said:

Does the Falklands have any endemics at all?

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It's quite clear that the Falkland avifauna, as a whole, is not particularly deeply diverged from that of mainland S America.

They have a number of endemic subspecies, of course. But, besides this, only two taxa are generally/regularly regarded as endemic species: Cobb's Wren and Falkland Steamer-duck.
The wren remains controversal and is often regarded as a race of House Wren (incl. by the SACC).
Although the validity of the duck is undisputed AFAIK, it would probably be easy to dispute it in practice. Genetic data (http://elibrary.unm.edu/sora/Condor/files/issues/v090n04/p0773-p0781.pdf) have suggested that the three flightless steamer-duck taxa form a monophyletic group of very closely inter-related forms (iow, there is no possible argument of multiple independent evolution of flighlessness to support their treatment as distinct), with distances between them similar to or smaller than between populations of the flying species. According to these data, Falkland S-d could have diverged from White-headed only some 13,000 yrs ago...

l_raty said:

The wren remains controversal and is often regarded as a race of House Wren (incl. by the SACC).

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Even if a few authorities still do not recognize it, the wren is in reality rather uncontroversial, and I doubt anyone who has any level of experiance with it and its mainland counterparts doubt its validity as a distinct species (and that includes the members SACC, too). If SACC regard the presently published evidence as enough for separating it is another matter, of course, but they have had a "proposal needed" placed there for quite some time. The same applies - to some extend - to the mess among the mainland taxa, but at least there we can discuss how many species they should be split into, and along which borders (especially the Lesser Antillean taxa still need some work... and urgently, considering the status of a few of them). Has anything been published that suggests Cobb's Wren should not be regarded as a distinct species? I haven't kept up to date on what may have been published on the genetics of this taxon (south of the region I usually keep a close eye on), but published evidence on voice, morphology and ecology all point clearly in the species direction.

Speaking of Falkland endemics, there is, in addition to the already mentioned, only really one that stands a fair chance of becomming a Falkland endemic; Melanodera melanodera (leaving M. princetoniana for the mainland population).

Rasmus Boegh said:

(especially the Lesser Antillean taxa still need some work... and urgently, considering the status of a few of them).

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I think, if I remember correctly, that the status of the St Lucia (sub-)species is a little better than what you can read in Raffaele; again, if my memory serves me right, the wren also occurs at the Pitons on the western side of the island. However, the situation on the French islands do seem quite bleak, the checklist labels the species as "Extinct" in Martinique and "Extinct?" in Guadeloupe.

Similarly conserning would be the local subspecies of Ringed Kingfisher, which seems to be gone from Martinique and hangs by a hair in Guadeloupe.

Sorry if this leads to too big a tangent in this thread :gn:

Niels

Rasmus Boegh said:

The same applies - to some extend - to the mess among the mainland taxa, but at least there we can discuss how many species they should be split into, and along which borders (especially the Lesser Antillean taxa still need some work... and urgently, considering the status of a few of them). Has anything been published that suggests Cobb's Wren should not be regarded as a distinct species? I haven't kept up to date on what may have been published on the genetics of this taxon (south of the region I usually keep a close eye on)

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There are no published genetic data for cobbi as far as I know.

Mainland taxa, at least, really seem to be a mess - with problems including the fact that apparently one of the deepest divergence in the entire complex would seem to be between western North American parkmanii and eastern North American aedon. It seems likely that most mainland and insular populations (except brunneicollis, but including such things as Clarion and Socorro Wrens) are embedded in the clade delimited by these two populations. (Which are presumably in contact somewhere...?)
We discussed this earlier here : http://www.birdforum.net/showthread.php?p=1204069

Farnboro John said:

Does the Falklands have any endemics at all?

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Used to have an endemic canid....

http://www.petermaas.nl/extinct/speciesinfo/falklandwolf.htm

James

l_raty said:

There are no published genetic data for cobbi as far as I know.

Mainland taxa, at least, really seem to be a mess - with problems including the fact that apparently one of the deepest divergence in the entire complex would seem to be between western North American parkmanii and eastern North American aedon. It seems likely that most mainland and insular populations (except brunneicollis, but including such things as Clarion and Socorro Wrens) are embedded in the clade delimited by these two populations. (Which are presumably in contact somewhere...?)
We discussed this earlier here : http://www.birdforum.net/showthread.php?p=1204069

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Thanks - yes, I know. There are, btw, people working on it, but I haven't kept up-to-date and have no idea how far they are from publication (a few years, I guess). They also have more Antillean taxa, but as far as I know not all.

Insularity is certainly endemic in the islands, this may have played a part?

John[/QUOTE]

John,

for someone who seems to think they know about the people of the Falkland Islands you seem to know very little of the wildlife.

cheers

Alan
www.surfbirds.com/blog/falklandbirder

Richard Klim said:

A potentially interesting but somewhat confusing article in the latest issue of Birdwatch magazine suggests that there may be a case for treating 'Falklands Snipe' as a full species in its own right.
[Ref. Hale, W.G. 2008. Species spotlight - Grounds for investigation. Birdwatch 196 (Oct 2008), 44-45.]

...It is unclear to me whether the author's intention is:

• either to simply endorse the split of Magellanic Snipe G. magellanica from G. paraguaiae (in turn split from G. gallinago);
  
• or to suggest a further potential split of the Falklands population ('Falklands Snipe') from (mainland) magellanica.

Click to expand...

Professor Hale has kindly provided the following clarification in Birdwatch 199 (Jan 2009):

“The article on the snipe of the Falkland Islands (Gallinago paraguaiae magellanica) was originally written to draw attention to the differences between this form and European Snipe (G g gallinago) and to provide a series of images of the former. Small editorial additions (the heading and the initial summary) have altered the emphasis.

The article is not about the relationships of the small American snipes, but there is certainly some confusion concerning the taxonomy of these birds. HBW recognises Wilson’s Snipe (G g delicata) as a race of G galinago and paraguaiae, andina and magellanica as races of South American Snipe (G paraguaiae).

The naming of these subspecies has been based on very small morphological differences. However, there do appear to be non-morphological differences between the more northerly breeding G p paraguaiae of continental South America (B) and the birds of the Falkland Islands (A).

There is little or no information of this sort on the southerly continental South American breeding G paraguaiae (C) which, together with the Falklands birds, is in the subspecies magellanica. Is A separable from C or C from B? At present there is insufficient evidence one way or another. Woods (1997) commented on the Falkland population that ‘there is no recent evidence of migration’, suggesting that this population may well be isolated!

One line of possible clarification may come from an examination of the DNA of different snipe populations, and this is underway.”

Richard

Hello Folks.

A few interesting threads to comment on here quickly. In our book on birds of Chile we noted that the winnowing song of magellanica snipe is different from that of paraguaiae. This has been confirmed recently using a larger set of vocalizations by Ted Miller of Memorial University in Newfoundland. He is currently working on this problem, but unless he comes up with intermediate sounds from somewhere, the two are clearly different snipe species. The Falklands issue is an interesting one, thus far no one has published voices of this snipe, it may or may not be the same thing as magellanica. I noted in Birds of Chile that the sounds of this snipe had not been analyzed yet. The reason that I thought it was worth mentioning this is that visually Falkland's Snipe look different than the mainland ones. My limited experience, and Alan you can correct me on this, is that there is a certain level of variation (perhaps sexual) in how dark they are. When I found pairs of snipe on the Falklands one bird was noticeably darker than the other one. I think that this is the reason that there are several unsubstantiated sightings from tour boat of Fuegian Snipe for the falklands in the recent years. I have been sent photos of at least two of these sightings and in both cases they were dark plumaged "South American" Snipe, not Fuegian. So if anyone has voice recordings of the Falkland Snipe and they can make these available to me, I can get them to Ted Miller for analysis.
Cobb's Wren - uncontroversial in my opinion. Robin Woods and I are writing a proposal to give it formal species status by the South American CC.
Lesser Antillean Wrens - I need to get off my butt and publish some of the info I have. I have performed playback experiments on the 4 LA Wrens that I have some experince with (Grenada, St. Vincent, St. Lucia and Dominica). They do not respond to each other's songs. Habitat choice, ecology, song, appearance and bill length all suggest that these are good species compared to mainland House Wrens.

cheers - Alvaro.

Alvaro, thanks for your interesting comments.

Hoping you will be providing more insights on Neotropical issues on this forum...

Richard

Fantastic thread: thanks for alerting me, Richard.

Another Falklands taxon that some, e.g. Mark Pearman, are minded to consider specifically distinct from the mainland form is Blackish Cinclodes