Australia official checklist? (1 Viewer)

Which checklist do birders in or visiting Australia use? Heading down to Western Australia for a trip and trying to find a checklist I can compare my sightings against. Found one by Birdlife Australia but it also includes introduced species (are all that are included considered as established?). Avibase has a decent checklist that also mentions the introduced species.

Would just like to get some input from people familiar with Australian birds on the inclusion of introduced species such as House Crows, Laughing Doves or even Laughing Kookaburras in SW Australia. Are those birds tickable? Is the list by Birdlife Australia a comprehensive list of the birds in Australia?

What's tickable for you is what you want decide is tickable for you. But for a more useful answer, all the species on the Birdlife list are either native and tickable, introduced but with established wild populations and therefore tickable, or wild vagrants and therefore tickable. Or at least, those who do big twitches/big years in Australia will tick them. A few, such as the Ostrich and Peafowl, are more dubious as there is the possibility of them being only semi-wild, or escapees depending on where they are on the continent.

The Birdlife Australia list is comprehensive enough, but it follows HBW taxonomy, not IOC or Clements. So if you work in one or the other of those, you will need to make allowances for differences in splits and lumps (for instance, IOC and Clements/eBird has Malurus assimilis the Purple-backed Fairywren, but HBW has it as a subspecies of the Variegated Malurus lamberti assimilis. Of particular interest to you is that the Spotted Scrubwren of WA (Sericornis maculatus) has just been split from the White-browed Scrubwen (Sericornis frontalis) of eastern australia, but this doesn't appear yet in version 2.1 of the checklist. Note that, depending on which edition of field guide you use, some common names will have changed fairly recently too and may conflict with the checklist slightly.

But really, there's no better checklist going around. If you use eBird, you should be able to generate a checklist for Australia (but it might take up a fair bit of paper if you print it) or any of the states, but it will only show species that have been recorded by eBird users, not all potential/actual species.

Thanks for the comprehensive answer, really appreciate it! Will stick with the Birdlife list and check eBird as well. Cheers

MikeMules said:

What's tickable for you is what you want decide is tickable for you. But for a more useful answer, all the species on the Birdlife list are either native and tickable, introduced but with established wild populations and therefore tickable, or wild vagrants and therefore tickable. Or at least, those who do big twitches/big years in Australia will tick them. A few, such as the Ostrich and Peafowl, are more dubious as there is the possibility of them being only semi-wild, or escapees depending on where they are on the continent.

The Birdlife Australia list is comprehensive enough, but it follows HBW taxonomy, not IOC or Clements. So if you work in one or the other of those, you will need to make allowances for differences in splits and lumps (for instance, IOC and Clements/eBird has Malurus assimilis the Purple-backed Fairywren, but HBW has it as a subspecies of the Variegated Malurus lamberti assimilis. Of particular interest to you is that the Spotted Scrubwren of WA (Sericornis maculatus) has just been split from the White-browed Scrubwen (Sericornis frontalis) of eastern australia, but this doesn't appear yet in version 2.1 of the checklist. Note that, depending on which edition of field guide you use, some common names will have changed fairly recently too and may conflict with the checklist slightly.

But really, there's no better checklist going around. If you use eBird, you should be able to generate a checklist for Australia (but it might take up a fair bit of paper if you print it) or any of the states, but it will only show species that have been recorded by eBird users, not all potential/actual species.

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According to Scythebill, the IOC has 884 species for mainland Aus whilst Clements / ebird have 870.

I'm finding hard to get a figure based on HBW as I'm not a subscriber and Birdlife Australia list of 967 includes outlying islands (Macquarie, Norfolk, Cocos Keeling, Christmas Island, etc.)

andyadcock said:

I'm finding hard to get a figure based on HBW as I'm not a subscriber...

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Because I'm feeling nice...

Thanks McM,
852 seems a bit low for HBW?