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snowfinch - Qinghai, China (1 Viewer)

Can anyone help me with the ID and inform me of the current taxonomic status of two snowfinch species found on the Tibetan Plateau.

This picture was taken in Qinghai in June on high plateau. The bird was foraging for insects amonst rocks and short vegetation and feeding chicks in a nest in a hole beneath a stone about 100 m away.

At the time I had the McKinnon & Phillips field guide which illustrates two possible species: White-winged Snowfinch M. nivalis and Tibetan Snowfinch M. adamsii. I thought this was adamsii based on the small amount of visible white on the wing.

I have since learned that White-winged Snowfinch has been split and that the former subspecies M. nivalis henrici, which is found on the Tibetan Plateau is now regarded as a full species and its English name is ... Tibetan Snowfinch (the same name given to M. adamsii in McKinnon & Phillips).

I guess the alternative English names of Henri's and Adams's snowfinches are less ambiguous regarding which taxon is being referred to.

Anyway, does anyone have a reference for the justification of splitting nivalis and are there any pointers for distinguishing Henri's and Adams's Snowfinches.

I've also got some pictures of winter-plumage snowfinches on the plateau that are even more confusing!

Thanks
Andrew
 

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Montifringilla adamsi seems most often to be Black-winged Snowfinch but Gill & Wright is using Tibetan for this one, so that may change.

Montifringilla henrici seems as you say to be Tibetan Snowfinch in both Clements and Howard&Moore, but Gill & Wright uses Henri's for this one.

Montifringilla nivalis seems to keep the name White-winged, but seems at one time to have included even adamsi.

All of the above from Avibase. I additionally found this link for you, where I could only open the abstract: http://www.sciencedirect.com/scienc...d=345366&md5=8dac4b0b08670ac83ee2900110cb5c2f

Cheers
Niels
 
I can sympathise with your Snowfinch confusion, I struggled with the same things myself in NW India last year. The nearest I can find to a justification for the split is in Inskipp et al, An Annotated Checklist of the Birds of the Oriental Region. In the entry for tibetan Snofinch (M. adamsi) they state: "Roselaar (in Cramp and Perrins 1994a) treated adamsi as conspecific with nivalis because of apparent intergradation of the two forms in Central Asia, but Stegmann (1932) spoke of synonymy of adamsi with M (n.) henrici and M.n.kwenlunensis. Thus, only one of adamsi and henrici can be conspecific with nivalis; Roselaar chose the former because he felt it was the less distinct; however, Roselaar did not discuss the sympatry of adamsi with kwenlunensis, although he placed adamsi at the end of a cline of nivalis subspecies with kwenlunensis the penultimate one". For White-winged Snowfinch (M. nivalis) the same source gives Roselaar trating henrici of east Tibet as a seperate species from nivalis because of marked morphological differences. Again Stegmann (1932) took a different view and regarded it as a subspecies of nivalis which was clearly differentiated from M. n. kwenlunensis.

I'm not sure that actually sheds any light but it'll have to do for now! I'll have a look at the ID stuff shortly.

Stuart
 
On the ID question, my only source is Clement et al, Finches and Sparrows, an ID guide. They give adamsi as being much browner on the head, neck and underparts than nivalis, and showing less white in the secondaries. So far so good, except all the photos I've seen attributed to adamsi, including mine from the NW Indian himalayas, show rather grey-headed birds, not unlike your photo. They also state that "in overlap areas (Kashmir and Tibet), the species are usually separated altitudinally".

The final, rather unhelpful comment confuses things still further, as Grimett et al in the Birds of the Indian subcontinent don't list nivalis as occuring in the region, which suggests that the species doesn't occur in Kashmir after all. I can see that I'm going to have to look at this in more detail and revisit my own snowfinch photos as a result of this thread!

Stuart
 
Thanks both for putting me on to the reference paper and the images.

The photograph of henrici in the series of white-winged snowfinch images on your link is a very distinctive looking bird. There is a marked contrast in the brown feathering of the head and neck compared to the white underside of the breast and belly. The beak looks large too, which is another feature of henrici according to the paper found by Niels (I managed to download a PDF - if you want a copy PM me). The series of photos of adult adamsi show birds with a less contrasting pattern between the head and breast.

When I was in Qinghai I didn't see any Montifringilla snowfinches that were as distinctive as the henrici in the photograph on the OBC website. They all looked pretty similar to me and it was often difficult to judge the extent of white on the wings because as the birds moved around the amount of visible white changed. The only really noticable difference to my eye was that females in pairs were browner and less bright than the males (btw my photo is of a male).

From the pictures on the OBC website adamsi looks more similar to nivalis (both have greyish heads and more buff coloured underparts) than henrici. This fits with the results of the Wu et al paper, which found that adamsi was more closely related to nivalis than henrici.

The illustrations in McKinnon and Phillips are not the best and show nivalis but not henrici. Also, having just seen pictures of Plain-backed Snowfinhes on the OBC website I now realise why I couldn't identify any from the illustration in McKinnon and Phillips!
 
Hi Andrew

We only recorded Henri’s Snowfinch Montifringilla henrici on two days in the vicinity of Wenquan (Er La area), whereas Tibetan (Himalayan) Snowfinch Montifringilla adamsi we encountered more widely, on five days (and they were very nice birds too!) Rubber Mountain rings a bell... not sure exactly where without my notes to hand
 
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I remember from visiting Koko Nor back in 1989 that we saw lots of adamsi and only a single henrici. To address Stuart's problems - I don't believe henrici/nivalis occurs in NW India. Certainly we only saw adamsi in Ladakh.

Rob
 
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