The British List: A Checklist of Birds of Britain (9th edition) (1 Viewer)

Peter Kovalik · Dec 6, 2017

McInerny, C. J., Musgrove, A. J., Stoddart, A., Harrop, A. H. J., Dudley, S. P. and The British Ornithologists’ Union Records Committee (BOURC) (2018), The British List: A Checklist of Birds of Britain (9th edition). Ibis, 160: 190–240. doi:10.1111/ibi.12536.

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(2018), British Ornithologists’ Union Records Committee (BOURC): 48th Report (January 2018). Ibis, 160: 241–248. doi:10.1111/ibi.12535

[link]

Ross Ahmed · Dec 6, 2017

Why has Fea’s Petrel disappeared? Because Desertas has been split and Scilly et al records don’t rule out Desertas?

l_raty · Dec 6, 2017

Ross Ahmed said:
Why has Fea’s Petrel disappeared? Because Desertas has been split and Scilly et al records don’t rule out Desertas?

It's on the last page.
(And, yes: "64 records not identified to species including six records identified to P. feae/deserta.")

Ross Ahmed · Dec 7, 2017

We should all take (presumed) Fea’s Petrel off our British lists then, for now anyway.

Maffong · Dec 7, 2017

I believe national lists should maybe be adopt a different approach. It seems wrong to me to delete a species-group from such a list, just because it is absolutely impossible to be safely identified to species level in the field. They could just put it as Fea's/Deserta's/Zino's Petrel Pterodroma feae/deserta/madeira inside the list (not as a separate category) and add an asterisk or remark where the status is explained.
To me it seems wrong to say that 614 species of birds have been observed in Britain as this is clearly not the case. With the Petrels, southern Skuas, White/Black-bellied Storm-Petrels and Band-rumped Storm-Petrels clearly at least 4 more species have been observed in Britain. So the number should be 618, shouldn't it?

Maffong

Bismarck Honeyeater · Dec 7, 2017

Maffong said:
I believe national lists should maybe be adopt a different approach. It seems wrong to me to delete a species-group from such a list, just because it is absolutely impossible to be safely identified to species level in the field. They could just put it as Fea's/Deserta's/Zino's Petrel Pterodroma feae/deserta/madeira inside the list (not as a separate category) and add an asterisk or remark where the status is explained.
To me it seems wrong to say that 614 species of birds have been observed in Britain as this is clearly not the case. With the Petrels, southern Skuas, White/Black-bellied Storm-Petrels and Band-rumped Storm-Petrels clearly at least 4 more species have been observed in Britain. So the number should be 618, shouldn't it?

Maffong

I think so too. The only time a problem would arise is if another of the group turned up, you could still only count one species, or greater species if you will

Steve Lister · Dec 7, 2017

The difference between 'observed' and 'recorded'. It is the BOU RECORDS sub-committee after all.

Steve

jurek · Dec 7, 2017

Ross Ahmed said:
We should all take (presumed) Fea’s Petrel off our British lists then, for now anyway.

Anybody believing it should take off Band-rumped Storm-Petrel, southern Skuas and Fea's/Desertas/Zino's Petrel off the world list altogether, unless one saw a precise individual bird which was genotyped and proven to be of a certain species.

All these are widely traveling species dispersing within others' breeding range, and this is an act of faith to believe that wandering individuals don't occasionally visit breeding colonies of other species.

Even if one might try to counter it, saying, for example, that seeing a petrel at a breeding colony is sure ID, because 100 petrels genotyped at a breeding colony at Desertas were always Desertas Petrels and not Zino's or Fea's, then in aspects of bird identification, an 1% chance of error is much too high to be acceptable. For example nobody would accept that an unidentified duck is certainly Mallard only because at that locality Mallards outnumber other ducks over 100 to 1.

8-P

Interestingly, a paper examining a DNA from a bone of Pterodroma from Britain during Iron Age found that Fea's, Desertas and Zino's were subspecies.

PS. That splitting might have gone too far? Than nobody using ID for practical purposes splits so much, except the little world of conservation fanatics and rarities commitees? That I may be jokingly pointing it? Not, honest.

Paul Clapham · Dec 8, 2017

Maffong said:
To me it seems wrong to say that 614 species of birds have been observed in Britain as this is clearly not the case. With the Petrels, southern Skuas, White/Black-bellied Storm-Petrels and Band-rumped Storm-Petrels clearly at least 4 more species have been observed in Britain. So the number should be 618, shouldn't it?Maffong

Aha, that's why my comparison is coming out off by 4 species!

A warning for those of you who download the spreadsheet which is associated with this version of the British List: the tab labelled "British List Categories A-C" has about a dozen Latin names which are not the same as those in the printed (or PDF) document.

VATH 82 · Dec 9, 2017

Ross Ahmed said:
Why has Fea’s Petrel disappeared? Because Desertas has been split and Scilly et al records don’t rule out Desertas?[/QUOTE]

Yes

Mysticete · Dec 9, 2017

Seems the easiest thing is to just jot down a complex as, for instance, Fea's/Desertas on a checklist. Presumably birders don't completely ignored undescribed species on birding trips, on the basis of them not having a species name attached to them. I don't know why you wouldn't do the same with species complexes.

Mike Earp · Dec 10, 2017

Paul Clapham said:
A warning for those of you who download the spreadsheet which is associated with this version of the British List: the tab labelled "British List Categories A-C" has about a dozen Latin names which are not the same as those in the printed (or PDF) document.

Paul

Can you list the dozen or so species whose scientific names differ? Would be good to know which version is correct i.e. follows the IOC.

Mike

MJB · Dec 10, 2017

Mike Earp said:
Paul, Can you list the dozen or so species whose scientific names differ? Would be good to know which version is correct i.e. follows the IOC. Mike

Well, if they decided to have a Taxonomic Sub-Committee, surely such an oversight wouldn't happen...?:eek!::eek!::eek!:
MJB

Paul Clapham · Dec 10, 2017

Mike Earp said:
Paul

Can you list the dozen or so species whose scientific names differ? Would be good to know which version is correct i.e. follows the IOC.

Mike

In that tab we have:

Ardenna griseus instead of grisea;
Zapornia pusilla and parva instead of Porzana pusilla and parva;
Anarhynchus alexandrinus, mongolus, leschenaultii, and asiaticus instead of Charadrius;
Thalasseus maxima and acuflavida instead of maximus and acuflavidus;
Lanius pallidirsotris instead of pallidirostris;
Saxicola stejnegei instead of stejnegeri.

So, a mixture of misspellings, gender disagreement, and taxonomic differences. However the other tabs in the spreadsheet don't seem to have these issues.

Mike Earp · Dec 10, 2017

Paul Clapham said:
In that tab we have:

Ardenna griseus instead of grisea;
Zapornia pusilla and parva instead of Porzana pusilla and parva;
Anarhynchus alexandrinus, mongolus, leschenaultii, and asiaticus instead of Charadrius;
Thalasseus maxima and acuflavida instead of maximus and acuflavidus;
Lanius pallidirsotris instead of pallidirostris;
Saxicola stejnegei instead of stejnegeri.

So, a mixture of misspellings, gender disagreement, and taxonomic differences. However the other tabs in the spreadsheet don't seem to have these issues.

Paul

Many thanks. I hope someone at the BOU is reading this and can get the file corrected. Maybe they are as all but three of these seem already to have been corrected. The uncorrected ones are: Ardenna griseus, Thalasseus maxima and Lanius pallidirsotris.

Mike

Paul Clapham · Dec 11, 2017

MJB said:
Well, if they decided to have a Taxonomic Sub-Committee, surely such an oversight wouldn't happen...?:eek!::eek!::eek!:
MJB

Sure it would. From what I've seen, when checklist writers decide to produce a web site and a spreadsheet, it's not unusual for the two to disagree. Ideally they would both be generated from the same database but there's a lot of infrastructure building necessary to do that, requiring skills which aren't necessarily available.

Bismarck Honeyeater · Dec 11, 2017

Now that Siberian Stonechat is split, does anyone know which previous records are unequivocally Maura as opposed to generically Maura?

Just had a look through the last 30 years of BBRC rarity reports and can only find one or two, but that was back in the day when Maura meant Maura and not Maura as distinct from Stejnegeri

Pretty sure that most of what I have seen did not look typically Stejnegeri like, so presumably they were Maura, but it would be nice to know.

Nutcracker · Dec 11, 2017

Bismarck Honeyeater said:
Now that Siberian Stonechat is split, does anyone know which previous records are unequivocally Maura as opposed to generically Maura?

Just had a look through the last 30 years of BBRC rarity reports and can only find one or two, but that was back in the day when Maura meant Maura and not Maura as distinct from Stejnegeri

Pretty sure that most of what I have seen did not look typically Stejnegeri like, so presumably they were Maura, but it would be nice to know.

They'll certainly need to go back through all the old records and check for potential Stejneger's - it looks like it reaches W Europe often enough for the potential for some more to be hiding in past records.

MJB · Dec 11, 2017

Paul Clapham said:
Sure it would. From what I've seen, when checklist writers decide to produce a web site and a spreadsheet, it's not unusual for the two to disagree. Ideally they would both be generated from the same database but there's a lot of infrastructure building necessary to do that, requiring skills which aren't necessarily available.

My post was intended to be tongue-in-cheek, hence the smileys.

However, any checklist writer worth his or her salt would ask someone with current in-depth taxonomic knowledge (eg a 'TSC' member) to copy-edit the material before publishing. I note that only one tab had this issue, which suggests strongly that all the other tabs were indeed cross-checked... :t:
MJB

Paul Clapham · Dec 12, 2017

MJB said:
My post was intended to be tongue-in-cheek, hence the smileys.

Yes, I knew that.

However, any checklist writer worth his or her salt would ask someone with current in-depth taxonomic knowledge (eg a 'TSC' member) to copy-edit the material before publishing. I note that only one tab had this issue, which suggests strongly that all the other tabs were indeed cross-checked... :t:
MJB

It's very hard to check the accuracy of two separate lists of that length by eye. I found the discrepancies by getting my computer to compare the two lists, which is a trivial process once you get the two lists into a suitable form.

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