Great Egret (Australia) - correct name? (1 Viewer)

Can someone please help with clarification?
I'm confused - two books: one has it as Alba, the other as the (Eastern) Great, Modesta.
I'm more focussed (sorry) on the photography than bird nomenclature so will need a little (a lot?) of assistance from time to time.
Thanks, and best regards,
Aussie Geoff.

Hi Geoff

The issue is all explained in our Opus article on the Great Egret.

At present the Australian one is included in Great Egret by most of the taxonomic authorities, but they may well be split before too long.

A. (a.) modesta was split a few years ago, and then they re-lumped it with new evidence: makes me suspect they won't want to split it again without compelling further new evidence. IOC has the comment "modesta should not be split (Pratt 2011)".

Current money is more on the New World subspecies A. (a.) egretta being split; and also the whole of Great Egret being turfed out of Ardea back into Casmerodius.

delia todd said:

The issue is all explained in our Opus article on the Great Egret.

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Actually, that whole article needs some updating! Doesn't even mention that they're breeding in Britain now :t:

An important paper on species limits in the Great Egret complex (the one cited by IOC that I mentioned above):

https://heronconservation.org/media/JHBC/vol01/01_05_Pratt.pdf

Nutcracker said:

A. (a.) modesta was split a few years ago, and then they re-lumped it with new evidence: makes me suspect they won't want to split it again without compelling further new evidence. IOC has the comment "modesta should not be split (Pratt 2011)".

Current money is more on the New World subspecies A. (a.) egretta being split; and also the whole of Great Egret being turfed out of Ardea back into Casmerodius.

Click to expand...

Hi Nutcracker (and welcome also to AussieGeoff).

We had quite a long thread about this in 2017 started by John Allcock in HK. I wrote several quite long posts in the thread about my experience of the two ssp in Japan, where alba seems to be becoming fairly common in the winter.

To me they seem significantly different, and it also seems to me that they recognise this difference and try to get rid of members of the other group from their spot (NB ancdote ≠ data). I won't repeat what I said there (the link to the thread is above). I also gave a link to the blog of Neil Davidson in Kyoto, who is a vastly more experienced birder than me and who also thinks alba and modesta are significantly different (and alba becoming more frequent in Japan).

Both my posts in that thread and ND's blog posts show photos of the two ssp / sp together. Obviously I'm completely unqualified to comment on the DNA evidence, but it seems odd that since the two overlap a lot geographically, they nonetheless have remained distinct (rather than being part of a blur species, as it were, where there are examples of blends at many points between the two extremes).

PS: John in HK, if you are reading this by chance, did your alba which started that previous thread get recognised as a record for HK?

MacNara said:

PS: John in HK, if you are reading this by chance, did your alba which started that previous thread get recognised as a record for HK?

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Yes it did, thanks for asking. It seemed like quite a long circulation in the Records Committee, but was accepted in the end. The first paper will be in the next Hong Kong Bird Report.
At the time I wondered if we would suddenly have more records as people became more aware of what to look for, but I don't think there have been any further claims since mine.

johnallcock said:

Yes it did, thanks for asking. It seemed like quite a long circulation in the Records Committee, but was accepted in the end. The first paper will be in the next Hong Kong Bird Report.
At the time I wondered if we would suddenly have more records as people became more aware of what to look for, but I don't think there have been any further claims since mine.

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Congratulations!