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The Swift and the Swallow and the Whip Poor Will.. What is what? (1 Viewer)

manfred0034

Active member
Hi,

I have been intrigued by Birds that to me are basically the same but are called different things. Like the Barn Swallow and the Purple Martin. And for a long time I thought the Swift was in that same group (of looking the same birds, but very small subtle differences.)

However I recently learned that Swifts are not related to Swallows or Purple Martins. That they are in a different family. What is weird is that the Audubon Society book I have is what led to my confusion on Taxonomy. It puts Swifts with Swallows because they are both fast flying birds. I looked in a different bird book and it put Swifts with Whip Poor Wills. And way over in a different section it had Swallows and Martins.

So I take it that Swifts are not at all related to Swallows? Are Swifts related to Whip Poor Wills? What kind of bird is most closely related to Swifts. I take it that Swifts are an example of convergent evolution. Two totally different things that just happen to look similar. Like Lions and Marsupial lions. Or so forth.

Are Swifts even related to Whip Poor Wills?

Thanks

P.S.
I also learned another thing. To add to the confusion. That New World Vultures aren't really vultures at all! That they are actually storks that just happen to resemble birds of prey. And Old World Vultures are actually birds of prey. Or related to Hawks, Falcons, and Eagles. New World Vultures are more closely related to storks than they are to Old World Vultures. I guess huh? (Lots of confusion.)
 
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Hi,

I have been intrigued by Birds that to me are basically the same but are called different things. Like the Barn Swallow and the Purple Martin. And for a long time I thought the Swift was in that same group (of looking the same birds, but very small subtle differences.)

However I recently learned that Swifts are not related to Swallows or Purple Martins. That they are in a different family. What is weird is that the Audubon Society book I have is what led to my confusion on Taxonomy. It puts Swifts with Swallows because they are both fast flying birds. I looked in a different bird book and it put Swifts with Whip Poor Wills. And way over in a different section it had Swallows and Martins.
Field guides have different approaches, some sort by appearance, others by colour (bad idea), and still others by taxonomy. The last one is my favourite approach, but it requires some background knowledge.


P.S.
I also learned another thing. To add to the confusion. That New World Vultures aren't really vultures at all! That they are actually storks that just happen to resemble birds of prey. And Old World Vultures are actually birds of prey. Or related to Hawks, Falcons, and Eagles. New World Vultures are more closely related to storks than they are to Old World Vultures. I guess huh? (Lots of confusion.)
AFAIK the current approach is to retain them within Accipitriformes (Hawks, eagles, vultures, osprey, secretarybird etc.), but as a distinct family, unlike true vultures, which are part of the same family as hawks and eagles.
Falcons are an entirely different order that are apparently now believed to be closer to songbirds and parrots than to other birds of prey.
 
I take it that Swifts are an example of convergent evolution. Two totally different things that just happen to look similar. Like Lions and Marsupial lions. Or so forth.

Yes, the swifts and the swallows are an often quoted example of convergent evolution. Both families developed through adapting to aerial insect feeding, giving them both small bills, wide gape and agile flight etc. Although unrelated this has resulted in a comparable appearance. The Nighthawks, Whip Poor Wills, Nightjars and similar are a different but close family to the swifts, whilst the swallow family is not related till you go back to the beginning of birdlife.

If you look at a Nighthawk's face you will see a similarity to swifts ;)
 
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P.S.
I also learned another thing. To add to the confusion. That New World Vultures aren't really vultures at all! That they are actually storks that just happen to resemble birds of prey. And Old World Vultures are actually birds of prey. Or related to Hawks, Falcons, and Eagles. New World Vultures are more closely related to storks than they are to Old World Vultures. I guess huh? (Lots of confusion.)


The relationship between New world Vultures and Storks is false and obsolete.

Phylogenetically, Cathartidae (family frequently placed in Accipitriformes, sometimes isolated in their own order Cathartiformes [what I do]) and Accipitriformes are sister , so to speak.


A lot of things have changed in the last ten years, Sibley and Ahlquist are outdated
 
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...I take it that Swifts are not at all related to Swallows? Are Swifts related to Whip Poor Wills? What kind of bird is most closely related to Swifts.

I also learned another thing. To add to the confusion. That New World Vultures aren't really vultures at all! That they are actually storks that just happen to resemble birds of prey. And Old World Vultures are actually birds of prey. Or related to Hawks, Falcons, and Eagles. New World Vultures are more closely related to storks than they are to Old World Vultures. I guess huh? (Lots of confusion.)

Swifts and swallows are not closely related but look superficially similar and are placed together in many identification guides. Swifts are most closely related to hummingbirds which are in turn related to the nightjar group (including whip-poor-wills). Swallows and martins, on the other hand, are passerines, embedded in a large group which includes mostly Old World families like reed warblers, babblers and long-tailed tits. Amongst North American birds, the closest relatives of swallows and martins are the Bush Tit, the Wrentit and the Horned Lark.

New World vultures are no longer thought to be close to storks, but are indeed related to eagles, hawks and Old World vultures. Confusingly though, falcons are now known not to belong to this group - they are instead related to parrots and passerines. Hope this is helpful.
 
Grebes and flamingoes are each others' closest relatives . . . who would've thought that without DNA testing?! :eek!:


And yep, falcons are parrots that turned bad and got a lust for blood . . . next time a pet parrot bites your finger, it's dreaming of its cousins :-O
 
Falcons are an entirely different order that are apparently now believed to be closer to songbirds and parrots than to other birds of prey.

Wow that's crazy! haha. No way. Well I am an adult I can handle this. I wonder if the bird books won't say or mention this because they think it would be like telling a little kid that there is no Santa Claus.


Hey, science is science. You are constantly learning. Could have fooled me with the falcon. They have a strong curved hooked beak. They have talons. And they eat large prey. And they have excellent vision.


Well, I think until we get this bird situation handled (which is starting to sound messier and messier everyday) they should hold off on the Dinosaur movies and shows and putting feathers on them and saying that they are nothing more than big flightless ancient birds.


I guess it would be a bad idea to share this weird dream I keep having of a super super gigantic penguin that has basically evolved to the size of a killer whale and lives almost the entirety of its life underwater. To me penguins are the most perplexing of all birds. The way they look and they can't fly. And they are extremely cold adapted. And can swim enormous distances.
 
If you look at a Nighthawk's face you will see a similarity to swifts ;)

Please tell me that Owls are still birds of prey! Please don't tell me that Owls are actually the same thing as Turkeys. I am still learning about birds so forgive me. I learned recently that the extinct DoDo was actually a giant pigeon. So that's cool. Somehow looking at a pigeon today isn't quite the same.
 
Wow that's crazy! haha. No way. Well I am an adult I can handle this. I wonder if the bird books won't say or mention this because they think it would be like telling a little kid that there is no Santa Claus.
I'm guessing you're referring to field guides. They usually leave out such topics due to lack of space - these books need to be as light as possible while covering as many ID features as possible.
Handbooks and other scientific literature on the other hand discuss these issues. The problem with those is that their taxonomy can be antiquated shortly after publishing because thanks to genetic research, the science moves at a rather quick pace.


Hey, science is science. You are constantly learning. Could have fooled me with the falcon. They have a strong curved hooked beak. They have talons. And they eat large prey. And they have excellent vision.
Convergent evolution. It's a really fascinating topic IMO. If you look closely at falcons though, you can see some similarity with parrots. The pointed wings in most species for example. And there's something about the head that just resembles parrots somehow.
By the way, most birds have great vision, so that's not always a deciding feature. A better indicator of predatory adaptation is forward-pointing eyes (to some degree).


Well, I think until we get this bird situation handled (which is starting to sound messier and messier everyday) they should hold off on the Dinosaur movies and shows and putting feathers on them and saying that they are nothing more than big flightless ancient birds.
Well that wouldn't be entirely accurate either. Not all dinosaurs necessarily had feathers. But their portrayal in Jurassic World is definitely antiquated.


I guess it would be a bad idea to share this weird dream I keep having of a super super gigantic penguin that has basically evolved to the size of a killer whale and lives almost the entirety of its life underwater. To me penguins are the most perplexing of all birds. The way they look and they can't fly. And they are extremely cold adapted. And can swim enormous distances.
A few decades ago, a guy named Dougal Dixon published a book about a hypothetical scenario of evolution after the extinction of humans, I think it's called "Life after Man" or something. It featured a giant filter-feeding penguin.


Please tell me that Owls are still birds of prey! Please don't tell me that Owls are actually the same thing as Turkeys. I am still learning about birds so forgive me. I learned recently that the extinct DoDo was actually a giant pigeon. So that's cool. Somehow looking at a pigeon today isn't quite the same.
Owls are a separate order. They're definitely not close to turkeys, though.
 
I guess it would be a bad idea to share this weird dream I keep having of a super super gigantic penguin that has basically evolved to the size of a killer whale and lives almost the entirety of its life underwater.

A few decades ago, a guy named Dougal Dixon published a book about a hypothetical scenario of evolution after the extinction of humans, I think it's called "Life after Man" or something. It featured a giant filter-feeding penguin.
The main difficulty for something like this would be evolving active young birth instead of egg-laying, as an animal that size couldn't come on land to lay eggs. Dinosaurs / birds never managed this in 250 million years (though some other reptiles did, notably Ichthyosaurs, as well as mammals).
 
Sorry I don't want to get too off topic. However thanks Sangahyano for the book lead. I will have to check that out. The penguin in my dream was scary. You wouldn't want run into it. And it's feet definitely evolved or merged together to form a back flipper. I'm not sure if it was two back flippers like seals, I think maybe it was. Filter feeding. Wow. Who knows.

I found this
Notice that ichthyosaurs, one of the marine creatures associated with the ‘age of dinosaurs’, although they would be properly classified as reptiles (they are not dinosaurs, nor are plesiosaurs, pterosaurs and so on), did in fact give birth to live young (we know this from the fossil record). But they nevertheless did this in a way similar to some living sharks–they laid the eggs inside themselves, and hatched them inside. So they were not viviparous, as mammals, or oviparous, as birds, but rather ovoviviparous.
https://creation.com/did-all-dinosaurs-lay-eggs
 
Sorry I don't want to get too off topic.

I found this
https://creation.com/did-all-dinosaurs-lay-eggs [/I]

This conversation has swayed a fair bit off the usual topic of this forum, but getting one started in understanding how organisms are evolutionarily related is part of what we do here. That said, your choice of source material for your observations is a bit concerning (the link above, for example). I'd recommend you check others for some more scientific material about paleontological and evolutionary topics. Here, there be no dragons!

That said, there are several snakes that are viviporous, showing that even within a modern (albeit very old!) group of reptiles, there are species the span the spread of different reproductive strategies.
http://www.reptileknowledge.com/articles/article28.php

But back to your original questions, which have been largely answered by other members: the relationships among the various birds you mentioned are mostly quite well understood, and have been for over a century. Swifts are Apodiformes, which means they evolved from the same ancestor as hummingbirds (also in that order). Nightjars (such as Whip-poor-wills) are in their own order, Caprimulgiformes, which is believed to be closer related to swifts than many other groups of birds. Swallows are in the order Passeriformes, the largest of the bird orders and which includes thrushes, sparrows, warblers, flycatchers, etc.--the "song birds". Swallows differ from swifts in their foot structure, their flight style, and their vocal repertoires (among other characters). These are the sorts of things which allowed Ornithologists as long ago as the 1800s to categorize the orders of birds with enough accuracy that we still maintain many of their older works even today, in the age of DNA sequencing. Morphological (meaning, examining physical structures such as skeletons, body shapes, plumage, etc.) and molecular (meaning DNA) techniques have both been important in allowing us to understand the evolutionary relationships among birds.

As others have mentioned above, there have been some molecular surprises, such as the close relationship of falcons to parrots and those, together, closer to Passeriformes than to Accipitriformes (the hawks, eagles, vultures, etc.), and also the close relationship between grebes and flamingos. In these cases, the morphology "duped" earlier evolutionary ornithologists into believing one relationship when another was more likely the truth--the falcon-hawk situation was a case of convergence in morphology as it turns out. But falcons, hawks, and owls are all still "raptors" as that name has no evolutionary significance, it simply means they are carnivores and capture their prey--much the same way ducks, grebes, penguins, puffins, and coots are all "waterbirds" even though none are particularly closely related to the others.

Hope this clears up your questions! If you want to see more about how birds around the world are related, you might try looking at these webpages:
http://www.worldbirdnames.org/classification/orders-of-birds-draft/
http://www.birds.cornell.edu/clementschecklist/download/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bird_families
 
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As an aside, I'd not trust any information from a website that's pushing weird religious viewpoints ;)

I only mention because I know you respect precision in language - Creationism isn't exactly a religious viewpoint and most (all?) major religions have no conflict with evolution.
 
One additional thing to note about reptiles is how paraphyletic they are, so it's kind of difficult to define just how inclusive the term "reptile" is.


I only mention because I know you respect precision in language - Creationism isn't exactly a religious viewpoint and most (all?) major religions have no conflict with evolution.
Well, to be even more precise, the mainstream religious organizations have no conflict with evolution, or rather they seem to side-step the issue. Creationism is a pan-religious movement; AFAIK there is even cooperation between Christian and Muslim creationist activists. But it does derive its justification from religious scripture.
 
Thanks for the answers. I had no idea that I posted something from a creationist website until the next day. I really don't see a similarity between Parrots and Falcons. I am guessing the US military doesn't either. I know there is the F-16 falcon but not the F-16 parrot. Or the F-16 Macaw. Seriously it seems like I am getting blamed for things that are published (by I am guessing science and academically accredited people) in internationally published books. By major publishers.

I am looking at a Audubon society bird book. And it apparently is full of flubs. But maybe it is aimed at kids. I am looking at a Everglade kite. And to me the Everglade kite looks like a bio-engineered bird of prey pigeon! I mean by looks. I know it's not probably related to pigeons. It has a curved beak and talons and it is listed as a bird of prey. But other than that it looks like a Rock Dove. And of course it has falcons listed as Hawk-like birds. Then there are types of Hawks called Harriers that to me resemble falcons more than hawks. The book says that Harriers are like keener sharper versions of hawks.

So thanks for the information. Until government and academia starts naming their fast multi-million jet fighters after parrots (to be more scientifically accurate) I am not going to feel guilty for still thinking a Falcon is a type of Hawk.
 
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I'm sure nobody here meant that as a personal attack. It's just that it's easy to fall for bad info (or "fake news", as it were) when you're new to a subject. Heck, in some cases, it even happens to experts if they're not careful.

As to military naming conventions, all they care about is that they name their aircraft after badass birds of prey. Whether those birds are related to one another is of no interest to the USAF. "Raptor" is an ecological category (decribing adaptation and behaviour), not a taxonomical one.
 
.... I know there is the F-16 falcon but not the F-16 parrot.
I like the idea of a jet named after a parrot :-O

The book says that Harriers are like keener sharper versions of hawks.
Yep - harriers are closely related to hawks (that is, to true hawks, i.e., Cooper's and Sharp-shinned).


So thanks for the information. Until government and academia starts naming their fast multi-million jet fighters after parrots (to be more scientifically accurate) I am not going to feel guilty for still thinking a Falcon is a type of Hawk.
If you like the idea of some more detailed reading, take a look at the link in post #3 of the Raptors thread here :t:
 
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