An appendix to "My Alphabetical Bird Compendium" (1 Viewer)

[dedennedillo]

Not entirely sure as to which forum this should've gone in, but hopefully this works

I recall I posted about an artistic project of mine, where I was doing art tiles for each letter of the alphabet with birds inside which with that letter name began.
This was based off an old sketchbook with stickers and sketches of the birds for each letter.
But of course that was years ago, and taxonomy moves on!
I don't wish to spill the beans; but here were the major 'asterisks' I had with regards to making the list. I will not do so much to spoil the exact species.
Both the birds are, in essence, super species. One was split around the time the original sketchbook was being done... and the other one was split just this year!
And my line of thought was basically, whichever is the 'nominate' species now, that which bears the scientific name prior to the split, is the one that gets depicted. And it gets depicted under the common name of its superspecies. So if 'Wandering Albatross' was on the list [it isn't, but anyways], then the birdy with big wings on 'W' still is listed as 'Wandering Albatross', it's just that it's a snowy albatross that's being shown on the page.
It was only recently that I learnt of one particular policy however.... that whenever a taxonomic split occurs, then even if the species is the nominate, its common name in English gets redone. Even if plenty of books still call it a wandering albatross.
So now I'm split as to what to do. Would one say I should depict the superspecies' nominate; or would it be best I easily write it out? These birds were both in the original sketchbook; one is on a recovered page, and the other one was to my best memory also. My general policy is to change as little as the sketchbook's contained birds as possible.

 

[dedennedillo]

Though saying that...
it does make me wonder how much more taxonomy would've changed once the whole thing is finished!

 

[dedennedillo]

Perhaps this could be moved to "Taxonomy and Nomenclature"?
I think it'd be better there somehow

 

[Paul Clapham]

It was only recently that I learnt of one particular policy however.... that whenever a taxonomic split occurs, then even if the species is the nominate, its common name in English gets redone. Even if plenty of books still call it a wandering albatross.
So now I'm split as to what to do. Would one say I should depict the superspecies' nominate; or would it be best I easily write it out? These birds were both in the original sketchbook; one is on a recovered page, and the other one was to my best memory also. My general policy is to change as little as the sketchbook's contained birds as possible.

That policy is sort of a policy, but it's not always enforced like that. For example suppose there's a species which lives all over Asia, let's call it "Asian Candybird". Then it's decided that the birds of this species which live in Sri Lanka comprise a separate species. Then you have two species, called "XXX Candybird" and "Sri Lanka Candybird". So what do you use for XXX? There isn't a good adjective for "Not In Sri Lanka" which you can use here, the only logical choice really is "Asian Candybird". That happens fairly often.

(Also, the policy you described doesn't look at the nominate subspecies of the original un-split species. For example it's possible that the Sri Lanka Candybird contained the nominate subspecies of the original species, but that doesn't affect the choice of common names for the two species resulting from the split.)

Of course that information isn't that helpful to you because the Wandering Albatross split wasn't that kind of split. It depends on how much bringing-up-to-date you want to do with the project; if you want to minimize changes you could use the "asterisk" approach and just supply a little footnote explaining that the name at the top of the page isn't the name currently used for the species.

I'm also unclear about whether you say your "Wandering" albatross illustration is actually a "Snowy" albatross only because that's where the nominate subspecies went in the split, or whether it really is a Snowy and not, say, an Antipodean Albatross. If you can't tell from the illustration which of the four new species it is, I don't think I would call it a Snowy.

 

[dedennedillo]

I'm also unclear about whether you say your "Wandering" albatross illustration is actually a "Snowy" albatross only because that's where the nominate subspecies went in the split, or whether it really is a Snowy and not, say, an Antipodean Albatross. If you can't tell from the illustration which of the four new species it is, I don't think I would call it a Snowy.

In any case, it isn't a bird I have on the list so it most likely will not be in the tile itself.
I'm merely saying that if it were on the list for whatever reason, it would be a snowy albatross depicted because that's the nominate.