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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Jos Stratford" data-source="post: 1633807" data-attributes="member: 12449">Completely agree. Don't buy the excuses given trying to justify the killing of these specimums - I echo BirdBoyBowley's question, what could you gain by killing these birds, over and above what could be gained by the photographs, detailed field descriptions and, if necessary, live catching for detailed measurements/DNA or whatever.The words of Rasmussen, explaining her conclusive verification, "The morphometric analysis I did shows that all four unicolour specimens are very similar to each other, and distinctly different from Corvus enca specimens. We also showed that the two taxa differ in eye colour - an important feature in Corvus. Not only did this confirm the identity of the new specimens but also the specific distinctness of Corvus unicolor, which has long been in doubt."All she did was measure the dead things and look at the eye colours, hardly a difficult task to do on live birds! This is a hark back to Victorian times, 'tis simple a disgrace that a bird with a population in the mere dozens, or even perhaps hundreds, should be further depleted by so-caled scientists.</blockquote>