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Message: <blockquote data-quote="jurek" data-source="post: 1603165" data-attributes="member: 3357">The policy of splitting every recognizable subspecies as a species was in place in 19. and early 20. centuries. It was ditched for several scientific and many practical reasons. Most of them remain valid now. Why to reinvent a wheel? Maybe somebody should reprint some seminal ornithology work from ca. 100 years ago, when the number of bird species dropped from ca 20,000 to 8,000? BirdLife International made decision many years ago to include only full species in their red list (and not subspecies, unlike eg. mammals, fish or plants). The reason stated was purely practical - monitoring and conserving the 1000+ threatened species would already be overwhelming task, and protecting every race could jeopardize the conservation of more distinctive species. Did the reasons change? Do mankind already protects well every bird species?I, for one, would welcome BirdLife not to start splitting species, but simply include some or more distinctive subspecies in their Red List. This would: 1) save the cost and effort of re-naming and re-publishing the list, which changes nothing in the field conservation 2) avoid chaos during the transition, where ornithologists are in-process of splitting and debatting, often with the shaky understanding of the taxonomy. 3) maintain a clear priority of distinctive species over less distinctive races, if prioritizing the conservation resources was ever needed. 4) avoid the well-intentioned raising the form to the species to prioritize the conservation, which is now rather well-known trick and was criticized in the Economist (the case of Bornean Clouded Leopard and WWF campaign about Borneo rainforest). 5) bring birds to line with other organisms (where separate conservation status is given to subspecies, eg. Siberian Tiger, or even stocks and subpopulations, eg. Black Sea population of Beluga Sturgeon). To put it short: I feel that ornithology is moving in circles.</blockquote>

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