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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Rasmus Boegh" data-source="post: 762999" data-attributes="member: 1146"><p>The only problem being that voices should be used with great care when dealing with oscine taxonomy (greater than when dealing with suboscines and some non-passerines due to the differences in the vocal structures). I was somewhat surprised when seeing that Collar's paper dealt with 44 (!) splits in a wide range of genera (indeed, probably comprising at least two families), despite not being that much longer than the average paper which deals with taxonomical changes in birds. There are greater argumentation for splitting the Variable Antshrike (Thamnophilus caerulescens) into multiple species (it's a suboscine where voice and plumage vary greatly over its range) than many of the splits in Collar's paper. However, papers published within the last two years have shown that, at least the taxa involved in Bolivia (this includes most of the distinctively different taxa), all are part of a single species as per BSC. Anyway, having read Collar's paper a few times by now, I think there can be few doubts that most of his splits are the "real thing", but admittedly didn't find all the conclusions particularly convincing, as the taxonomy of at least some of these groups evidently is highly complex, often involves allopatric taxa and some of the plumage details clearly are highly plastic. I can't help wondering why he didn't include some biochemical work to support his conclusions, as he clearly has contacts that would have been able to do this. In my opinion it would have been better if the paper had dealt with less groups, but been more of a final word, which I suspect the current paper won't be (both in terms of lumping and splitting). Anyway, the splitting is done (and as said earlier; much of it probably rightfully so) and will probably all be followed without much additional thought in the forthcomming volume of HBW, as I can understand Nigel is involved in it.</p></blockquote><p></p>

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