NACC, North American birds (1 Viewer)

[Peter Kovalik]

Oscar Johnson, Shawn M. Billerman, Blanca E. Hernández-Baños, Daniel F. Lane, Pamela C. Rasmussen, J. V. Remsen, Kevin Winker & R. Terry Chesser (2024) Comments on the species limits of certain North American birds, part 1. Bulletin of the British Ornithologists' Club 144: 367-414.
Comments on the species limits of certain North American birds, part 1

Abstract
Although species limits of North American birds are relatively well delineated, discrepancies among global lists identify species complexes that are subject to differences of opinion. As part of our work with the North American Classification Committee (NACC) of the American Ornithological Society, here we assess species limits in 11 such species complexes of North American birds: Spruce Grouse Canachites canadensis, Band-tailed Pigeon Patagioenas fasciata, Antillean Mango Anthracothorax dominicus, Greenish Puffleg Haplophaedia aureliae, Black Oystercatcher Haematopus bachmani, Hook-billed Kite Chondrohierax uncinatus, Sharp-shinned Hawk Accipiter striatus, Elegant Trogon Trogon elegans, American Three-toed Woodpecker Picoides dorsalis, Golden-olive Woodpecker Colaptes rubiginosus and Olive-throated Parakeet Eupsittula nana. We update information on the taxonomic history of these species, and recommend revised taxonomic treatments by using published works, analysis of museum specimens and citizen/ community science databases. This work can provide a foundation for future taxonomic research in these species complexes.

 

[Peter Boesman]

A comment about the Band-tailed Pigeon case in above new publication:

Voice of northern and southern group clearly differs: Advertisement call of northern has a short note followed by a hoot, southern has a single hoot. There has however been discussion as to how consistent these differences are:

Remsen (2015 in J. Field Ornith.) referred to ML70842 as (the single) counter-example of a single hoot in northern birds. After listening to this recording, I re-identified it as being of Grey-headed Dove (Boesman 2015). This has meanwhile been corrected in Macaulay library.

Now, in the above (Johnson et al. 2024), ML51184 is mentioned as a single counter-example of a disyllabic hoot in the southern group. I listened to this recording, and it is clearly a Scaled Pigeon (!).

I have made previous comments about wrongly identified sounds that are used in NACC proposals as (unjustified) counter-arguments.
In the above, this is even a peer-reviewed publication.

In either case however, equivocal information about birdsounds is apparently not detected by NACC members and is relied on to take decisions.
More care should clearly be taken when single recordings are used as proof to contradict general trends (besides obviously the need to compare homologous vocalizations, which clearly is another weak point).

 

[Mysticete]

This looks like NACC's big reply to the current Avilist/WGAC series of proposals, perhaps in lieu of adding a bunch more proposals that might take a year to respond to.

 

[raymie]

 

[l_raty]

Genetic data.—Monteros (1998) treated T. e. elegans and T. e. ambiguus as conspecific; although his GenBank accession suggests two individuals, they were not separated in the analysis and their origin was not given. Moyle (2005) included only one representative, a sample of T. e. elegans from El Salvador. DaCosta & Klicka (2008) included single samples from El Salvador and Mexico; unsurprisingly, they were sister taxa, and the genetic distance was small.

Espinosa de los Monteros 1998 (at least this is how he writes his own name) did not cite ambiguus at all, and was silent about the species limits he recognized. He sequenced two genes (cytb and 12s) from one individual, hence the two GenBank accession numbers; he did not indicate its origin indeed.

DaCosta & Klicka 2008 actually had seven samples :

Trogon	elegans 1	FMNH​	434015​	El Salvador: Ahuachapan, Parque Nacional El Impossible​
	elegans 2†	FMNH​	434013​	El Salvador: Ahuachapan, Canton Concepcion​
	elegans 3	FMNH​	434014​	El Salvador: Sonsonate, Canton Las Lajas​
	elegans 4	MZFC​	DUET042​	Mexico: Michoacan, La Verdura​
	elegans 5	MZFC​	QRO189​	Mexico: Queretaro, Laguna de la Cruz​
	elegans 6	MZFC​	QRO486​	Mexico: Queretaro, El Chuveje​
	elegans 7	MBM​	JK03280​	Mexico: Jalisco, Sierra de Bolanos​

The four Mexican samples were all from N of the Isthmus, thus represented the ambiguus group. The three samples from El Salvador represented the elegans group. The trees in the paper itself included only two of these samples; for a tree based on the complete data set, see the supplementary data on the publisher's website. The two groups in this tree were reciprocally monophyletic. The authors apparently preferred not to make their data available in a public repository, hence the distance between the groups cannot be computed; based on branch lengths in the published trees, it must have been between 3 and 4%. This distance was "small", in the sense that it was smaller than the distances between many populations treated as conspecific in this paper; it only differed marginally from, e.g., the distance separating T. bairdii from the "T. viridis" from Panama and Ecuador, which were subsequently split as Trogon chionurus by the SACC based on these very data.