BirdForum is the net's largest birding community dedicated to wild birds and birding, and is absolutely FREE!

Register for an account to take part in lively discussions in the forum, post your pictures in the gallery and more.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Gretchen" data-source="post: 3304448" data-attributes="member: 70591">Hi Marshall,Thanks for your helpful reply.  I usually expect this kind of detail in the taxonomy forum.  I had a vague feeling I had seen the topic discussed before, but frankly I don't always pay close attention and was hoping that someone would point out an earlier thread on the topic.  If this is the first time it's discussed, then I'm glad I brought it up!You point out what I suspected - different definitions of these birds:I rely quite a bit on Brazil, and now forced to read his intro on taxonomy, I see that he follows H & M (with changes), and he even mentions the parus in his brief intro.  The answer to my original question is what Brazil defines as Eastern Great Tit is not the same as the Clement's Japanese Tit because Brazil separates out the nigriloris and commixtus into a "Southern Great Tit", which Clements (at Marshall explains) regards as part of Japanese Tit.  This means calling any Jiangxi tits "Japanese Tits" makes much more sense to me at least.I confess when I called it a simple question, I only did so because I thought it must have already been discussed here.  Taxonomy is complex, and as Brazil said it's especially hard in Asia where there has been less study and fewer observations.I appreciate eBird's desire to use rigor in keeping records, and recognize the huge size project you all are engaged in.  I will add that as a user in Asia, slow internet speeds can make the maps less usable (but your links work considerably faster).</blockquote>

Verification