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Message: <blockquote data-quote="cuckooroller" data-source="post: 2419287" data-attributes="member: 1557">Well, probably not recognised by the casual "birder" as per his definition of such.  However, I would imagine that there are a lot of even the casual "birder" that become interested in the various species concepts even if he initially wanted to just find out what that pretty bird was that he just saw in his backyard.  All of the various species concepts have their relative merits though personally I might consider rather useless if not just as a theoretical construct a species concept that would have it that carried to its logical extreme each individual bird can be viewed as a defineable taxonomic unit, that is to say, a total abdication of attempting to define parameters for analysis of bird populations below the species level.Certainly, I agree with him that mankind's attempt to further refine the techniques used, to review the past work done for the definition and description of subspecific taxa should be undertaken and is laudable just on the basis of common scientific rigor.  The number of presently accepted bird races is certainly rife with inexactitude.  We certainly need to get better in the descriptions and in our choices of the reproducible parameters used from case to case.Presently there does not seem to be an overarching set of rules by which to assign taxa below the species level (actually, even assigning species level is problematic).  There are lots of statistical models out there and a lot of researchers that seem to just stick their hands in the choice bowl until they find one that justifies their findings.  It is probably more useful to give preeminence to just one.  The Tobias scheme is the one that I find most worthy lately.  I have also found extremely worthy of merit the model known as Ecological Niche Modeling.</blockquote>

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