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="jmorlan" data-source="post: 1803975" data-attributes="member: 1564">Most major museums have their bird skin collection catalogs online now.  Can you check to see if there are any American Three-toed Woodpecker skins from the Brehm collection in any of these institutions?  It appears to me, that if there were such a specimen, it would have surfaced in the last 150 years.  Furthermore, if Brehm's name were a misidentification and was found to refer to another species such as the Black-backed Woodpecker, it would be subject to being suppressed because the name had been applied to the American Three-toed Woodpecker over three editions of the the AOU Check-List and various other authors.  Switching around the names would not be in the interest of taxonomic stability or clarity because the same name would be in the literature for two different entities.  But beyond whether the name is hypothetical, there remains the question of whether the description is adequate to establish a name-bearing type (fixed or not) according to the requirements of the code.</blockquote>