What is going on with cormorants in Morocco? (1 Viewer)

[opisska]

Anyone who has been to Morocco must have noticed their spectacular cormorants with white breast. Now we were in south Africa, saw their White-breasted Cormorants and started to wonder, what actually us the difference between those and the Moroccan ones ...

... and the result is a total confusion. It seems that once upon a time, the White-breasted Cormorant (lucidus) has been treated as a subspecies of Great Cormorant, but IOC for example seems to have elevated it to a species. IOC also lists "maroccanus" as a subspecies of Great Cormorant present in Morocco. Maps on xeno-canto show that lucidus is supposed to occur only up to Mauritania and Great (presumably maroccanus) occurs in Western Sahara.

So far so good, right? But then you try to read some slightly older works and people routinely refer to moroccan birds as lucidus, others claim that maroccanus is an "intermediate form between lucidus and nominate carbo" etc... Amids this contradictory nomenclature, it is nigh impossible to locate any information as to how to actually separate lucidus from maroccanus - because to be honest, on our picture, they look quite convincingly inseparable. But someone must have had a motivation to draw the lines between species like this, right?

A separate question is then, does proper lucidus, in the current-day IOC sense ever occur in Western Sahara? It's pretty damn close from their resident range in Mauritania. This seems as a simple question, but considering that the maroccanus birds were formerly called lucidus by some people, it's again pretty much impossible to see what records mean! And, honestly, how would they even be recognized?

 

[Maffong]

You're not the first one to wonder that. Have a look here

I haven't tried to research very much, but I guess this paper should be a start for you. I hope you understand some French

Cheers Maffong

 

[opisska]

You're not the first one to wonder that. Have a look here

I haven't tried to research very much, but I guess this paper should be a start for you. I hope you understand some French

Cheers Maffong

My French is, exhaustively: oui, no, bon soire, bon apetit, bon jeur, oarevour, l'autorute, la peage, la buchon, la estacion service - from the times I used to hitchike the country, not very useful for reading a paper But acrocephalus summarizes it in post #11 of the linked thread and it seems to say that there are intermediate forms all over the place ...

I mean this seems to be somewhat of a mistake by IOC to draw the split line between two continuously mixed subspecies, doesn't it?

 

[opisska]

Btw. regarding the description for ID noted in the llinked thread, this is the most interesting bird we found from Morocco/Western Sahara - sadly on my wife's screen the pouch looks much more olive than on mine, so it's really a lottery on what people will view it To be honest, the birds from Namibia have the contrast more prominent ...

I am still kinda surprised that this just lies out there. Why doesn't someone DO something? This is an obvious topic for research in a super-easily reached country. If I were a biologist, I'd be booking flights

 

[Andy Adcock]

I was in Morocco in 99 and certainly our notes from the time refer to 'the white chinned birds at Oued Massa look like maroccanus'