Wheatears on Lesbos between 9th and 12th May (1 Viewer)

[BobbyJim]

I'm going round in circles so I thought I'd seek expert help.
Photos 1 & 2 are of the same bird and I'm thinking it's a female. I am of the opinion that the birds in photos 3, 4 and 5 are all males. I'd go as far as to opt for all the birds except the one in photo 6 as being black-eared wheatears. The million dollar question I can't answer is are some Eastern and some Western black-eared wheatear. I'm thinking that the bird in photo 6 is a Northern Wheatear.
Any help would be much appreciated.

 

[kuzeycem]

1-5 Eastern Black-eared, 6 Northern

 

[Butty]

are some Eastern and some Western black-eared wheatear

I doubt there's any reason why that would be so. It's merely a geographical split between two forms: you're well into the range of the eastern form - and it's breeding season - so that's what they are.

 

[kuzeycem]

If Western Bonelli's and Melodious Warblers can turn up in the Balkans then W Black-eared surely can too, but these aren't it.

 

[BobbyJim]

Thankyou kuzeycem and Butty for taking the time and trouble to reply to my post. Your help was much appreciated!

 

[Brian J Small]

merely a geographical split between two forms

Don't think so

‘Black-eared Wheatear’ split​

The ‘IOC World Bird List’ split the Black-eared Wheatear into two separate species in January 2020 (version 10.1): Western (Oenanthe hispanica) and Eastern Black-eared Wheatears (Oenanthe melanoleuca).

This split was based on research that begins almost a decade ago that looked at the genetic divergence between four closely related and phenotypically similar taxa: the two Black-eared Wheatear “subspecies” plus Pied Wheatear (Oenanthe pleschanka) and Cyprus Wheatear (Oenanthe cypriaca). The latter two, which are even more similar in plumage, were considered as belonging to the same species in the past.

These studies which culminated in the new publication by Schweizer et al. (2019) showed unequivocally that hispanica and melanoleuca are not sister taxa (not each other’s closest relatives) and therefore should be considered as two separate species.

They found, among others, that Western Black-eared Wheatear is the most genetically divergent from all the other three taxa (it started to diverge about 1.7 million years ago). The genetic distance between the three other taxa is very small (almost negligible) as they started to diverge later.

This example shows perfectly well the mismatch between plumage similarity and true phylogenetic relationships between the different taxa/species.

Reference:

Schweizer, M., Warmuth, V., Kakhki, N. A., Aliabadian, M., Förschler, M., Shirihai, H., Suh, A., & Burri, R. 2019. Parallel plumage colour evolution and introgressive hybridization in wheatears. Journal of Evolutionary Biology 32: 100–110.

 

[Butty]

Don't think so

Point taken - and jolly interesting - but... this is 'merely a geographical split' in the lay-birder's sense that they are, AFAIK, neatly-allopatric forms - one replacing the other (a fact which one may choose to think makes Schweizer et al.'s conclusion less robust than they assert), and differing from each other, phenotypically, only in the fairly trivial way that different geographical forms/races of a single species typically do differ from one another. So, from the field birder's standpoint... yes, I do think this is 'merely a geographical split between two forms' - regardless of the forms' (apparent) genetic differences relative to (an)other species.