The most fundamental part of bird watching is either knowing what species you are looking at, or trying to figure it out. There are aids for the figuring-out part called field guides.
In these modern times you can also hold up your phone and use Google or Merlin, but they have limited accuracy. (Merlin is better for bird calls.) But isn’t that a little like letting a robot run a marathon for you? Or letting AI write your love letters? Field guides, to me, teach. They work your brain; they expand your knowledge of the world. AI just answers questions with dubious accuracy.
Figuring such things out is good for your brain, especially when it comes to birds. This is backed up by a recent paper published by researchers in Canada who monitored the MRIs of 29 birders and 29 non-birders as they looked at photos of birds. Turns out that in the birders, the parts of the brain that store expertise were denser and more organized than those of the non-birders. Which may mean a higher degree of neuroplasticity. Which may mean the brains of birders may have a stronger ability to rewire themselves, something that may limit or slow cognitive decline as people age.
Anyhow, the conceptual spine of most field guides is taxonomy, the categorization of different species. Sometimes those relationships are obvious in the way the birds look; sometimes, not so much.
The best way to keep track of all those different species and their relationships is also one of the simplest forms of data organization schemes: lists.
Birders can go a little crazy with lists – county lists, state lists, park lists, yard lists. But the list that most concerns birders is the North American list, also known as the American Birding Association Area list.
Every year a panel of experts from the American Ornithological Society releases a report that tweaks the North American list a bit based on new understandings of different bird populations. Actually, the society tweaks the list of all the birds in North and South America, as well as the Caribbean. There tends to be eras in the tweaking, sometimes of lumping, when the people in charge decide that two similar species are actually the same species, and sometimes of splitting, when it is decided that distinct populations of the same species are actually different species.
These taxonomic decisions are based on analysis of the birds’ visible physical aspects and vocalizations. In recent decades, genetic analysis has launched a current era of splitting. Though with these scientific advances, I’m not sure if we’ll ever get back to lumping.
Birders, like any subculture, often speak in slang that includes banders codes, the four-letter abbreviations of species names used in the field notes of people who band birds. For instance, belted kingfisher is BEKI, peregrine falcon is PEFA, American kestrel is AMKE. And if you say BEKI, PEFA or AMKE to most birders, they will know what you mean.
So some birders were saddened by this year’s AOS report, entitled – deep breath – “Sixty-seventh Supplement to the American Ornithological Society’s Check-list of North American Birds.”
We’d lost GREG.
It was the bander’s code for great egret, a species with an incredibly broad range, covering every continent in the world except Antarctica, and many, many islands. And birders liked having a bird with the same name as the eldest Brady son.
In the Keys, we have two large white herons – the great egret and the great white heron. (Great white heron is currently considered a color morph of the great blue heron, but DNA analysis has shown them to be significantly different, so there’s a solid chance they will be returned to species status, or at least subspecies status, in the coming years.)
Great white herons and great egrets are pretty easy to distinguish from each other. Great whites are about 15% larger with proportionally thicker bills.
If you see a big white heron or egret nearly anywhere else in the world, it’s most likely a great egret. But here, we have to pay attention.
And after some genetic analysis and consideration of physiological differences – the North American great egrets have black legs; the Old World great egrets have more flesh-toned legs – they were deemed two separate species.
The Old World birds are now the great white egret. The birds we have here are now the American egret. American as in North and South continents, not as in ’merica. And their bander’s code is AMEG, which bears no relation to any member of the Brady Bunch and just sounds weird to say. The New World birds will be GWEG which, okay, is kind of funny.
One of the other changes that will affect Keys birds is the split of willet, one of the rare mononym species in North America. For years birders have talked about the eastern and western types, the westerns being inland breeders and about 10% larger than the eastern types, who breed on the northern Atlantic coast.
Those have been split into two species, with the easterns now called saltmarsh willets and the westerns now called prairie willets.
We get both kinds here, sometimes side by side. According to the American Birding Association, the saltmarsh willet is said to totally abandon the continent from November to February, meaning any willet you see in North America during those months is a prairie willet. (I look forward to field testing that assertion this winter.)
There is also one nomenclature change to a species that, in North America, is found only in the Keys. The yellow warbler was split the previous year into northern yellow warbler and mangrove yellow warbler. But the committee decided to simplify their names to yellow warbler and mangrove warbler. Which I like.
I’m going to miss GREG. But I’ll probably get over it.
