Date: 11/11/24 3:11 pm From: Don Roberson <creagrus...> Subject: [MBBIRDS] Taxonomic update re Bird Families
Now that the latest eBird/Clements update has been completed — and everyone knows that Vega Gull and Siberian Pipit are new vagrants that occur along the central California coast from time to time — that same taxonomic update added 3 new eBird/Clements Bird Families to be considered when birding the world. The Clements update enumerates these new Families:
> Three additional families (Sharpbill Oxyruncidae, Yellow Flycatchers Erythrocercidae, and Spotted Creepers Salpornithidae) are recognized this year
eBird/Clements has also re-sequenced some of the families — mostly small changes, but it now puts the Flamingos and Grebes back into the middle of the phylogeny, rather than closer to the front as it had been.
This is my 19th edition of my list of Bird Families for birders, and is very little changed from my 18th ediiton that was posted a year-and-a-half ago. I’ve added the Spotted Creepers to the list — which is my one addition — and they now have a separate page with photos and discussion. I had already accepted the split of Sharpbill from the Royal Flycatcher, and had accepted the Erythrocercidae, now called Yellow Flycatchers, about a dozen years ago. I’ve also re-sequenced the entire list to match the current eBird/Clements list.
One of the reasons I have this website is to give world birders a “heads up” long before the global checklists get updated to add (or drop) Bird Families based on new research. I read a lot of that research when it is published , and have often updated my site many years before the new Families are formally adopted by the major World Checklists. So, for example, if one was birding Ghana in 2013, as I was, it was very helpful to know that Chestnut-capped Flycatcher, then considered to be a Monarch Flycatcher, was actually in a new and different family that would become a formal family 11 years later, this year, as among the the Yellow Flycatchers (Erythrocercidae).
I’ve also updated my personal gallery of photos of Bird Families — just one photo for each family — but these have been updated by newer photos and have also been re-organized to the current eBird/Clements sequence. I’ve now photographed 242 of my 261 bird families; the remaining 19 are families I’ve seen but not photographed.
