Date: 10/22/26 8:14 am From: Kent Fiala (via carolinabirds Mailing List) <carolinabirds...> Subject: AOS taxonomy update
The American Ornithological Society's "Sixty-seventh Supplement to the American Ornithological Society's Check-list of North American Birds" was published Tuesday. As I posted a few weeks ago, since 1886, the AOS has been the authority for the taxonomy of North American birds. More recently the upstart Clements taxonomy has been making inroads on this authority, because it is worldwide, not just North American, and especially because it is used in eBird. But as always, the Carolina Bird Club follows AOS taxonomy.
A couple things interesting about this year's update. The AOS has a reputation for being generally more conservative about making changes, and only this year they have accepted some changes that were in Clements last year: splits of Whimbrel, Fea's Petrel, and Yellow Warbler. They have also adopted some changes that will be in the Clements update scheduled for next week: splits of Willet and Marsh Wren. One departure from Clements is that, although they split the Yellow Warbler, they retain the name Yellow Warbler for what Clements calls Northern Yellow Warbler. The most surprising (to me) departure from Clements is that they are making one not-conservative change that Clements is not making (unless there's a late-breaking update that I haven't heard about yet)--they are splitting the old world and new world forms of Great Egret into two species. What we've been calling Great Egret will now be American Egret with new scientific name /Ardea egretta/. The old world species will retain the scientific name /Ardea alba /with common name Great White Egret.
North Carolina already has Eurasian Whimbrel on its official list as a subspecies, so the split adds a species to the NC list.
I've told the story that when I started birding in 1961, I had bird guides that were already outdated, so I thought that this egret was called American Egret back then. Eventually I learned that the AOU had renamed it Common Egret, and still later it was renamed Great Egret. From this I concluded that AOU was the first to make American Great. And now here we are circled back around to where I started 65 years ago.
