In the Olde Worlde, things
were much simpler. There was only one of everything, so they could just
refer to The Kingfisher, The Robin, The Wren, etc. There were a bunch of
LBJs (Little Brown Jobs) that were called buntings: Reed Bunting, Pallas's
Bunting, Little Bunting, etc. Occasionally, these showed a little bit of
character- the Yellowhammer for instance (not to be confused with the State
Bird of Alabama). These birds can show up in Alaska and even more rarely
on the West Coast of the Lower 48. These are in the genus Emberiza,
and are the "type genus" (whatever that is) of the family
Emberizidae. There was another bunch of LBJs in the Olde Worlde that were
called Sparrows: House Sparrow, Tree Sparrow, Italian Sparrow, etc. These
didn't show up at all in the New World. These are in the genus Passer and
are the type genus of the family Passeridae
and the order Passeriformes.
 |
| Yellowhammer. Not the European kind though. |
When the Europeans
"discovered" the Americas (with apologies to the humans already
living here), they had to give names to the critters they found here. A
common bird with a reddish breast was called "robin," despite bearing
no familial relation whatsoever with The Robin. Any bird of prey was
called "hawk," despite that name being reserved in the Olde Worlde
for the genus Accipiter. In fact, birds of the genus Buteo (such
as our Red-tailed and Swainson's "Hawks") are called Buzzards over
there, but the New World Vultures came to be called buzzards, while
"real" vultures (i.e., Olde Worlde Vultures) are in a different
family.
 |
| Black and White Warbler, per early European naming conventions |
Confused yet? Hold on to your hat, it
gets worse.
So, confronted with a
myriad of LBJs in their new homeland, the namers, had a fifty-fifty chance and,
of course, picked the wrong one and called them sparrows, which they aren't,
instead of buntings, which they are. Except for Lark Bunting, which
is. There are also the Snow Bunting and McKay's Bunting, which were also Emberizids
until a couple years ago, when they became warblers, but that's a story for
another time.
 |
| We've been over this- I'm not a bunting. |
But the Emberizidae is just one family of
"nine-primaried oscines" (pardon my French), which went absolutely
berserk in the New World. The nine-primaried oscines include the
wood-warblers (Parulidae, which are
totally not related to the Olde Worlde warblers, Sylviidae, or are they now Acrocephalidae?),
the tanagers (Thraupidae), and the
New World blackbirds (Icteridae, not
to be confused with the Olde Worlde Blackbird, which is a thrush). For a
while, all these families were lumped into one huge mega-family, Emberizidae (and all the Olde Worlde
flycatchers, warblers, thrushes, etc., were lumped into a similar mega-family,
the Muscicapidae). Then, the
Museum Ornithologists got concerned about job security and realized that they
needed to break up the mega-family Emberizidae,
so they re-split the Parulidae, the Thraupidae, the Emberizidae, the Icteridae,
and for good measure, the Cardinalidae,
the Coerebidae (containing only the
Bananaquit) and a few loose ends that we don't know where they go.
In the Parulidae, the Yellow-breasted Chat has always
been a problem. Is it a warbler or a tanager? Well, it's pretty
much agreed now that's it's a solid warbler. A few years ago, however,
the Olive Warbler asked for a divorce, and it now has it's own family, the Peucedramidae, containing one species in
all the world. The rest of the Parulidae
has been fairly stable, except that the Museum Ornithologists recently decided
to pull down their genes and mix up all the genera (plural of genus),
completely rearranging the sequence and breaking up all sorts of happy
relationships.
 |
| I couldn't find a picture of a Chat, so here are some gulls! |
The Thraupidae, Cardinalidae,
and Emberizidae have been exchanging
species willy-nilly for a decade. Originally, we had 6 species of tanager
in the ABA Area, five species of Piranga and the Western
Spindalis. The species of Piranga, including our Summer and
Scarlet Tanagers, got pulled out and dumped into the Cardinalidae, where they seem destined to stay, although they will
probably always be called "tanager." Western Spindalis was, for
awhile, the only "true tanager" in the ABA Area, but it's status as a
tanager remains shaky, at best. Nobody quite knows what to do with the
Bananaquit. For a while, it had its own family, but, at least as I write
this, it is a tanager. The Thraupidae
has also picked up some of the other emberizids, such as the Yellow- and
Black-faced Grassquits, so we now have 4 thraupids in the ABA Area, as well as
such strange things as the Darwin's finches! The Emberizidae contains the "New World
sparrows," including the towhees and juncos. The emberizids recently
lost the snow bunting and longspurs to their own family, which now sits between
the Olive Warbler and the other warblers!
The Icteridae
has been perhaps least affected by all the shenanigans.
 |
| Icteridae: the boringly organized family. |
Now, "finch" is
just a generic term for a small bird with a pretty song and generally a
seed-eating bill, so you have House Finches and American Goldfinches (as
opposed to The Goldfinch of the Olde Worlde) in the Fringillidae and Saffron Finch in the Thraupidae and
Tanager Finch in the Emberizidae
(when you figure that one out, please explain it to me). Likewise,
"grosbeak," as Mark said is "gross (or heavy) beak," and we
have the cardinal-grosbeaks (Rose-breasted, Black-headed, and Blue) in the Cardinalidae and finch-grosbeaks
(Evening and Pine) in the Fringillidae.
And how "bunting" got transferred from something as plain as a Reed
Bunting to something as gaudy as a Painted Bunting, I don't know.
 |
| Summer Tanager. Well, until they tell me otherwise. |
Taken from Bruce Neville's email to Rio Brazos Audubon's Google Group.
CC-BY
================================
As a post-script to this, there was a large suite of papers published in late 2014 that provided the most complete view of the phylogeny of birds to date. While the above tale of naming conventions based on gross morphology (or at least quick-glimpse morphology) highlights the complexity and difficulty of making order out of the chaos of evolution and diversity.
These papers use genome level sequencing to compare a variety of birds to try and better understand the basis for their diversification and inter-relatedness. It's a truly remarkable tale of birds, DNA sequencing, hard work, and clever thinking to peice this puzzle together. For more reading I'll turn it over to some of the blogs that will do a better job of explaining than I will:
No comments:
Post a Comment