Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!samsung!munnari.oz.au!sirius.ucs.adelaide.edu.au!spam!wvenable
From: wvenable@spam.ua.oz (Bill Venables)
Newsgroups: rec.birds
Subject: Re: MacGillivray's Warbler variant song query
Message-ID: <310@spam.ua.oz>
Date: 27 Jun 90 05:06:19 GMT
References: <29148@eerie.acsu.Buffalo.EDU> <306@spam.ua.oz> <151@sun13.scri.fsu.edu>
Organization: Statistics, Pure and Applied Maths, University of Adelaide
Lines: 28

In article <151@sun13.scri.fsu.edu> sandee@sun13.scri.fsu.edu (Daan Sandee) writes:
>
>Interesting. The A.O.U. (that's American, not Australian) treats two
>populations as distinct species if they, under normal circumstances,
>do not significantly interbreed. 

If you add "in the wild", that was my understanding of the official
RAOU position also.  However this is clearly not the full story. There
are many examples in Australia of sedentary birds which have a range
consisting of several discrete areas, sometimes hundreds of kilometers
apart, between which migration, and hence interbreeding, does not
occur, and yet they are still regarded as a single species.  To name
just two, the crimson rosella (a parrot) and the satin bower bird.

Official lists still have the wedgebills as two species, Psophodes
cristatus and P. occidentalis, although it has been suggested in the
local literature that they should be not so regarded.  I do not have
the references to hand so I can't say on what basis this suggestion
has been made, but the ranges are both so remote that I suspect that
study "in the wild" can't be easy.  (My suggestion that they "had
recently" been re-classified was premature.  Sorry!)

The determination of sepcies status is a strangely contentious issue
in Australia, and some rather iconoclastic revisions have recently
been suggested which are generating a good deal of heated debate. Is
this an antipodean peculiarity or is it the case everywhere?-- 
  Bill Venables, Dept. Statistics,        | Email:   wvenable@spam.ua.oz.au
  Univ. of Adelaide,  South Australia.    | Phone:           +61 8 228 5412