SARBN: IOC world list update

[Trevor Hardaker]

Hello to all SARBN subscribers,

 

Today seems to be a day for unpleasant news, what with the MACARONI PENGUIN near Hawston disappearing overnight and leaving a lot of birders very disappointed this morning down on the beach, so let’s try and get all of the “bad news” out of the way in one go…

 

The IOC version 15.1 world list is now live and, therefore, official. I still need to work through it in detail as there have been a lot of lumps (and some splits) worldwide, and many of these will affect us, not so much in the numbers, but more in the common names that we are used to using, as certain species in Southern Africa have been lumped with others elsewhere and now take on different names.

 

When I find some time, I will work through all of it in detail and update the current Southern African checklist and publish the new update on here, but that’s still going to take a while before I get to that point.

 

From a pure numbers perspective, the current IOC update has meant that we have “lost” one bird (only!!) on our current subregion checklist with the lumping of Rufous-bellied and Cinnamon-breasted Tits. Agulhas and Cape Long-billed Larks remain as separate species for now, but the likelihood of them being lumped still remains quite high.

 

More as and when I get the time but, for now, we can all, unfortunately, drop our numbers by one, assuming that we had previously seen and ticked both Rufous-bellied and Cinnamon-breasted Tits…L

 

Hopefully, my next post on here will be much better news…J

 

Kind regards

Trevor