SARBN: AviList

[Trevor Hardaker]

Good morning all SARBN subscribers,

 

The world of global birding was given a bit of a shake-up yesterday when the first version of the new unified global bird list was released, known as AviList. This has been coming on for a few years now with various representatives of the IOC, Clements/eBird and BirdLife International taxonomic groups that have been working together to come up with a single, unified and aligned global bird list that everyone agrees on, instead of having multiple bird lists with differing taxonomies. It has now finally happened and all other world lists have agreed to now move across and follow this single list in the future.

 

If you would like to know more about AviList, or download the initial world list that has been produced, you can find all the information you need at this website - AviList: The Global Avian Checklist

 

It makes sense now that the Southern African list also moves across to be aligned to this new world list. Currently, we follow the IOC list here and, since they will be aligning themselves with AviList, it makes sense that we do as well. It’s still going to take quite a bit of time before I have worked through everything carefully in order to produce the new Southern African checklist but, for now, a few quick comments…

 

There have been a number of taxonomical changes on the list and, at family level, perhaps the most interesting one for us is that the Ground Hornbills are no longer in their own separate family, but are now in with the rest of the Hornbills.

 

There have been a number of splits across the globe but, after a quick glance, none of them seem to affect us here in Southern Africa, so we are not gaining any new species out of those.

 

There have also been a large number of lumps across the globe. Many will affect us locally in terms of the names used, as one of the species that have been lumped occurs in the subregion. I still need to work through all of this very carefully to see the full extent of it but, as an example, all of the Swamphens (previously 6 extant species across the globe) have been lumped together into a single species now called Purple Swamphen. But these are mostly just going to result in name changes, rather than anything else.

 

I guess what everyone is most interested in are the lumps that are going to affect our overall numbers here in Southern Africa and, unfortunately, there are a few of those too…

 

·         Little and Dimorphic Egret have been lumped together (we’ve only just recently added Dimorphic Egret to our list to start with!). The lumped species will be called Little Egret still.

 

·         Cape and Agulhas Long-billed Larks have been lumped together. The lumped species will be called Cape Long-billed Lark.

 

·         Karoo and Benguela Long-billed Larks have been lumped together. The lumped species will be called Karoo Long-billed Lark.

 

·         Green-backed and Grey-backed Camaroptera have been lumped together. The lumped species will be called Bleating Camaroptera.

 

·         Black and Yellow-billed Kites have been lumped together (again). The lumped species will be called Black Kite.

 

I still need to work through everything carefully, so may find further changes, but that’s all I could find after a quick work through it.

 

It’s a rather large task to now bring our current Southern African checklist fully in line with this new list, so I’m going to need quite a bit of time before I can share it with all of you, but I will start working on it so long…

 

The long and short of it is that the overall Southern African list will be getting shorter and most of our personal subregion lists will be getting shorter as well…L

 

Hope this all makes sense and is of some value to you.

 

Kind regards

Trevor