As regular CFZ-watchers will know, for some time Corinna has been doing a column for Animals & Men and a regular segment on On The Track... particularly about out-of-place birds and rare vagrants. There seem to be more and more bird stories from all over the world hitting the news these days so, to make room for them all - and to give them all equal and worthy coverage - she has set up this new blog to cover all things feathery and Fortean.

Tuesday 27 December 2016

Scientists Realized a Species of Bird Is Really Thirteen Different Species





December 9, 2016 // 03:50 PM EST 

But it turns out the birds that were once believed to all belong to the same species—the red-bellied pitta—are actually 13 distinct species, found around Southeast Asia. 
Image: BirdLife International 

This is particularly significant because when they were all lumped together, conservationists weren’t worried about their population numbers. But now that the differences have been teased apart, it’s become apparent that three of these species are actually globally threatened. One species is also considered near threatened, according to BirdLife International, a bird conservation organization, which is the Red List authority for birds for the International Union for Conservation of Nature. 

“The birds do look alike but there are significant differences between individual taxa,” explained Nigel Collar, a Leventis Fellow in conservation biology with BirdLife International, who helped to identify the different species. 

The first clue came from a team of geneticists who, in 2013, published a paper that showed the red-bellied pitta could be as many as 17 distinct species, based on their genetic diversity. (One factor that can help determine that two animals are separate species is if they are unable to successfully interbreed.) Collar explained that there’s a bit of debate over how genetics is used to determine whether a species is distinct, but the evidence convinced him and his colleagues to take a second look at the pitta. 

“We sat down in British Museum and got out all the specimen and evaluated these slightly different or fairly different subspecies,” Collar said. “So you’re comparing the differences: maybe one has a big bill and another has a small bill; a large wing or a short wing.” 

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