Friday, 18 April 2014

Re: [Maine-birds] Acadian Chickadee

On Apr 18, 2014, at 9:59 AM, Henry L.Donovan <henryldon@aol.com> wrote:

> Are the Acadian chickadee and the Boreal Chickadee the same bird?

Yes.

The Acadian Chickadee is a subspecies of Boreal Chickadee. The names Hudsonian Chickadee, Columbian Chickadee, and Acadian Chickadee all refer to different races (=subspecies) of the Boreal Chickadee. There are two other subspecies that don't have English names commonly associated with them.

The Acadian Chickadee, "our" chickadee along with our Canadian Maritime province neighbors, is said to be slightly smaller and warmer, more rufescent brown on the back (but with duller crown) than the wide ranging nominate race, hudsonicus, found from Alaska to eastern Canada, including Newfoundland. The Acadian Chickadee's range is a bit uncertain, as are the distinctions of it from birds to the north and west. It is said to range south of the St. Lawrence throughout the Maritimes to northern New England and west to northeast New York and southern Quebec. Although birds that occur south of this range in fall and winter incursions are ascribed to the Acadian Chickadee, they may in fact be birds from farther north and west (Hudsonian). Boreal Chickadees of Newfoundland, at one time described as a separate subspecies, show distinct genetics shared in part with birds from Nova Scotia. So there is work to be done on this.

The scientific name for the Acadian Chickadee is Poecile hudsonicus littoralis. It was first described by Henry Byrant based on birds from Yarmouth, Nova Scotia. Thanks to the Biodiversity Heritage Library, one can read the characters then ascribed to the subspecies:
http://biodiversitylibrary.org/page/9491314
[I'd like to make a separate plea to support BHL, the resource for older, important scientific literature online is worth it! It is maintained by users like you. Consider a donation: https://donate.sil.si.edu/v/DonateBHL.asp]

Interestingly, the first case of hybridization between Black-capped and Boreal Chickadees in eastern North America was documented from Atlantic Canada (Nova Scotia, 2010) and thus involved littoralis. (The only other case is a hybrid specimen from Alaska between Black-capped and Hudsonian Boreal.) This raises some interesting questions and suggests we look carefully at our chickadees Downeast and perhaps in the mountains too where overlap is widespread.

Lastly, a helpful publication to past names of birds in North America is a booklet prepared by Dick Banks. Here is a link to both an HTML and PDF version (I have the old-fashioned paper copy): "Obsolete English Names of North American Birds and Their Modern Equivalents"
https://www.pwrc.usgs.gov/research/pubs/banks/obslinks.htm

The last AOU checklist to use English names for subspecies was the 4th edition (1931), and the last to list subspecies was the 5th (1957), when only the scientific names were used. Those are two primary sources for subspecies, but there are others.

Louis Bevier
Fairfield

--
Maine birds mailing list
maine-birds@googlegroups.com
http://groups.google.com/group/maine-birds
https://sites.google.com/site/birding207
---
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Maine birds" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to maine-birds+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.

0 comments:

Post a Comment