Birding with Kenn and Kimberly

A male Purple Finch pauses in mid-crunch to ask himself, "How do you pronounce Haemorhous , anyway?" From Oak Harbor, Ohio, Kenn writes:   Every year now, birders in North America eagerly await the annual publication of the American Ornithologists' Union's Committee on Classification and Nomenclature - better known as the AOU Check-list Committee.  This is the committee of experts that makes the decisions about how our birds are classified, what is a full species and what is merely a subspecies, and what their official names should be.  Birders usually love it when a species is "split" (it could make our lists larger!) and hate it when two species are "lumped" (which could have the opposite effect).  And although the committee is not secretive about their deliberations, we never know for sure how things are going to turn out until the annual supplement in published, in the July issue of the AOU's journal, The Auk. The supplement for 2012...

From home base in Ohio, Kenn writes: A number of years ago when I was a kid birder, bumming around North America to learn as much as I could about birds, my friends and I started to get interested in Winter Wrens. Of course, there are plenty of reasons to be interested in the Winter Wren. For one thing, there’s the question: is it a bird, or a rodent? Living in dense woods, it can be almost impossible to see sometimes, mousing around in the undergrowth, crawling under logs and vine tangles. (When it does pop up into the open, you have to be very lucky or very skillful to get anything better than the crappy photo shown below.) But when it starts to sing, then you get a different idea. It has a beautiful, long, varied, tinkling series of runs and trills, not what you’d expect to hear from a mouse, or even from the average bird. An "Eastern" Winter Wren at Magee Marsh, Ohio, in early April. Winter Wrens are common early spring migrants along the boardwalk at Magee, but they...

From Rocky Ridge, Ohio, Kenn writes: If you’ve traveled much in North America, especially in the West, your life list may soon go up by two species. Something to sing about: we may have three meadowlark species. The October 2008 issue of The Auk, the scientific journal of the American Ornithologists’ Union (AOU), was mailed late, and I just received my copy. But among the technical papers in this issue were two that could affect how some birds are classified. One study presented evidence that North America has three species of meadowlarks, not two. Another paper gave evidence that the Western Scrub-Jay should be split into two species. Changes like this won’t become official until they’re voted on by the AOU’s Committee on Classification and Nomenclature (more affectionately known as the AOU Check-list Committee). This is the committee that establishes the standardized names and species limits that we see in field guides and bird checklists for North and Central America. But with the...