Fellow birders, Although I started birding as a kid, earlyish in the last century, and was a busy birder in the 60's and 70's, I was out in the field much less during the 80's, when nesting overwhelmed me, soon followed by first and second cycle year off-spring, etc. So when I found time for birding again, in the 1990's, I realized that I needed to educate myself about the dreaded "T" word--Taxonomy! "Do Woodpeckers come before or after Flycatchers?" I'd ask myself. If your own answer is "Who cares?" it's OK to stop reading now.
I started hopped on the early part of the learning curve by studying "Non-passerines" vs "Passerines." What a "false dichotomy!" After all, why is not the taxonomy of sporting equipment divided into "baseball bats" and "everything that is not a baseball bat?" But, I digress. As a memory crutch, I devised an alphabet of Colorado's bird families, from loons through finches, reflecting the now out-moded taxonomy of that era: A was for loons, cormorants, and pelicans B was for herons and egrets C was for Ducks and Geese, D was for Hawks and so on, in taxonomic order, one letter for each group. In my own alphabetic system, I "lumped" swifts and hummers, so I would not run out of letters of the alphabet. Fortuitously, G was for Gulls P was for pipits and Phainopepla-- how nice! Q was for vireos and warblers S was conveniently for Sparrows, and this alphabet ended with U for icterids, then V for finches. (For a while I had X for House Sparrows, but gave that up, trying to keep it simple). I coped with some minor family rearrangements, as the vireos moved away from warblers and herons and falcons were bumped around. As an exercise, I looked at the latest (but surely not final) taxonomic arrangement of birds, and here is how my old alphabet went bezonkers: C now comes first, for Ducks and Geese, followed by E for gallinaceous birds, etc, etc. The newest taxonomy, using my old alphabet is now: C E A H I E F G A B D H I J D (again) K G M L N O P X P (take a breath) V S R Q S T R U! So there you have it, what I now call the "A C B's" of modern avian taxonomy. Finally, so I won't be misunderstood as a taxonomic Luddite, I admire progress in avian taxonomy, feeling that advances like DNA analysis, sound recordings, etc, etc are bringing us closer and closer to "reality," with a better understanding of what the birds have known all along. Joe Roller, Denver Find me in the phone book under the "R's". OOPS! Are there phone books anymore? -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Colorado Birds" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/cobirds/CAJpZcUD3h09AXoZ7B%3DbVL%2BZyZKmyFOR8qmZ6On3nPDSNqqKysA%40mail.gmail.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
