As we approach August, families have been passing through my yard - small flocks of robins, flickers, grackles, chipping sparrows, all pecking at the ground for food. Birds are also flocking to the cherry tree, where the berries have become ripe enough to consume. The robins, catbirds and jays have been joined by raucous families of titmice as well as the occasional house finch.
Over at the house wren box, the young - I'm guessing there are at least two in this brood - are now big enough that the parents feed them from outside, except when one (usually the female) goes in to remove poop. I can hear the cheeping of hungry young through the open window while I sit on my enclosed porch.
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| Northern House Wren, aka one of my backyard birds. (Margo D. Beller) |
Many types of birds, including the house wrens and the robins - have multiple broods in a season. Many more are one and done. At this point of the summer, some species of birds are already heading south to their winter feeding grounds. More will be on the move in August into September, including warblers, shorebirds and raptors.
At that point it will be time for people like me to prepare our gardens for winter and put out feeders for the birds passing through and those that will be spending the cold months in and around my yard.
It is at this point of the summer that the American Ornithological Society's (AOS) Committee on Classification and Nomenclature of North and Middle American Birds publishes its "check-list supplement." This benign-sounding document in reality contains what could be radical realignments of the way birds are categorized. Many types of birds previously considered separate species can be "lumped" into one - decreasing the number of birds to record on a Life List. Other birds have been found to be separate species and so are "split," thus increasing the number of birds to be sought by birders.
Here are a couple of examples.
The small common redpoll, which I've seen only during some winters in New Hampshire when they come farther south because of the lack of food in their usual territories are now considered the same species as a paler redpoll I've never seen and is considered a rare visitor to northern U.S. states, the hoary redpoll.
Meanwhile, the Audubon's shearwater, a bird that looks like a large gull and lives its life over the open ocean, is now five species of shearwater, only one of which (the Sargasso shearwater) is found in North American waters. The cattle egret, which is found in farm fields rather than at the edges of water, is now the Western and the Eastern cattle egret. AOS says they are different in plumage. The Western is what is found in the Americas, the Eastern in Asia and Australia.
Normally these changes in taxonomy don't interest me because they involve birds I don't see often or are not likely to see unless I travel to a completely different part of the world.
But the change to the house wren did interest me.
Where there was once one "house wren" there are now six: the northern house wren, the southern house wren, the Cozumel wren, the Kalinago wren, St. Lucia wren, St. Vincent wren and the Grenada wren.
According to the press release announcing the changes:
This split was a long time coming. Some of the island species, in particular, look and sound very different. Some sound so different that people who are intimately familiar with House Wrens from the mainland don’t even recognize their songs as being from a wren! Indeed, that was my experience on my first visit to Cozumel. Speaking of the island species, it was very nice to see this sentence in the acknowledgements of the supplement: “We thank Kalinago Chief Lorenzo Sanford and the Kalinago Council for permission to use ‘Kalinago’ in the English name for the newly recognized species Troglodytes martinicensis.”
Note that “Brown-throated” Wren of Mexico and the far sw. United States is included in Northern House Wren, so there is no additional species for the ABA Area. Northern and Southern house wrens switch over in Veracruz and Oaxaca, where they look different (warm “Brown-thoated” Northerns vs. grayish Southerns) and use different habitats (highland vs. lowland). Kalinago Wren was originally found on Dominica, Martinique, and Guadeloupe but persists on only the first island. The other species are found on their namesake islands.
So the birds in my yard are Northern House Wrens.
Of course, the birds don't know what we humans call them. If they could understand the human need to classify they likely wouldn't care either. Neither do I. I'll continue to call the birds in my yard "house wrens" even after they fly south for the winter.
