Kingbird Highway by Kenn Kaufman

Author:Kenn Kaufman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Cape Sable Sparrow

On that same trip I stopped to look at a related bird, the Dusky Seaside Sparrow. Like the Cape Sable Sparrow, it was a Florida specialty: the Dusky was found only in a small area of marsh near Titusville. Like the Cape Sable, the Dusky had been “lumped” in the latest revision by the American Ornithologists’ Union. It was now just the Dusky race of the Seaside Sparrow, and already the birders were losing interest, writing it off.

At the time, we all assumed that these decisions on taxonomy were permanent. They seemed to carry the finality of What We Know Now, as opposed to What People Used to Think, and we assumed that this was how birds would be classified forever into the future. We did not realize that the pendulum of scientific opinion could, and would, swing the other way.

Within a decade, the very definitions of species and subspecies would be opened up to question. By the early 1990s, some respected biologists would be suggesting that these localized forms were full species, after all. But by that time, the Dusky Seaside Sparrow would be extinct.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.