[Tweeters] re Steller's Jay research

[Mark Egger]

Hi all,

While I was amused by the suggestion of Stellar Jay as the “new” name for Steller’s Jay (I’m still grumbling about the lame justification for “new” names by the AOU), I was very impressed with the paper linked by Steve Hampton on Steller’s Jay evolution and the case for splitting the PNW and Rocky Mountains populations. This has been of interest for many for years, and this extensive paper seems to provide strong support for their splitting. But of even more interest to me is that the paper mentions the great morphological divergence of the birds in southern Mexico and Guatemala, which were NOT included in the analysis published in the paper.  Hopefully that team or others will pursue the southern populations for full species recognition in the near future. I’ve seen the Steller’s Jays both in the Sierra Madre Occidentalis of Mexico (presumably the Rocky Mountains species) and in the Cuchumatanes Mountains in Guatemala, and the populations south of the Isthmus of Tehuantepec (a natural gap in the distributions) really are strikingly different visually. Here’s an example, from a post in iNaturalist from Chiapas in far southern Mexico, adjacent to Guatemala:  https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/96626667#data_quality_assessment

Here is the link again to the scientific paper, and it can be downloaded from this site as a free PDF: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1002/ece3.9517   


Mark 
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