1 (edited by charliebarnes 17-02-2015 12:10:40)

Topic: Carrion crows

I'm posing this as a question as it seems clearer in my head...

Say I have a record of a Carrion crow (and it's not obvious if the person differentiated it from Hooded) from 1968. What (and what list) in Recorder 6 should I record it as?

I can't use BIRDS checklist because I don't know whether the recorder is referring to the species Carrion crow or the the subspecies and an aggregate doesn't exist in that list.

If I used the Corvus corone agg from the List of additional names, that would imply a level of (in)accuracy that wasn't with the original record (although the recommended name should reflect the 'agg'). The common name is also as "Carrion crow". An identical situation arises if I used Corvus corone agg from the Recorder 3 list (this seems to be a duplicate of Corvus corone?).

The only other options I can see is to use Corvus corone from the Recorder 3 list or Carrion crow from the RSPB list* But the recommended taxon for both of these is Corvus corone on the BIRDS list - and this doesn't included the Hooded Crow.

Help! I'm confused!

(this is why I'm a lumper not a splitter...)

* there also appears to be a problem with Hooded Crow on the RSPB list - it's down as the hybrid Corvus corone subsp. corone x corone subsp. cornix, as a child of Carrion Crow.

Charlie Barnes
Information Officer
Greater Lincolnshire Nature Partnership

2

Re: Carrion crows

That does seem an odd potential error in the RSPB list, however that isn't a recommended list and it seems to be quite old. We don't have that mistake in the master taxonomy or the BOU (A,B,C,D) list, which is the recommended bird checklist :)

Chris Raper, Manager of the UK Species Inventory, Angela Marmont Centre for UK Biodiversity,
Natural History Museum, Cromwell Road, London, SW7 5BD.  (tel: 020 7942 5894)
also Tachinid Recording Scheme (http://tachinidae.org.uk/)