More on Cape York Subspecies and Rarities

Hi Lloyd et al

A very stimulating thread, thanks. We were in Cape York and the Wet Tropics recently and I agree on a lot of your comments. The Cape York form of Graceful Honeyeater has a completely different call that took us quite a while to work out what it even was. In the dawn chorus call it gave a call more like Green-backed that fooled us numerous times. And yes the tick call was only occasional. One thing I noticed as a casual observation was that birds out in the heaths near Portland Rd gave the tick call more frequently than the same birds in the Iron Range rainforest.

The Red Boobook also sounded different to me, slightly deeper and slower and with a slightly buzzing or scratchy quality. But then I’m used to WA birds.

The Tropical Rosella split will surely be borne out in the near future, for the genetics see Shipham et al (2015. Molecular Phylogenetics and Evolution 91:150-159. The genetics in this paper shows nigrescens is more distantly related to other Crimson than Green Rosella is. This creates paraphyly which can only be resolved by lumping Green Rosella (unlikely as it has a wide mitochondrial ND2 separation) or splitting Tropical. The authors were cagey in their conclusions suggesting more work is underway already to nail the split. Looking at pictures one of the key differences to me (not noted in books?) is a patch of black feathers (or skin??) around the eye of many but not all birds making it look like a pirate (‘Pirate Rosella’?). It also looks in photos at least to have a more robust bill perhaps. And of course the juvenile is completely different, black not green.

Incidentally the same paper included a limited comparison of your adscitus versus palliceps Pale-headeds and didn’t note anything for these subspecies beyond the general closeness and rather recent separation of Pale-headed and Northern Rosella.

On the kingfisher, I agree this sounds different but one thing that has to be taken into account are the species limits within what is/was the large ‘Collared’ super-species group. Not sure if you have seen, the genetics have been done recently by Andersen et al (available free at rsos.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/2/2/140375 ). This included one specimen of colcloughi and four of sordidus so a pretty small sample (but none of WA’s ‘pilbara’). A supplementary doc on the species limits (which I now cannot find on the website for some reason) stated “Further sampling is recommended to better understand the phylogeographic history of these forms in Australia”. In the phylogenetic tree colcloughi is basal, but just eyeballing the branch lengths it doesn’t look any more different from sordidus than the four samples of sordidus are from each other. From limited evidence (literally one specimen) this perhaps suggests the genetics wouldn’t support a split especially against the background of such a divergent superspecies radiation. But don’t give up birding just yet!

Hope I haven’t bored you with genetics talk but just wanted to point out a few recent papers on these.

Cheers
Martin