Grasswren splits

Interesting splits there, whitei is probably not that surprising, not sure about rowleyi, although it is a bit of an isolate, so again a possibility. The one I question is oweni from central Aust. Schodde & Mason didn’t even consider this one as a subspecies! I had a look at the grasswrens for HANZAB, & certainly the central ones look very distinctive, very rufous & bright compared to mallee striatus. They had the opinion that there was a cline between striatus & oweni, which gradated into something more rufous in central Australia. The main problem here is that most of the habitat between the 2 has been wiped out, as well as the possible clines between the 2. I kind of thought they warranted subspecific status to mark the differences between the 2, especially since the cline is now broken. The other complication is the remark that striatus is found in the south-east Murray-Mallee region. I’ve looked at photos of grasswrens from Gluepot & compared them to the grasswrens at Ha ttah, south of the Murray & the Gluepot birds are a little more rufous than the Hattah birds. This could well be evidence of a cline. I haven’t looked at the paper, but I hope that these problems have been taken into account. Perhaps the birds north of the Murray are actually oweni!?-Kevin Bartram =============================== To unsubscribe from this mailing list, send the message: unsubscribe (in the body of the message, with no Subject line) to: birding-aus-request@vicnet.net.au http://birding-aus.org ===============================