[cobirds] Meadowlark split

All,

The 63rd Supplement to the Check-list of North American birds from the American Ornithological Society was published today in the journal Ornithology.  As Brandon already notified everyone, included in the changes was the split of Eastern Meadowlark into Eastern and Chihuahuan Meadowlarks.  Chihuahuan Meadowlark includes the Lilian's race from Arizona and New Mexico and another race from northern Mexico. The proposal for this split was written by Johanna Beam, and is based mainly on a paper published last year in Ornithology which has Johanna as the lead author. The research for this paper was done when Johanna was an undergraduate student in Biology at CU in Boulder, and she is now a PhD student in Biology at Penn State University. I believe her interest in this subject started in 2015 when she found some Lilian's race Eastern Meadowlarks on the north side of McIntosh Lake in northwest Longmont, and submitted record 2015-089 to the CBRC. Johanna is a Colorado young woman that all Colorado birders should congratulate and take pride in.

CBRC records for Eastern Meadowlarks are at:  https://cobrc.org/Reports/SpeciesDetail.aspx?id=463  There are 26 of them going back nearly 50 years, and at least 3 refer explicitly to the Lilian's race, which are 2005-22 from near the old Campo lek in Baca County, 2006-103 from the Colorado City cemetery and 2015-089 from McIntosh Lake in Longmont by Johanna Beam. Other records, especially 2003-33 and 2012-47 from south Baca County, may well also refer to the Lilian's race. This will be determined in the near future, so that the new Chihuahuan Meadowlark will be well documented to have occurred in Colorado. This highlights the importance of maintaining and expanding the CBRC database of rare birds in Colorado.

Peter Gent,  Boulder.

CBRC Chairman. 

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