A few thoughts about the magpie. This bird might prove to be useful in illustrating how we are going to sort and classify birds. A good starting point is the carefree days of
What Bird is That? The pictures stayed the same through many editions but the text was revised over the years. At first there were two species, leaving out the Western one, for the moment. Then came the ground-breaking Slater guide in 1974. Unlike
Cayley, this showed a visible gender difference in both species – the charcoal suffusion in the white nape/back of the female. The distributions of the species were understood to be much as indicated by the Slater maps. There is no reason why anyone would
compare the illustrations, but if they did they might notice differences in the way each artist treated the lower back of the ‘White-backed’. Next: another look at the taxonomy.
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