Something else I just noticed about P & K is that with the White-browed
Treecreeper both the text and illustration fail to make clear that the bird
is very much darker than the Brown Treecreeper, more like the colour of the
Brown Treecreeper ssp melanota. Simpson and Day make this mistake too, and
only Slater has the right colour amongst the field-guides.
A few months ago in a Wingspan article on Button Quails the author made the
point that the field guides were unconvincing in their portraits of the
Buff-breasted Button Quail (and consequently many people still thought that
it was just a race of the Chestnut-backed BQ) because in a Melbourne museum
the specimen of the BB BQ was a wrongly labelled CB BQ). Is there perhaps a
very pale White-browed Treecreepr as a specimen in a Melbourne museum drawer
somewhere?
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Dr John Leonard
PO Box 243, Woden,
ACT 2606, AUSTRALIA
"The form of our thoughts is the form of our wisdom,
the form of our action is the extent of our wisdom."
F.Fletcher
http://spirit.net.au/~jleonard
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