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New Christidis & Boles

To: "Peter Shute" <>
Subject: New Christidis & Boles
From: L&L Knight <>
Date: Tue, 22 Jan 2008 17:17:30 +1000
Why on earth would you want to re-order a FIELD guide to keep up with taxonomic fashions?

Field guides are for birders who want information about the birds that they come across in the field, not in museum collections. You put the pelagic birds in a group, waders in a group, waterfowl in a group, quail and button quail in a group ...

Regards, Laurie.

On 22/01/2008, at 4:39 PM, Peter Shute wrote:

With all these changes I'm beginning to understand why people gripe so
much about them - this is my first round of changes, I assume many of
you have seen many of them.

Can we expect future field guides to modify the order to match these
changes?  If so, and assuming that DNA studies will result in more
changes than ever before, would it be a silly idea to suggest that
someone comes up with a separate stable taxonomy purely for
identification purposes? One where birds that look or act the same are
left together despite the fact that we know they're really from
different families?

It would only be used for the ordering of species in field guides,
checklists, etc.

We have scientific and common names, why can't we have scientific and
common taxonomies?

Peter Shute

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