 We are honored to have Professor Brian Olson, Ornithal's Professor of the University of Maine, join us for our keynote speech today, closing out the Rangeley-Birding Festival. Brian's a great professor, a great guy. I met him when we testified about the Maine State Bird Chickadee issue up in Augusta, and he gave a informational and hilarious and entertaining testimony there. And so he's a great guy, I'm looking forward to this. So Brian, welcome and take it away. Great, awesome. And thank you, Nick. And I think this whole festival, I'm so excited about just in general because some of my very first field jobs, when I was still in college, we're up in the Rangeley Lakes area, working on loons and kingfishers and swallows and kicking around in that whole part of the state, which is definitely one of my favorite parts. So I'm really happy to be part of this today. So today what I was going to do is talk to you all a little bit about the madness that is field guides and what the thoughts are behind that, kind of give you a little bit of a peek underneath the scientific hood for what makes your field guides the way that they are. So the idea with this lumps and splits awful pun is that for those who haven't spent a lot of time being really strong listers, if you, a lumping is when you take what used to be two species and now they're officially one and the split is when you take what was one species, it gets split into two. So let's get going. So if you have a field guide kicking around in your house from say 1950 or so, and I have so many field guides kicking around in my house, I probably can represent every decade for the past century or so, but you crack one of these guys open and there's a ton of birds in there that don't exist anymore. We've got chicken hawks and sparrow hawks and English sparrows and solitary burials and there's no place that you're gonna find on Cornell's website to help you understand what these birds are and how to idea them and that's mostly because the birds are still around but all of their names are changed. So in this instance, we're talking about Cooper's hawks and American casserole, house sparrows and blue-headed burials. So as time goes by, birds, their names get changed, they get split into some species, some species get moved together and the other thing too is that if you were to pull out your ABA checklist, this is American birding association that keeps a list of all of the birds that you could see within the birding area within North America and if you pulled them out from each year, you'd notice that the number of species that they actually list that you can see has consistently grown and grown and grown each year. This big jump at 2016 here is when they added Hawaii into the count circle. So that's not some sort of massive speciation event but still all of these things are happening as time goes by and so at the end of the day, your field guides have a shelf life and there's a point at which they don't reflect the agreed upon species designators anymore and they don't reflect the ranges and they don't reflect what people are calling things and so basically today's talk was just trying to figure out what's up with that. So why do they keep changing the names and why do they keep adding species? And so that's what we hope to talk to for the rest of the time and it's not just a mad business model for the publishers because really the reason that they keep changing the names and the species the answer to both those questions is science. So today we're gonna peek into that a little bit and hopefully give you a better understanding of that. So first I wanted to spend a little bit of time just talking about who's in charge here, how these decisions get made and really there's two professional organizations that are in charge of changing what would get listed in a field guide for North America. And the first is the American Ornithological Society. The American Ornithological Society is a scientific organization made up of researchers and academics who study birds and they are the ones that really try and define what a species is and the science behind that. And then the American Birding Association is the one who's officially in charge of actually saying whether somebody seeing a bird within the area was real or not. And they basically usually take the AOS's decisions on what a species is. And then they are the ones who determine whether you can see it or not in North America or whether it has been seen officially within the North American count area before. So those two organizations work together and the list that comes out from them is what ends up being used by field guides when they get published. So why do we call something species and not other things species and it's clearly not because of ways that things can be easily pulled apart. So for instance on this top row here, this is one species, this is yellow warbler. And you go out in my backyard here in Orno, I can see these guys and listen to them sing all over the place and they look like this. But if we go to the West Indies, they've got this really cool cap and a nice yellow face. But if you go to the Galapagos, they have a shorter cap and a darker face. And if you go down to Central or South America, you've got this crazy chestnut colored head and that goes down on the breast and very easily differentiable. But these are subspecies and they're only gonna be listed as a single species in your field book. And if you see any, all four of these, you only get to add one species to your life list. So that's what's going on there. Whereas these Maddening Insanity, these are four completely different species and they're all in the genus Impidenax, these are the Impidenax flycatchers or some subset of the Impidenax flycatchers. And they, even though all four of them could be sitting on a wire in front of you, would look nearly identical to each other, but are in fact different species. Basically at this point, trying for me to tell you how to tell these apart visually, you can, they're obvious, right? The head, this one's got holding his head a little bit up, this one's got a little bit down. No, so really these guys are incredibly similar morphologically. In fact, the alder and willow flycatchers are so similar that there are individuals that even if you touch them in your hand, you can't take any measurements that will help you try to differentiate between the two of them using their morphology, their shape and their color. Although it's actually, this is an interesting thing. The inside of their mouths are actually a little different between the alder and the willow, that coloring on the roof of their mouth. So if you're having trouble identifying an impenetrable flycatcher in your backyard, just look at the inside of the back of its mouth. Totally easy. So this was clearly not done for birders. So why do we name species the way that we do? And the American Onophological Society uses what's known as the biological species concepts to determine whether or not something is a species or two species or five species. And to define it real simply, the BSC biological species concept says that two members of the same species can interbreed and produce fertile offspring. So this donkey is a species because every member of the donkey species can reproduce with every other member of the donkey species and lo and behold, they produce donkeys that can also make more donkeys. And so that's a species because they can all interbreed. And horses also, every member of the horse group can also mate and produce fertile offspring with every other member of the horse group. And that doesn't mean that they're all the same kinds of horses, so you could have draft horses and Shetland ponies and any number of other things mixed in there, but they can all produce fertile offspring. And so thus they're all horses and any of the other things that are in there would be races or breeds or varieties that happen within the horse, but they're all horses because if they can reproduce and produce fertile offspring they are all a member of this circle right here and not a member of this circle right here. And so the reason that we know that horses and donkeys are different because if you mate a horse and a donkey you actually do get something, you get a mule, but mules are infertile. And so they are not producing fertile offspring, these two. So that makes them different species. What does it make the mule? Well, the mule that can't reproduce at all. And so it's nothing, it is an evolutionary dead end and we won't talk about it ever again. So the horses, another way to think about this is that if some mutation popped up in the horse, so if you've got say a horse of a different color, then that mutation that caused the change in coat coloration has no way to get over into the donkey because it doesn't matter how any reproduction happens there's never going to be a donkey with the same genetic mutation that happened in this horse. However, there could be other offspring of this horse that happened for many, many, many generations have that mutation. So basically, because of this fertile offspring thing mutations that happen in horses stay within the horse group. Mutations that happen in donkeys stay in the donkey group and those two things don't mix because they are separate species. So that is the biological species concept in a nutshell except there's one little wrinkle and that is that we like to think about it in the wild because there's lots of crazy stuff that can happen in zoos and in captivity. Basically, if you literally have no options but to breed with the last man on earth then strange things happen. Okay, so that's all well and good. That's one way that folks have determined species and but the BSC has some limitations. And one of the big ones is that hole in the wild kind of phrase. So here are two species. If you opened up your field book, you had an Eastern field guide or a North American field guide. It would list model duck and it would list the American black duck. American black ducks, you can see it all through Maine. They breed up in range Lee. It's really fun watching those guys kick around and model ducks don't, the model ducks are breeding down here in Florida and along the Western Gulf Coast, a little bit up into Texas. And so in the summer, so if we ignore this blue color here, in the summer you can find black ducks breeding in basically the North Eastern US and Eastern Canada and the model ducks breeding down here in the South. They don't overlap. And so they don't form hybrids but we don't know if they could because they're never in the same place during the breeding season. So does that make them different species just cause they're not in the same place? It's really tough to figure that out. And then if, because if you were saying that's the case, then Harlequin duck should be lots of species and we don't call them lots of species. So for instance, here's our Harlequin duck, one of the most impressive looking ducks you can find on the main coast in the winter. But it has a Pacific population and an Atlantic population, actually also has a Greenland population and an Iceland population. And in each of these areas, birds winter on the ocean and then they fly to freshwater and lakes to breed. And then out in Alaska, they do the same thing winter on the ocean, fly into interior Alaska for freshwater lakes to breed. But they don't mix. So these birds over in the West don't encounter these birds in the East when they're breeding, oh boy, excuse me. And the ones in Iceland don't encounter them as well but we still call it just one species. So it's not, we have a disjunct range the same as the model duck and the black duck but now we're calling them one species and then the model and the black duck, we call them two and what, why, what is happening here? So this is all becomes very confusing if you're just looking at ranges and the BSC doesn't say anything about what if they're, they can't integrate because they can't get to each other. And there's a much bigger fly in this ointment. This is the map of one is the fact that tons of birds actually produce hybrids with other species. And they, those hybrids are not infertile. They can indeed breed even after they are produced. And so that, if we're going to use the strict biological species concept as our way to define what is a species and isn't can really get in the way. So I wanted to do a quick little chat guessing game here. So if everybody can who has the ability to throw things into the chat, I want folks to guess what percentage of birds have make hybrids with some other species that fertile hybrids. So go ahead and put it into the chat box, couple of guesses in there. How many species of bird can produce fertile hybrids with some other species? Okay, so Nick says 10%, I got some 20s and 30s and 20s. Matt going big with the 90. All right, so folks, you got some idea people have realized that the hybrids are not super rare. There's nothing like smaller than 10% out there. So here's the grand reveal. The grand reveal is 16.4% of birds have a hybrid with at least, or it been reported to have hybrids with at least one other. And if you count captivity, the weird stuff that happens in captivity, that goes up to over 20%. But some groups are insane. So waterfowl are 80% of species. So if we were using the strict definition from biological species concept that says, hey, if you can produce fertile offspring in the wild with this other species, you guys are one species, not two. If that was our strict definition, there would basically be two species of waterfowl. There would be a duck goose, I mean, sorry, a duck and a goose, well, it's a goose swan, but there's only two groups that don't interbreed with each other. Like all the ducks interbreed with some other duck and it's this crazy chain of hybridization that goes across the whole groups. So if we only, if we wanna be really strict about the BSC, we basically have a duck that has lots and lots and lots of different plumage colors, but that's not the way that we think the world actually works. So the BSC is a little bit too strict for bird use. Because the hybrids and birds are out of control. And in fact, there's so much hybridization across the class AVs that there are entire field guides devoted just to identifying avian hybrids. So you always have thought that you're identifying some brand new species that you've never seen before. I know I did that a ton when I was first starting out. Here's a book that can basically justify anything you see in the wild. Okay, so what are we gonna do now? If we want to have more than two species of waterfowl, we need a different definition. And so the ALS, American Ornithological Society actually uses a derivation of the biological species concept. It's kind of been tweaked a little bit, which I'm calling the BSC 2.0 and I just made that up entirely. Okay, so the idea behind the way that the AOS views the biological species concept is they define it more as a species is a population of interbreeding individuals that have an independent evolutionary trajectory. And what does that mean? That's a little weird. So what I want you instead of thinking of them as species to think of them as water droplets that are colored in some certain way. And so what we have here is two beakers. And those two beakers are supposed to be representative of two populations at first, okay? So we've got a red population, there's a bunch of genes in here and they're all kind of floating around in interbreeding. And then there's a blue population, they're doing the same sort of thing there. But because they're in separate beakers, red stays red, blue stays blue, and they are different from each other. And as time goes by, any mutations that pop up in the red beaker stay in the red beaker. And any mutations that pop up in the blue beaker stay in the blue beaker. And so the ease would be separate species because things that happen in the red beaker don't affect things that happen in the blue beaker. So any evolution that happens in the red beaker is independent of what the evolution that's happening in the blue beaker. And as each of these beakers change through time, their evolutionary trajectory, they do it on their own and they're not influenced by the other beaker. So that's what an independent evolutionary trajectory is in terms of a strange metaphor about beakers. If we have hybridization though, what we're basically doing is taking some genes, say from the blue beaker and potentially putting them into the red beaker because let's say if you have a blackheaded and rose-breasted gross beak, they make a hybrid that is half blackheaded, half rose-breasted gross beak, that's a hybrid that actually happens fairly frequently. And if that individual then makes with another rose-breasted gross beak, it's going to continue to pass some percentage of blackheaded genes over there. And if those offspring continue to breed the rose-breasted gross beaks, then all of a sudden you have blackheaded gross beak DNA that's kind of floating around in the rose-breasted gross beak beaker. And it's going in the other direction if that hybrid had made it with a pure blackheaded gross beak and then its offspring did that again and its offspring did that again. Now we end up with rose-breasted DNA kind of floating around within the beaker. That's one drop that would go in there. But if a hybrid happened a lot, you're putting drops back and forth and back and forth and of course through time, what you'd end up with is two beakers that are the same color, that are some sort of mix of the two because that hybridization is basically mixing genes from the one beaker into the other and then hybrid is going in the other direction, goes from the ring genes from that second beaker back to the first beaker. And so now if that hybridization is ongoing, it's continuing to happen through time, any mutation that pops up in this beaker could end up over in this one and any that pops up here because of hybrid can end up over there. So these two beakers are no longer independent of each other because of this hybrid sampling of back and forth and back and forth. So that's no longer an independent evolutionary trajectory and now they're one species and not two. And so that's how you would see that hybrids could make what used to be two beakers become one beaker or was two species become one species. But that's not always the way that hybridization works. So what we can also think about is that let's say that hybrids, let's focus just on this blue coming into the red to begin with. So if this blue genes come over into the red beaker, they have the potential to make the beaker purple but they're only gonna do that if they can continue to survive and reproduce in that red population. But instead what we could have happen is that the hybrids are produced and they're technically fertile. They could have babies and grand babies but those offspring that they have don't do as well in this red beaker environment as they would over here in the blue beaker environment. So if you bring this dot over, it's there but it's just there for a little bit before it gets filtered back out. So in some ways hybridization in this really torturous metaphor is like you bring a dot over but then you filter it back out. And so if that's the case where you have ongoing hybridization and it goes over here and it goes over there but every time it goes over there, it gets filtered back out then red stays red and blue stays blue. And any mutations that happen here don't go and change the color of the blue beaker because even if they manage to get over there through hybridization, they get filtered back out. And likewise, anything that happens in the blue beaker doesn't change the red thing not because it can't get over there but when it gets over there, it gets filtered back out. And so that keeps the trajectories of these two beakers independent. And so this species, even though it's hybridizing with this species, those offspring don't really affect this species again at the end of the day because those offspring, although they're fertile don't do very well in the environment and they end up not being able to produce offspring. And so if that's the case, even with hybridization these two beakers can still stay on their own trajectories and not influence each other as long as you filter out hybrids as fast as they're produced. Okay, so that's the idea there. So this is the difference between the 2.0 and the 1.0 is that 1.0 said any hybrids, boom, you're one species. Whereas the 2.0 said, ah, you can have hybrids but the hybrids can't happen enough or survive well enough to influence what genes are in your environment. So that's the twist on the 2.0. So let's take that kind of twisty definition go back to our confusing duck example where we say the BSC 1.0 is kind of confused because they exist in different places but the field guides say that these two ducks that are really closely related but breeding different places are different species whereas these two ducks on the Pacific and Atlantic for Harlequin's breeding different places but we call them the same species. So what is going on there? Let's start off with our anus genus which is our black duck and our mottled duck. In fact, I'm gonna zoom back a little bit and talk about four ducks. So we have our mallard which is also closely related. We have our black duck, the next one over and then we have our Mexican duck which also looks just like a female of everybody else and the mottled duck which is also very similar. These are very closely related species. And what I'm showing here, this is a figure from a textbook that's just been published this year and these figures are really common in genetic studies but I'm assuming that none of you or very few of you have ever seen anything like this. So we're gonna walk through this really slowly because you're gonna see more pictures like this but basically these different separated, the things separated by white lines are the beakers. There are populations that we can figure out that they live in different places or there's some reason that we think that they're a separate population. And then each individual little column in here, you can see that there's a bunch of little columns that are all stacked next to each other. Each column is an individual. So somebody went out and took blood samples from, couple dozen, three dozen mallards, couple three dozen black ducks, couple three dozen Mexican ducks, et cetera, et cetera. And then they looked at 15,687 places in their DNA and they basically said, what do you look like? Do you look like this speaker, this speaker, this speaker, this speaker, this speaker? And what you find out is that, and then in each column, it's like a percentage chance. So for instance, this column right here, just past that black duck line, says that there's a really big chance that it's green. That's why the bar is mostly green but the little tip of the bar is blue. So it's like, that's a really big difference because it's like there's a tiny chance it's blue but really it's green. Whereas everything in the next speaker over, everybody looks red, next speaker over, everybody looks orange. And so you can see that basically by looking across all of these different markers that they're very distinctly different between black ducks and model ducks. And so if you, you're never gonna get any of the black duck DNA confused with the model duck DNA because it's very different. However, the mallard DNA is halfway in between which is a little weird because basically there's actually a lot of black duck DNA floating around within the mallard DNA. So a lot of these individuals, and this depends on where you sample, a lot of these individuals, they say, well, I'm pretty sure it's a mallard but there's like a 40% chance it's actually a black duck because about 40% of the places they look in the DNA look black duckish but like 60% of the places they look looks something totally different which they're calling this mallard beaker. So really what it means is that the difference between mallards and black ducks genetically is much smaller than the difference between black ducks and model ducks. In fact, I've been kind of ignoring it up until now but you'll notice that there's two model duck beakers. This one here is the Florida population. All of these birds were sampled in Florida and this WGC is a Western Gulf Coast. So these were all birds that were sampled in the Western Gulf Coast. And if you, I'm gonna go back a slide real quick or maybe go forward to go back, there we go. You'll notice that model ducks, you can see them in Florida here on the range map. And then there's a gap across the panhandle where you don't find them. And then you find them again in the Western Gulf Coast. And the difference between the Western Gulf Coast of model duck and the Florida population of model duck across all of these places in their DNA is actually greater than the difference between a black duck and a mallard. And so the question here isn't to say at this point why are model ducks and black ducks considered two separate species. But really the question we should probably be asking is why isn't model duck considered a Florida model duck and a Western Gulf Coast model duck? And so we probably have five species here and not actually the four that you'll find in your field guide. So keep your eyes open for that. This could be a split that might get announced in the years to come. But the idea here then is generally if you can look at lots and lots and lots of places in the DNA and you can tell just by looking at them that they are one population and not another one because if you're in a black duck population you have all the green type stuff and if you're in a Mexican duck population you have all of these whatever defines a red type of thing going on in your DNA, et cetera, et cetera. Obviously these colors are completely arbitrary. But if your DNA says you are a black duck, I look here and it looks like black duck and I look here in your DNA and it looks like black duck and I look here and I look here and I look at 16,000 places and you look like black duck then you're a black duck. And I know that you're a different species than another one because those places are all different if I look at a different individual in a different species. So that's how we can tell which beaker they're in and whether they're on an independent evolutionary trajectory. So that's what's going on with these ducks. But what about Harlequin ducks? So again, we've got breaks in population just like we have between model ducks and black ducks or between even the Florida model ducks and the Western Gulf course model ducks. So why do we call this one species? Well, they're clearly in different beakers. The Pacific population of Harlequins say and the Atlantic population of Harlequins because they don't breed with each other. But if you look at their DNA, there's nothing that tells you there's no marker. If you look across their whole DNA there's no marker that you can look at and it'll tell you, oh, this one's from the Atlantic. Oh, and this one's from the Pacific. There isn't a marker like that. And so they're basically, they have the same DNA. It doesn't matter where you look. And they have the same morphology. They're the same shape and size and color. They have sort of the same behavior. If somebody were to just mail me a Harlequin duck in the mail, please don't mail me a model ducks, I mean, or model ducks, don't mail me any ducks. But if somebody mailed me a dead Harlequin duck in the mail, I would have no idea if they didn't tell me where it came from. Like I couldn't figure it out. And so they're in different beakers but they're still show the same evolutionary trajectory and that's probably because they were just put into different beakers very recently. So maybe if you wait a couple of hundred thousand years there'll be different species. So no guarantees that the Sibley guide addition 2376 won't have these as different species but I don't think that anybody's gonna split Harlequin ducks anytime soon because of their similarities no matter where you look across the map. So they're on the road to become different species but they're not anywhere near there yet. So to get back a little bit to the naming bits, the AOS doesn't use just genetic data. They really these days, they lean on genetic data very, very heavily, but it's not the only thing they do. They basically say we wanna be able to tell species apart in at least two ways. And one of them is almost always genetic. If things are identical genetically there's little chance that they're gonna be gonna be called different species. But they also really wanna see differences in something else. It could be the mate choice, like the model ducks only like to breed with model ducks even if there were a mallard there that they could breed with, they wouldn't prefer that and mallard ducks would not like to breed with a model duck even if they're there. So that's kind of back to that BSC 1.0 kind of scenario. They don't like to make hybrids. So mate choice is a good one. Song, there's a difference between their songs. Not really a good duck example, but we'll come to a better one in a second. Their shape or their color, their morphology, that if there's clear differences, that's helpful. And if they have any sort of really consistent behavioral differences, like this one always puts his nest in cavities and this other one always puts his nests in cut nests and bushes. Those are really consistent between the two. Those also get added together as evidence. So AOS is always looking for two things and one of those is almost always genetic, these days and age. But here's an older split, like something that was split out a number of decades ago now. So here again, like we talked about before, our alder and our willow flycatchers. And they used to be called trail flycatcher. But again, you can't really tell the difference apart from them morphologically. And so that was not what they used to split these two across. They did use genetic differences. This is a really early genetic study. And actually, once they did that, there are ways, once you can tell what the differences are between two groups, you can try to put a time estimator on when they split. And the difference between alder and willow flycatchers is really big. So the evidence suggests that it was almost three million years ago that they split from different species and they've been on independent evolutionary trajectories for three million years. It is a long time that these things have not been considered. I have not been interbreeding with each other in producing hybrids. And they have really clear mate choice. In fact, there isn't any reported, at least that I know of, any reported hybridization between these two groups, although I don't know how you would find that, but because they look exactly the same. But their songs are super, super, super diagnostic. Okay, so if we get this guy here, hopefully you can see this or hear this. Hitsbue. Nice willow flycatcher song. All right, and then if we play this guy and you can... Alder flycatcher. Diagnostic because it says alder flycatcher at the beginning, that's how you know. CBO. All right, so that CBO is really consistently different from that Hitsbue. All right, and if you don't hear those differences, I'm sorry. But if you keep listening, you should be able to figure out the difference between those two with practice. And they are consistently, consistently, consistently different from each other because they are a different species. So this is an example where we didn't catch that they were different species to begin with because they look so similar, but they act different. They have different clear mate choice. They have different songs. They don't mate with each other. They only mate within their group, not between their groups. And they have a huge genetic difference. So the trails flycatcher was disbanded into willow and alder. And the way that AOS does that is like, nobody's allowed to be trails flycatcher anymore because it would just be confusing. Because then you're saying, wait, does trails refer to both of them together or just one of them? And so they just get rid of that name. Trails flycatcher is gone, unless you're a vander, but that's a different story. So you, that's gone. And then you only have willow and alder now. And if so, if I ever see a paper that says trails flycatcher, I know it was before the species split and it's actually could be referring to either of those species. So that helps keep the communication with the past clear. All right, so that's a really nice one. This one I like more because these guys are very near and dear to my heart. The reason I have a title marsh behind me is I do a lot of my research and title marsh, a lot of them on these two species, the Nelson Sparrow and the Saltmarsh Sparrow, which until very recently were called a single species, the Sharktailed Sparrow. And they were split into two. And this is a scenario where the first version of the biological species concept would not have called them two species. It would have called them one species because they do produce hybrids and those hybrids are fertile. If you go down anywhere between in Maine, anywhere from the New Hampshire line, Wells, Rachel Carson, National Wildlife Refuge up through Scarborough, all the way up to Midcoast and Popham. There's good title marshes behind Popham Beach State Park up to South Thomaston and the West Keg Marsh on the West Keg River. In that entire zone, basically from the western part of the Penobscot River estuary to down to the rest of the state, it actually goes even further into New Hampshire. But that whole area are places you can find hybrids and they're there pretty consistently. In fact, in the basement of the biology building on the University of Maine campus, there are hybrids that were collected in Scarborough Marsh in 1898. So there's been hybrids for a long time. Well, not long in evolution, but long in terms of our lifespan. But those hybrids don't do well. They don't produce as many offspring as the pure salt marsh or the pure Nelson Sparrows. So even though they're making these hybrids, even though there's genes going from one beaker into the other, they're getting filtered out after they get into that beaker. And so Nelson Sparrows isn't influencing the beaker that is salt marsh sparrows that much and likewise Nelson Sparrows have their own independent evolutionary trajectory that is not being influenced by things going on that much in salt marsh sparrows. So that's what causes them to be different species. And if you look across lots and lots of genetic markers, it looks like they've diverged or have been on their own separate trajectory for about 200,000 years. So nowhere near as long as the willow and all their fly catchers, but for about 200,000 years, salt marsh sparrows have been doing their salt marsh sparrows evolution thing. Nelson Sparrows have been doing their Nelson Sparrows evolution thing and they haven't been impacting each other that much. And salt marsh sparrows would much rather mate with a salt marsh sparrows than a Nelson Sparrows. And so they have clear within group preferences for mate choice. They have distinct songs. They have distinct behaviors. So Nelson Sparrows males will follow their females around. Salt marsh sparrows never do that. They're just basically mate with it as many females as they can and then they ignore them until they can mate with them again. There's no parental care. There's no nothing. So salt marsh sparrows don't have any of that going on. Nelson Sparrows kind of form pair bonds for a while. That's really distinctively different between the two of them. So these are two species because of that, but they're two species in the face of hybridization. So that's how this 2.0 definition works. Okay, so I wanted to give you guys a little peek into some other kind of unresolved issues. Some of these are, so what's coming down the pike from the renaming sort of scenario and what might the field guide of the future look like? So the AOS right now is considering a lump. This is a lump between the Northwestern crow and the American crow. I was actually really tempted to show the exact same picture of the same bird in both because you can't tell them apart looking. These things are maddeningly frustrating from a birding perspective and then have been for a long time. So the Northwestern crow, you basically tell it, like I have Northwestern crow on my life list. Why? Because I heard a crow when I was in Anchorage and that's why. I didn't look at it and say, ah, a Northwestern crow because they're really hard to tell apart and their voice is a little different but crows make a lot of sense. So that's what's going on with this Northwestern crow is basically was this range here on the Pacific coast and American crow is the one we've got all across the country. Well, there's been a bunch of new genetic data that's come out and it basically shows that there's in this area, especially in places where they meet, there's a lot of hybridization going on. The hybrids are doing just as well as the parental, the species are, and those genes are being successfully moved from the blue beaker into the red beaker and back and forth in this area. And so it's becoming harder and harder and harder to tell the difference between these species genetically and it's already really hard to tell them in every other way. And so it doesn't seem as though they're on independent evolutionary trajectories. They may have been at one point but with the changes in landscape and all sorts of other things that are going on, now at the very least it seems like hybridization is pretty common. So the Northwestern crow may end up becoming a subspecies of the American crow is what I would guess it might end up happening, but we'll see where the AOS lands on that one. Here's another one that makes me, this is one of these things that perennial frustrations with the AOS. Here are common and Hori red poles and also lesser red poles which are Eurasian red pole species. And this is looking down on the planet, map on the left here is looking down on the planet from the North Poles right in the center. So we've got all the Eurasian on the right and all of North America on all left. And these three species basically have this distribution where they're mostly found based at circumpolar all through the polar regions. And then we have these cool eruptions that happen to the South which we're really familiar with here in Maine where you get big flocks of red poles and you're sitting there with your binoculars staring trying to find the one Hori for years and years. I've been doing this and to get your yearly tick if that's something that you'd like to obsess about which I do. But common red poles and Hori red poles are found basically in the exact same place. They have the same range. And this right here is a black and white version of the duck what they're called structure plots. This is a structure plot where each of these columns again is the individuals and instead of red, blue, green, whatever it's light, gray, dark, gray, black. And you can tell that it looks the same color gray between common and Hori and lesser. Which is to say, if you look at thousands and thousands of different places in their DNA you cannot tell the difference looking at the DNA between a common red pole or Hori red pole and a lesser red pole. If I took a blood sample of a red pole somewhere in the planet and I sent it to well, somebody's lab and I said tell me what species this is. They could not tell me if it was common Hori or lesser. They could tell me it's a red pole. He's like, this is a red pole but I can't tell the difference between those three species because they're basically genetically identical. But they're still called three species. And this one, this is an interesting one. Well, to me, if you like these kind of weird decisions is that all of this data was presented to the AOS just a couple of years ago. And they ended up deciding not to lump them back together. And in fact, it was a split decision. Like half the people on the committee voted to lump them, the other half didn't. And actually to change something, you need two thirds majority and really getting into the details now. But they didn't lump it. And it wasn't because they thought that there was a genetic difference. They didn't lump it because they wanted something else too. They said, I hear your genetic argument. I'm not arguing against your genetic argument but tell me that they breed with each other and produce happy offspring. Tell me that they don't have mating preferences that are only within their group. Tell me that Common and Horry mate together all the time. And as soon as I see the field data, those other votes on the committee will probably say lump as well. So they're waiting for that second piece of evidence to lump these two things together. And why don't we have it already? Because it's really hard to study these guys. They're really inaccessible places. So as soon as somebody wants to go up to Bath and Island and spend a lot of time following the secret lives of red bulls, these guys will probably be lumped back together. Here's another one that's even more controversial if you like to have bird species, field guide controversies. It's a very serious stuff. So we have golden wing warblers here on the left and blue wing warblers here on the right. They're a famous hybridizing system because actually the hybrids they make and the back crosses where those hybrids mate with one of the other pure parental forms. Those are called back crosses. They're very distinctive coloration and they're not like a gradient in between if they look like this or like this or like this or like this. And so, in fact, all of these hybrids even have names or Lawrence's warbler or Brewster's warbler which is actually a hybrid between a golden wing and a blue wing. So these guys are two species in your field guide and some field guides actually even show you what the hybrids look like and give you their names as well. Tons and tons of genetic data went into this one. This is a totally different type of plot that I'm not going to talk about so you can ignore it if you want to. But basically this is showing what is different between things that we call, it took a bunch of golden wing warblers, a bunch of blue wing warblers and it's like, what's the difference? And if the difference is not that much then the bars are low. And if the difference is big, there's a big genetic difference, the bar is high. And this is basically all of the DNA or a lot of the DNA of these two species. And if you look across the DNA, bop, bop, bop, bop, bop, bop, left or right, you see one, two, three, four, five, this is actually two bars that are just really close together, six. There are basically six genes that are different between a golden wing warbler and a blue wing warbler, six. Everything else is the same. Everything else is mixed together. Everything else is like a big purple beaker. But there are six places that if you know those six places, you can tell, I can tell you whether it's a golden wing or a blue wing warbler. And those six genes, they code for feather color. So they basically, why is this a golden warbler? Well, because it has the genes for a golden wing. And this is a blue wing warbler because it has the genes for, this is like hair color at this point. It was like calling redhead and toehead different species because they're consistently have genes that produce redhead or toehead. And that's crazy pants. So I think these guys are gonna end up getting lumped at some point as well because there's just not a good difference between them genetically except for the things that code for what we like to see, which is easy ways to tell them apart. But really probably what we have going on here is varieties or just morphs. So you have like red-tailed hawks or something like that. Okay. So our bottom line at the end of the day, this is, I love this, this is a 1910 cartoon that was published in an American Ornithological Society except that its name has changed too, which is fitting I find in a deeply satisfying way. It used to be the American Ornithological Union. But anyway, that professional organization published this political cartoon was not political, although species can feel very political sometimes. But the idea is that this is Joseph Grinnell who was in charge of it at that time. And he was really famous for like naming every single frasher or fox sparrow in every valley of California. And so he's making all these little subspecies really thinly slicing them up and the Ornithological workers are tearing their hair out because you can't tell the difference between any of these things. And so, yeah, that's the idea behind that. But the bottom line is that species are independent evolutionary trajectories. What happens within that beaker affects that beaker and no other beaker. And how independent enough is a judgment call at the end of the day. That's why field guides change one way and sometimes go back, new data comes up. It looks like they're impacting it a lot, but then maybe they aren't. So that's where this is gonna probably continue to be an art for some time into the future. And we're not gonna end up with a final field guide to end all field guides. So one of the lessons you should take away is get it into your budget, you're gonna need a new field guide every decade or two. So budget port is coming at you. And the other thing I wanted to really emphasize is you should keep regional lists. And here's why. Here's why you should keep a regional list. Let's say that you did a road trip from Everglades National Park to the Channel Islands National Park outside of Santa Barbara, somewhere between 1957 and 1997. Okay, so I could have done this maybe like after high school graduation. I went on a big road trip. I didn't, but let's say I was more adventurous than I am. And I hitchhiked and birded my way across the country from Everglades to Channel Islands. And I was noting the bird that I saw along the way. Well, looking at my National Geographic second edition National Geographic, now I've showed you when I graduated from high school, National Geographic field guide, I would see Scrub Jay. There's a Scrub Jay. And I actually saw this bird in my theoretical trip in Florida and I saw it in Texas, in New Mexico, in Arizona, in California. And I went out and splurged on the ferry to the Channel Islands. I saw it out there too. This bird's all over the country. And I saw it lots of places. If I had just said lifelist tick Scrub Jay done, then that's all I get. But if I had kept regionalists and paid attention to where I saw the bird and kept records of it. And if Ebird had existed at the time and had done it that way, I'd have a record of where I saw this bird. And then I had this cross-country trip. I go home, I continue with my life. My lifelist starts giving dividends without any more birding. So in 1998, the Scrub Jay was actually split into three species. The Florida Scrub Jay is one here. The Island Scrub Jay, which is only found in the Channel Islands off the coast of California. And the Western Scrub Jay, which is like all this mess in the middle. And so I ticked once, I got three lifers. And then if I wait a little bit longer and now in 2016, they actually split the Western Scrub Jay into the California Scrub Jay, which is in California. And the Woodhouse Scrub Jay, which is this one that's a more interior desert-like bird. And there are huge genetic differences between these and behavioral differences and morphological differences. If somebody mailed me a dead Scrub Jay in the mail, I can tell you which one I came from or somebody could, but again, please don't mail me dead birds. And now my one species investment in the 90s ends up being a four species life tick in 2016 and I didn't do anything. And that's, I mean, if I'd bought Apple stock in California while I was there over the same time period, my one stock would have turned into 14, but one to four, that's not bad, that's not bad at all. So keep regional lists. And who knows, your life list may grow with you not even birding anymore. So with that, I hope you have now a better feel for what the logic is behind field guides and how things are named. And this is my much loved Sibley guide and I need to rebind it again. But so I keep my old guides as mementos, but you're gonna have to get new guides. But with that, I'd be happy to take any questions that anybody would have. And thanks for your attention. Ryan, thank you very much. That was outstanding, extremely information. Awesome, thank you. We call those armchair ticks, Ryan, where you're just sitting at home and you get some new birds. Yeah. We do have a couple of questions for you and folks on the chat, first of all, thank you to Brian and put your questions down there in the chat. I will try to follow along and ask. Brian, we have a question about the Baltimore Oriole. What happened there with its name change? Yeah, so that's a good one too. So it's so funny. I was looking up a bunch of these because I was assuming that I would end up with a bunch of, what about this species? What about this species? And I don't have all the answers for all of them. I know. Baltimore Oriole is like one of these really weird ones where it's flip-flopped, right? So like, you know, we had two species and then it got put together into the Northern Oriole and then it got split back out again. And it's really what has happened. The answer to almost all of these stories is that there's been a revolution in genetic data over the last few decades. And the data that I was showing where folks are looking at thousands and thousands of places in the DNA now, back when the lumping happened, the genetic information was only looking at dozens of places. And so if you have hybridization, dozens of places can be confusing because there are some places that kind of look hybrid and flip-flop and they're not diagnostic. And so you get 12 places in the DNA and it could look in a Baltimore Oriole, it could look like any Oriole at those places. But once you look at thousands of places, now you know 100%, this is gonna be a Northern Oriole. No, no, no, sorry, this is gonna be a Baltimore Oriole. So it was basically like, it's just better resolution. So if you have, you know, it's kind of like the five blind men on the elephant kind of scenario, right? So they go up to the elephant and one thinks it's a rope because they're holding the tail and one thinks it's a tree trunk because they're holding the leg and one thinks it's a snake because they got the trunk and I said trunk tail, whatever that works. And one thinks it's a wall because they got the side of the elephant and because they were only looking at a tiny piece, you end up with a totally different story. But once you look at the whole thing, clearly an elephant, but it looks different in different places. And that's the same kind of idea with genetic information. If you only look at a couple of genes, it's like, I don't know, it could be this Oriole or that Oriole or the other. But if you look at enough places, you're like, ah, it's Baltimore, like 98% across here. So we can very clearly call this a Baltimore Oriole and that's good. So we've only had the ability to look at thousands of places in the last couple of decades. So that's what most of these stories end up being like that. So it was, well, so this is a big arc for a lot of these species is folks were only using plumage and they split them into two species. And then they got some little genetic DNA back and they're like, nah, they all look the same. So they lump them all together and now they're only one species. And then we have better resolution with our genetic data and like, oh, actually we can tell them apart genetically and they get split back. So that scrub J example, for instance, yeah, in 1957 it was called just a scrub J. But if you go back further than that to 1910, it's four species or five species again. In fact, there's actually a point at which it's like seven where there's a separate species in Texas and somewhere else. So when they were only using plumage and behavior, they had split it really fine. And then the genetic revolution, the first one happened and they pushed it all together. And now the second revolution in DNA has basically put it back kind of similar to how it was in 1910. That was a really long answer to that. Good, that's a good one. Let me get to a couple more. So it's 1155, we do have a bunch more questions here. So from Sally, how important are the small differences in genes that are showing up between the common and the hori red bulls? Though, could those reflect a really important difference in behavior or otherwise? Yeah, so that's an interesting thing. So yes, it could difference. So nobody's arguing that there's not differences, right? So horis look different than common and they are a lot brighter and they might have some behavioral differences too. So the question ends up being whether if you look at a hori and you look at a common red bull and you find genetic differences, are those genetic differences, can they flow easily between the two or are they stuck together? So let me rephrase that in a different way. So for instance, is it like hair color where there's a redhead and a brown-haired person and they have something else? So let's say that the redhead is a fiery tamper and the brownhead is a pacifist or something like that. If they have offspring, can they have a fiery brown-headed kid and a pacifist red-headed kid? Because if that's the case, then those things are mixing when they mate. So that doesn't mean that the genetic information isn't there. It's just that it's not stuck in a beaker. It can flow around and rearrange in different ways, which is to say, it's genetic variation and it's behavioral variation and it's morphological variation, but it's not locked in a species grid. So that's what the, all those little differences we expect that any species is gonna have genetic variety, but if it's one species, that genetic variety can be found anywhere and if it's two species, then you end up with, if you have this thing, you also have this and this and this and this and this and this and they can't go over the other one. Awesome, thank you, I did. From Nick Ledley, is the rate of hybridization likely to increase as species expand territories due to climate change? Yeah, if the quick answer is yes. In fact, to give two kind of textbook examples, the golden wing and blue wing warblers, there are some people who say, yeah, it's all mixed up now, but it's because of deforestation with making farms and basically making the East Coast look a whole lot more like the prairies and that human change on the landscape allowed the blue wing warbler to come in, which is more of an open country bird, to come into the golden wing warbler area and make those beakers all mixed together and that they were separate before, but now they're all mixed up and so that change in the landscape is what led to them overlapping and then when they overlap, there was nothing to stop them from making hybrids and those hybrids did okay and then they move on. Another thing that's been kind of done some is to say that sometimes there's places where there's hybrids that happen, but the hybrids don't do well, but then if the environment changes, the hybrids can start doing well and so what you had was hybrids happen, they get filtered out, hybrids happen, they get filtered out. If the filter stops because the environment changes that everybody can survive, then that hybridization starts mixing and continues to mix them and what was two species with hybridization goes from one species. So landscape change, whether it's climate change or anything else that humans do to the landscape or even natural things that happen to the landscape can actually cause hybridization to change between two species, but that's an excellent question and the quick answer is yes. Great, so I'm gonna ask the last question here and I wanna say you've got a lot of positive comments about your ability to communicate such a complicated subject in a way that folks can understand, so thanks for that. Only half of those people are my family. Yeah, so sort of relatedly, do you offer any of your classes online? I don't right now, but we have definitely done so much online at UMain like every university has during this pandemic that we're all looking at online classes in a way that we haven't before. I will say the next time that I teach ornithology will be in spring 2021 and there are ways to take that without being an enrolled student, but right now I don't have a way to, I haven't thought about doing it online entirely, but it's definitely something I'm kicking around in the back of my head. Well, thank you, Brian. I wanna thank you very much for joining us today. That was fantastic. And I think David and I would like to wrap up with a quick thank you to everyone who participated. As a former Brian Olson student, Doug Hitchcox here, I just wanna say Brian was my favorite professor up at Orano. If he puts his class online, everyone can learn a lot about birds and in life from his class. Thank you. I appraise. I appraise. It's too late to get better grades, Doug, so. I got a B. Hey, everybody, it's noon, so we're wrapping up. I just wanna thank everyone so much from Mead and Audubon's perspective for joining this festival, for hanging in with crazy technology things and for learning about the birds of range league. Quickly, I wanna thank Doug Hitchcox from Mead and Audubon for leading it off. Pete McKinley from the Wild, the Wilderness Society, and then Maine Mountain Media, Kevin Sinnet from Rangy Lakes, Rangy Region, Lakes Cruises, and Biological Research Institute and the State of Maine. And then Nick Ledley from touchthewildphotos.com and Brian Olson from UMaine for all their presentations. Thank you all for coming and please stay tuned for more information about next year's festival in person. I'll turn it over to David Miller for final thank yous. Thank you. Thank you mostly to Maine Audubon. Thanks so much for being part of this for all of you who are here with us. I just wanna encourage you to stop in the range of the third is trust on Main Street. Next time you're in Rangeley, we're doing for local information and supports your local land trust and your local chapter of Audubon. So thanks so much everyone, great festival and a special note of thanks to our two sponsors, Maine Audubon, Office of Tourism and Betterment Fund. Thanks so much everyone, have a great season birding. Bye, thank you everyone.