The Fiftieth Supplement to the AOU Check-list has been posted to the AOU website. The changes will be incorporated soon into the online version of the Check-list.
Summaries have been circulating on the web for a couple of weeks now, but there’s nothing like the horse’s mouth. And it’s always great fun to see one’s friends and colleagues cited in the Supplement. Jon Dunn, of course, is a greatly valued member of the Committee, and Jake Mohlmann and Paul Lehman are both credited here with recent additions to the North American list: Jake (along with John Yerger) the astounding first Brown Hawk-Owl for the region, and Paul the 2007 Gambell Sedge Warbler and the nearly as surprising Yellow-browed Bunting from the same location the same year.
There’s much more in there, of course, and I’ll be spending as much time as I can over the next busy days teasing out the fascinating bits of buried material. Who’d have guessed, for example, that Linnaeus had unknowingly predicted the presence of a wild Graylag Goose in North America when he described the species 251 years ago?
