Hi, I'm Jeffrey Gordon, President of the American Burning Association and executive producer of the podcast.

I'd like to say thank you for a terrific third year here at the American Burning Podcast and a wonderful 50th anniversary year at the American Birding Association.

We depend on your memberships and your donations, particularly at years end, to be able to offer

you great programs like the American Birding Podcast.

Please give what you can at aBA.org slash give or by calling us at 800, 850-2473. Thank you so much and good birding and happy new year.

Hello and welcome to another episode of the American Birding podcast from the American

Burning Association. I am your host, Nate Swick, a Merry Christmas Bird Count season to all of you.

The biggest community science effort of the birding year starts this weekend.

I assume a lot of you are heading out in the field to count crows and house sparrows and whatever

else you happen to encounter.

Make sure that you check your Home Depot parking lots for the house bearers.

That is their preferred habitat.

It's also the time of year that the American Ornithological Society's classification committee

proposals start coming out.

That's always very exciting, at least for me.

We've already seen the first of what are typically three, less typically four ballots

containing all the fun potential splits and lumps that ornithologists and geneticists have

discovered over the last year.

There are usually a handful of common name change proposals in there too. We've talked

about them on the podcast before, usually with Nick Block, you may remember him, and we'll have

him back on again in the new year to discuss these things in more detail once all of the proposals

are out. But I did want to make a reference to one that I really like, albeit one that I don't

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