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Hello and welcome to the American Birding Podcast from the American Birding Association. I am your

host, Nate Swick. A new year means a new round of potential taxonomic changes from the AOS North American

Classification Committee. They have released the first two, what are usually three or four packets of potential changes.

And while the committee's purview extends all the way down to Panama and frequently is very

Mesoamerica heavy, there's a lot this time around that affects birds in the ABA area,

that being the U.S. and Canada.

The reason for this probably has to do with the ongoing WGAC effort that is the

working group on avian checklists, basically a summit, a multi-year summit that has included

all the major global bird taxonomy authorities in an effort to come up with a shared global

taxonomy. For those who are perhaps new to all this, there are a few

different bird taxonomy authorities, namely Ebird Clements, that's one you've probably heard of,

the AOS, from which the American Birding Association checklist is derived, and the IOC,

which is popular in Europe, Asia, Australia, Africa.

And they all basically answer the question of what is a species a little bit differently.

Some populations that we might consider subspecies are in fact considered full species by

...