Black-Cockatoos, et. al. | GrrlScientist

Here’s another from GrrlScientist.

She wrote “Not everyone experiences the joys of birding like me – a white woman,” which is included in our posting of May 30, 2020, “Birding while black in NYC Central Park.” She is a prolific writer. If you’ve birded in Australia and admired their many parrots, rosellas, lorikeets, cockatiels, cockatoos, black-cockatoos and budgerigars, totaling to an ever-shifting number of species somewhere over fifty, you’ll be interested in the following report, published 5-31-20 in Forbes. Maybe you’ll pick up an “armchair lifer.”

Hidden In Plain Sight: New Cockatoo Subspecies Identified In Australia
Forbes, May 31, 2020. GrrlScientist: Senior Contributor in Science. Evolutionary & behavioural ecologist, ornithologist & science writer.

Advances in DNA technologies have uncovered a new subspecies of red-tailed black-cockatoo in Western Australia. A large genetic study has uncovered a new subspecies of one of Australia’s most iconic birds, the red-tailed black cockatoo, Calyptorhynchus banksii. The newly identified subspecies is unique to inland Western Australia and lives in regions spanning the Wheatbelt, east of Perth, to the Pilbara in the state’s north-west.

Fig. 1 The distribution of Calyptorhynchus banksii subspecies in Australia and localities of the individuals genotyped in this study. Circles represent tissue samples (n = 113) and stars represent toe pad samples (n = 29). The inset photo of Calyptorhynchus banksii banksii demonstrates the morphological differences between male (right) and female (left) birds. Photo: Patrick Tomkins. (doi:10.1038/s41437-020-0315-y)

GrrlScientist has written a lot of articles. Because she alerts fellow American birders to them through her BirdChat messages, I have read many of them over the years. However I was not aware of her website which I found through a link in the Forbes article above. There I found over one hundred articles on various subjects. Here are a few: bumblebees, birds, narwhals, tigers, coronavirus, Cherokee seeds, algae, engangered plants, climate change, fireworks, salamanders, electric eels. And on and on. Birds are her favorite subject and parrots are obviously her favorite birds. Like Black-Cockatoos (a member of Psittaciformes order, but technically not a parrot).

Read the article above and check out her website. I highly recommend it.
[Chuck Almdale]