October 2022

Overview

Go directly to 2022 Updates & Corrections

This is the 16th installment of taxonomic revisions and updates following the publication, in 2007, of the 6th edition of The Clements Checklist of Birds of the World. Because the Clements Checklist has become tightly interwoven with eBird, the checklist now is referred to as the eBird/Clements Checklist. The entire checklist (including documentation of all revisions) is available as a downloadable spreadsheet (in Excel and .csv formats). This year’s spreadsheet version is eBird/Clements Checklist v2022, and was released on 25 October 2022.

As usual, we post a list of the major 2022 Updates & Corrections (e.g., new species, splits, lumps, and name changes) here. As noted above, however, full documentation of all changes is incorporated into the spreadsheet itself; and eBird also has a very useful summary of the major changes.

The spreadsheet contains 15 fields (data columns):

sort v2022 – Reflects the sequence of species, groups, and subspecies in eBird/Clements v2022

Clements v2022 change – A brief note to signal that a change from eBird/Clements Checklist v2021 occurred for that entry. Sometimes only a single change is made per entry; in other cases several changes are made.

text for website v2022 – Provides a fuller explanation of the change(s) from Clements Checklist v2021 that occurred for that entry.

category – Reflecting whether the entry on that line is a species; a subspecies; a monotypic group (i.e., a group that is equivalent to a single subspecies); or a polytypic group (a group composed of two or more subspecies). Thus, the total number of subspecies recognized in the eBird/Clements Checklist is the sum of all entries listed as “subspecies” and as “group (monotypic)”.

English name

scientific name

authority – The name(s) of the person, or group of people, who described a species or subspecies, followed by the year of publication of the description (this feature is added in 2022)

name and authority – The full scientific name combined with the authority, in a single column (this feature is added in 2022)

range

order

family

extinct – an entry (1) in this column means that the species or subspecies is extinct

extinct year – Reflects the year the species or subspecies went extinct (or, since the extinction date rarely is known with certainty, an approximation of the last year in which it was reported); “xxxx” is used when the date of extinction is not readily accessible.

sort v2021 – Reflecting the sequence of species in eBird/Clements Checklist v2021

page 6.0 – Reflecting the page number of the species in the last (sixth) print edition (2007)

Summary Statistics for eBird/Clements Checklist v2022

Species

In this year’s updates, we add “only” three newly described species, which come from two different regions. Two of these new species are from the Meratus Mountains in southeastern Borneo: Meratus White-eye Zosterops meratusensis and Meratus Blue Flycatcher Cyornis kadayangensis. The third new species also represents a newly described genus: Inti Tanager Heliothraupis oneilli of southern Peru and northern Bolivia. Two other additions are species that had been described long ago, but each had been confused with a different, more familiar species until recent field work confirmed their validity as separate species: New Caledonian Storm-Petrel Fregetta lineata, of the southwestern Pacific Ocean, and Ruvu Weaver Ploceus holoxanthus of eastern Tanzania.

Otherwise this year’s checklist includes 118 splits and 41 lumps; including the five new species listed above, this amounts to a net gain of 82 species. In terms of splits and lumps, we are current with the 2022 decisions of the American Ornithological Society’s North American Classification and Nomenclature Committee (NACC), and the decisions of the AOS’s South American Classification Committee (SACC) through July 2022. Additionally, the eBird/Clements Checklist is a participant in the Working Group Avian Checklists (WGAC), a collaborative effort at reaching consensus and alignment on avian classification, under the auspices of the International Ornithologist’ Union. Currently WGAC is focused on alignment at the level of the species and genus. In the future, after WGAC completes the first sweep across all species-related cases, consensus will be sought at higher and lower levels of classification; and of course WGAC will have plenty to do going forward to stay current with new research findings. We have implemented most WGAC decisions through June 2022.

Groups

eBird/Clements Checklist has adopted the concept of the group, which initially was developed by eBird. A “group” is a distinctive (field identifiable) subspecies or group of subspecies. The group is not a formal taxonomic unit, but often represents a potential future split (and so groups are a valuable taxonomic tool for the savvy birder).

Higher-Level Taxonomy

No new families are added or lost this year, and so the total number of extant families in the eBird/Clements Checklist remains 249 (including the family Mohoidae Hawaiian Honeyeaters of Hawaii, all species of which are extinct.

These 249 families are listed below, with the names of orders in bold CAPITAL lettering. We also provide the number of families in each order (in parentheses, after the name of each order), and the number of species in each family (in parentheses, after the name of each family).

Future Updates

The next annual revision that incorporates revisions to the taxonomy and nomenclature of the eBird/Clements Checklist will be released in the fall of 2023.

Acknowledgments

Please continue to report potential errors, corrections, and suggestions for improvement of the eBird/Clements Checklist to cornellbirds@cornell.edu). Many of the errors that you find are ones that would have taken a long time to notice, so we appreciate your help, and we do want to hear from you. Please keep in mind, of course, that the easiest corrections or proposed revisions are ones that are accompanied by a supporting reference or citation.

We thank our many collaborators who carefully reviewed advance versions of this checklist, in particular David Donsker, Praveen J, Max Kirsch, Peter Kovalik, Niels Larsen, Jack Levene, and Pamela Rasmussen. We take full responsibility for any remaining errors. We are grateful to Terry Chesser for providing advance copies of works in progress, and to both Terry and to Van Remsen for their too-little appreciated roles in chairing regional classification committees (AOS-NACC and AOS-SACC, respectively). And we are grateful to all members of the WGAC group for the stimulating and collegial discussions.

We also thank the following for their help in providing helpful comments on the eBird/Clements Checklist or for directing us to important literature for our consideration:

Per Alström, Daphne Gemmill, Alan Grenon, Mark Hodgson, Vernon Howe, Praveen J, Max Kirsch, Niels Larsen, Jay McGowan, Yann Muzika, Nigel Redman, Colin Richardson, Brian Self, Lars Skalens, Andrew Spencer, Joseph Tobias, Wich’yanan Limparungpatthanakij, and Adam Winer, as well as the wider community of eBird users, the always astute members of the Taxonomy and Nomenclature group on BirdForum, and no doubt others who we inadvertently may have overlooked.

Thanks to all for your support, and we look forward to your feedback.

Thomas S. Schulenberg, Marshall J. Iliff, Thomas A. Fredericks, Jeff Gerbracht, Denis LePage, Shawn M. Billerman, Brian L. Sullivan, and Christopher L. Wood.