Roughly 10 percent of the world’s birds — about a thousand species — are songbirds belong to a group called “nine-primaried oscines,” so named...

I looked over at the calendar the other day and literally almost jumped halfway across the room. The end of 2012 – and the...

A recent proposal (555) to the AOU’s South American Classification Committee deals with newly published information about relationships within the sandpiper family, Scolopacidae, and...

The oldest division in the great avian tree lies between the ratites and tinamous (the paleognaths) and all other living birds (the neognaths). The...

Many of us in North America are facing the imminent departure of “our” hummingbirds for the next few months, though across the Gulf Coastal...

We humans often understand things by exploring their relationships. Ourselves, for instance; just consider how many sweet or gritty stories you’ve seen about Olympic...

The American Ornithologists’ Union published the 53rd supplement (PDF) to its North American list last week, making official many long-speculated changes and rejecting others,...

Emotion. Drama. Intrigue. Philosophy. Yes, I’m talking about scientific proposals to ornithological taxonomic authorities. Take, for example, the gem I found in the latest...