As I complained recently, my lifelist jumped from 1998 to 2002 birds recently (actually today on Ebird) due to some recent taxonomic changes.

But now it looks like many of us will be losing a bird. Recently published research shows that Blue-winged and Golden-winged Warblers are just color morphs of the same species of bird. I assume they will be lumped in an npcoming AOU checklist?

Although I complained earlier about getting my 2K bird through a split, I noticed that it makes this velociraptor sighting my 2000th bird, which if I have to have a 2K bird, this ain't a bad one!

Oh, that's so sad that you might lose a bird...I feel your pain...
Did you see my Tern I posted for you?

So they're taking away Golden-winged, but they want us to separate 13 species of Red Crossbills by looking at sonograms of their stupid flight calls? AOU can bite me.

I'm going to form an Amish-style utopian society, except instead of freezing technology in the 18th century, I'm going to freeze taxonomy in the 1980's.

You might have to dial back a bit further. I think the Crossbill split was published in the 1980s.

Really? It was always one species in all my field guides. I thought the Crossbill split hasn't actually been accepted yet.

The initial studies showing that there were possibly 7 (?) species of Red Crossbill go back to then. Now, subsequent research has described as many as 10 North American species and 20 European Species of "Red Crossbill". Most sources haven't accepted these new species mostly because they are so hard to define.

Of course, I may have two new birds on the horizon anyway - http://us2.campaign-archive2.com/?u=b35 ... 7966fa68f5
I've seen three of the four (Myrtle, Audubons, and Black-fronted) so that will be two new ones hopefully. Just a question of if/when it is accepted into the field guides.

Chris