2018 Taxonomy Updates

posted in: BIF News, Ornithology | 0

Several years ago, we at BirdsInFocus.com made an internal commitment to synchronize our website’s taxonomy with the annually updated eBird/Clements Checklist. This has allowed us to stay as current as possible, for every bird species in the world, on the nomenclature now used by a rapidly growing majority of the world’s birders.

It’s always a labor-intensive process, and ironic health issues prevented me from completing the 2017 updates until this year, but I’m very pleased to announce that we’re now back on schedule. We incorporated all of the 2017 and 2018 taxonomic revisions just one week after eBird released its 2018 updates, making BirdsInFocus once again one of the most up-to-date bird photography websites in the world.

We now have nearly 12,000 high-quality photos online representing 2,153 species of birds from 30 countries on six continents, several islands, and at sea. With the latest taxonomic updates, we’ve added two new orders and six new families:

New in 2017:

New in 2018:

At the species level, dozens of common and/or scientific names have changed to reflect new research, and our net species total has increased by three:

Talamanca Hummingbird by Judd Patterson

  Talamanca Hummingbird by Judd Patterson

Southern Emerald-Toucanet by Bob Gress

  Southern Emerald-Toucanet by Bob Gress

Foothill Screech-Owl by Bob Gress

  Foothill Screech-Owl by Bob Gress

Follow David Seibel:

Nature Photographer

David Seibel, Ph.D., is a native Kansan and lifelong birder. He earned his doctorate in ornithology from the University of Kansas and was a biology professor for over 25 years before retiring from teaching in 2017 to pursue nature photography and writing full time. His passion for birds has taken him to five continents, eleven countries, and almost every state in the U.S.

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