American Ornithologists’ Union

American Ornithologists' Union Website

This organization commonly called AOU is the oldest one in America dedicated to the formal study of birds. This year the AOU celebrates its 125th Anniversary, during these years its members have developed an extended and diverse ornithological society open to scientific ornithologists, students, conservationists and birders.

The AOU website provide excellent information about birds in North America and one of the most important work shared is the Check-list of North and South American Birds. The Committee on Classification and Nomenclature of North and Middle American Birds produces an official Check-list of North American Birds, with the purpose of creating a standard classification and nomenclature.

Actually the check-list includes 2046 bird species known in the geographic area from North Pole to boundary shared by Panama and Colombia, including Hawaiian Islands and some Antillean Islands.

Every year Guatemalans check the publication proposed for AOU Committee in order to maintain update our bird lists, because in the last two years changes have affected birds regional endemic to North Central America, like splitting genera Megascops from Otus, which means that the new scientific name of the Bearded Screech-Owl is Mesgascops barbarus; or genus Asturina merged into Buteo which changes the scientific name of a common raptor in Guatemala, GrayHawk, to Buteo nitidus.




Gray Hawk (Buteo nitidus)


Posted by Maynor Ovando


http://www.birdwatchingguatemala.com/ is a registered trademark of Martsam Tour & Travel Copyright® 2,008
http://www.birdwatchingguatemala.com/
http://www.martsam.com/

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A trip looking for motmot species

Image
A trip looking for motmot species by  L Some days ago I was traveling with some colleagues in the Guatemalan thorn forest and we had a lucky day. We got pictures from the Russet-crowned motmot (which was a lifer for one of us) and we got pictures of many cuculidae from the country and of course we got a good game of bird data to our research. Well, we started to dream the ideal schedule to watch all the motmot species in the country. There are nine motmot species and more of them are easy to watch in Guatemala. For those who are not familiarized with motmots they have the unique characteristic to develop a racket-like rectris feathers. This family can be watched only in America and they originated in Mesoamerica in some recent point no more than 30 million years. Turquoise-browed Motmot tail. All motmot tail feathers have different blue tones. Early in the 20 century there was scientific observations which wrongly lead to the conclusion that motmots work out in sha
Read more

Ebird Guatemala

Image
Ebird is an extraordinary tool for birders and a great opportunity to share with all the World the bird richness in Guatemala. This is a program from Cornell Lab of Ornithology and started as a mechanism for US birders to report what they found in their birding fieldtrips and started to grow to the most important birding hotspots out of the United States. A few months ago a group of birders in Guatemala led by Carol C. Anderson implemented Ebird Guatemala in order to report accurately observations made in our country. This portal let you send your observations in each place and keep a record of your lifelist, bird list for that place, historical reports and let other birders use that information to prepare charts with frequencies, distributions, etc. Please visit the website and join us to have better information of bird populations in Guatemala. Posted by Maynor Ovando http://www.birdwatchingguatemala.com/ is a registered trademark of Martsam Tour & Travel Copyright® 2,008 http
Read more

Birding around Flores, Peten

Image
Peten Itza Lake Photo by Maynor Ovando Flores is the capital of the northernmost department of Guatemala, Peten. If you travel to visit any Maya city like Tikal or Yaxhá, you can’t miss this small and beautiful town. Flores is an island, bordered by Petén Itzá Lake and there’s a lot of options to take a tour on the lake or have a ride in a car to visit neighbor towns. Last Wednesday I decided to go birding around Flores Island, so I tried to have the two sides of the coin birding in water and land. I started in a boat at 6:00 am to look for wading birds for 3 hours, this is my bird list: Pied-billed Greebe Neotropic Cormorant Northern Jacana Purple Gallinule Limpkin Green Heron Little Blue Heron Ringed Kingfisher Snail Kite Mangrove Swallow Great-tailed Grackle Laughing Gull Amazon Kingfisher Great Egret Bat Falcon Social Flycatcher Rock Dove Common Moorhen Black Vulture Turkey Vulture Olive-throated Parakeet Yellow-throated Euphonia Blue-gray Tanager Juvenile Little Blue Heron and No
Read more