Mysticete
Well-known member
I recall one of IOC folks commenting here that IOC at least is putting a "hold" on new decisions relating to taxonomic change. The changes coming through here are either from the WGAC process or from decisions made by the North or South American checklist committees. Hence why we saw Northern Goshawk split, a NACC recent decision, and something I don't think any of the "Big 3" global checklists had followed through on. So at least one committee is sort of avoiding any new decisions.A hiccup with the WGAC process will be that in correspondence with BirdLife, I was informed that the participants are not putting a moratorium on new decisions. This means that quite a lot of the updates in each taxonomy are 'work as normal' assessments based on new evidence, rather than acts of unification. Each new decision is potentially a new area of disagreement to be resolved later. I thought it would have been wiser to have parked future decisions, until at least all the parties had agreed that they would be making the same change in future. Otherwise, it may be extremely difficult to finalize the project and sync all lists. The optimum time to try and do this would seem to be to target completion in early July, the end of the longest interval between the global taxonomy updates (IOC end of Jan and July, Clements Aug and BirdLife Dec).
I will not work through the update notices, but await the formal issue of IOC 13.2. It will however be interesting to see how IOC 13.2, Clements 23 and BirdLife 8 change the above calcs. How about a convergence clock with 1,000 differences representing one hour to midnight? (we would then currently be at 11:06 - 54 minutes to midnight!).
Of course, I always got the sense that Birdlife International/HBW already didn't update to the extent the other global checklists did, at least in recent years.