ne of the most wonderful things about being a birder is getting to see places you likely otherwise wouldn’t in this life. For many of us, that means, sooner or later: rainforests, open oceans, polar regions. But also: landfills, stockyards, sewage lagoons. And this: a million other places that are neither iconic (hello, rainforests!) nor surreal (I’m looking at you, landfills). They’re out of the way, they’re beautiful, and we probably won’t go there if it weren’t for the birds.
Case in point: Fox Lake Sanctuary, tucked behind a built-up day-use area on the western edge of Titusville, Florida. Like seemingly everywhere else in Florida, Titusville is expanding. The sanctuary isn’t even a mile from I-95. But it might as well be a million miles away. Or, at least, in the arid, mid-elevation pine forests of Colorado, where I live. Like this:
Really, that could be a foothills forest, around my home west of Denver, recovering from a recent burn or rockslide. You’d be excused for imagining that scrub-jays, so perfectly emblematic of the sun-kissed dry forests of Colorado, might be found in such a place. Like this:
Of course, that is a scrub-jay, the one we today refer to as the Florida scrub-jay, in distinction from the Woodhouse’s scrub-jay found far to the west of the Mississippi in the U.S. and Mexico. It hasn’t always been that way. Folks who were birding in the late 20th century will recall that all the birds called scrub-jay were once lumped together as a single species. But now we treat them as a complex of four “full species.” Which, to cut to the chase, means they “count.” They count for our life lists. If you’re from Colorado, or anywhere else in North America except for mid-peninsula in Florida, you can go to places like Fox Lake Sanctuary and get a lifer. A tick for your list.
Okay, that’s a caricature. I’m happy to report that our little band of scrub-jay seekers sought more than an “X” on our eBird checklists. We spent some serious Q. T. with the two Florida scrub-jays we found out there. We photographed them, we made videos, we audio-recorded them. (Gratuitous aside: I cannot for the life of me abide the assertion that watching and enjoying wild birds with technology somehow impairs fieldcraft. It’s completely the opposite, in my experience. Tech has made me a better birder.) And as an added benefit, we all got to experience a lovely landscape in Florida we might well not have prior to 1998, when the state’s endemic scrub-jay was elevated to full-species rank.
A few days later, and many Florida scrub-jays later (you see, I was really into scrub-jays, and kept signing up for Space Coast Birding & Wildlife Festival field trips to scrub-jay habitat), I found myself at Merritt Island National Wildlife Refuge, on the northeastern outskirts of Titusville. Bill Pranty, the legendary Florida field ornithologist, was my guide, and he took me to a place at Merritt Island with another bird endemic to Florida. But we didn’t see it. Because nobody has in close to forty years. The bird that lived there, the dusky seaside sparrow, is extinct.
At the time of its extinction, the dusky seaside sparrow was “just” a subspecies. Previously a full species, the way the Florida scrub-jay is today, it was demoted to subspecies status by the stroke of a pen in 1973. The late Jim Rising, at the time of his death in 2018 perhaps the world’s foremost authority on the New World sparrows, wrote an article in Birding, back in 2005, decrying the AOS (then the AOU) for its complicity in the matter.
Splitting and lumping are “just science,” according to some, but nothing is “just science.” Scientific discoveries have societal consequences. Now, to be clear, Rising was critical of the AOS for the science (or lack thereof) behind its 1973 lump of the multiple species, including the dusky seaside sparrow, into the one species we today refer to as the seaside sparrow. But Rising also remarked on the relevance and responsibility of the AOS to society at large.
Same goes for the ABA. The scrub-jay is split into first three (tick! tick!), and then four (tick! tick! tick!), species. But the three species of seaside-side sparrows are become just one (tick! tick!). And that’s all there is to it? No, of course not.
If the scrub-jays were re-lumped, they’d still be just as interesting. Their intriguing behaviors and ecologies wouldn’t suddenly go away. Their fascinating evolutionary histories wouldn’t be erased. And their critically important habitats wouldn’t get wiped out. Right? Because we birders would still care about all those things, correct? We’d still go to see scrub-jays in Florida; we’d still care about their magnificent and threatened habitats; and we’d still advocate for the birds and the places they call home, yes? Wouldn’t we? 
Ted Floyd is the longtime Editor of Birding magazine, and he is broadly involved in other programs and initiatives with the ABA. Ted has written 200+ magazine articles and 5 books, including How to Know the Birds (National Geographic, 2019). He is a frequent speaker at birding festivals and has served on several nonprofit boards. Join Ted here for his semimonthly spot, “How to Know the Birds,” celebrating common birds and the uncommonly interesting things they do.
