generally not a fan of arbitrary constructs but sometimes they can make your day
hummingbirds and taxonomy and lists and puerto rico and maybe gender
species is kind of a made up concept. of course there’s science behind which animals have babies with each other and which ones don’t and how evolution got them there. but, at least for birds, there’s literally a committee of people reading proposals and deciding which populations of birds are separate species and which are merely sub-populations of a single species.
and yet, when i heard that said committee decided that a hummingbird i’d seen, the antillean mango, was actually *two* species, the puerto rican mango and the hispaniolan mango, i was absolutely ecstatic. in fact, it totally changed the way i felt about the hummingbird.
the antillean mango is a beautiful bird: the males i saw were yellow-green with an iridescent green throat, purple tail feathers, a dusky belly, and a handsome black patch beneath their throat, black being a color you don’t often encounter on a hummingbird. females take on a more muted green-backed, white-bellied look. but during my february visit to puerto rico, we didn’t have a lot of time and i really wanted to focus on seeing the puerto rican endemics like the green mango and the puerto rican emerald, birds that only breed on the island. the antillean mango was not one of those birds, since it also breeds on hispaniola.
yet, every time i found a hummingbird on my own, it ended up being an antillean mango. i enjoyed watching and photographing them, but i couldn’t help but be a little disappointed. this was magnified by the fact that despite its tropical locale, casually encountering any hummingbirds on puerto rico is surprisingly tough since their populations dropped significantly after hurricane maria. (i did end up encountering the other two endemic hummers, but you can check out that story in the ebird trip report i wrote about the trip)
and then, it happened: the split.
every year, the american ornithological society (aos) releases a supplement to its checklist of birds. the checklist is a big deal: it’s a list of the north american bird species that the bird research community agrees are real. the supplement is also a big deal: an aos committee reads proposals about changes people think should be made to that checklist, then decides whether to make that change. these changes don’t represent anything different about the birds, just humanity’s increased understanding of how subgroups of those birds interact with each other.
no addendum to the checklist is as exciting to birders as splitting one species into two, of course. because a split means you get to add a new species to your personal list of birds you’ve seen, or, at the very least, it gives you another bird to go look for. of course, many birders will groan when two former species are lumped together, decreasing the length of their list by one.
the mango split is based mainly on the fact that the two populations look different, rather than their dna. most notably, hispaniolan mangoes have entirely black bellies, versus puerto rican mangoes’ black throats and dusky brown bellies. female hispaniolan mangoes have purple at the base of their tail feathers, while in puerto rican mangoes, the base is brownish gray, as shown below. on average, the puerto rican mango is lighter, shorter-winged, and shorter-tailed.
so, with the publication of the 63rd supplement to the aos checklist, the antillean mangos i saw are now puerto rican mangos. from now on, birders will go to puerto rico and include the hummingbird on their “must-see” list, and if they miss it, won’t be able to say “oh, i’ll just see it in the dominican republic.”
in my case, the thoughtless snake brain part of my brain immediately made me feel different about the hummingbird. i recalled excitedly chasing the first hummingbird i saw of the trip around our airbnb, hoping to get a good enough look to confirm it as one of the endemic species. well, it was! i watched a female feed on yellow flowers for several minutes right outside the restaurant where i had one of my favorite meals, hoping it would be an endemic species—again, just what i was hoping for. when i finally did see the other endemics, i watched a feisty puerto rican mango scare them away at a bird feeder—i don’t remember who i rooted for but now i’ll just tell myself i rooted for the puerto rican mango.
i recognize that listing—the birder term for trying to see as many bird species in a given location and period of time in order to amass the biggest list of birds—is a silly endeavor. there’s a stereotype that “listers” don’t really care about common birds. of course, this group does include some of the most competitive, privileged, and often most toxic birders. and it’s silly to base your experience of animals on ticking the boxes of a checklist drafted by an authority, especially when, in this case, the authority was just like, yeah, they look different so they must be different.
at the same time, listing can be an exciting element of birdwatching. it’s the pokemon part. it’s a way to learn about species you’ve never heard of before, a reason to plan vacations, and a structure around the hobby of birdwatching. every birdwatcher likes seeing a new species. it’s not like i didn’t like puerto rican mangoes before the split—notice, i still took plenty of pictures of them. it’s more that this pretty arbitrary effort has given me an entirely new reason to be excited about a bird that i already saw, six months after i saw it.
i guess all of this is to say that it’s people who define the world we live in. sometimes you buy into it and get excited about it. but it’s also important to consider what that means. who did we choose to make these definitions? what previous structure are these organizations supplanting, and what harm might they have caused to write those rules? i guess, if even the concept of “species” is a construct based on a proposal-and-vote kind of process, then i’m thinking there’s are some concepts based on far shakier ground i wouldn’t mind writing some proposals to update. like gender. which is also a construct.
i didn’t expect to get to gender but this post is about gender now. congratulations, mangoes!
ps: i’m sending this post from arizona, where my friends and i specifically made a trip to see the chihuahuan meadowlark, another new species from the new supplement split off from the common eastern meadowlark.