Blackish Cinclodes (Cinclodes Antarcticus)

Willie-wagtail (Rhipidura leucophrys)

© Allan Howell

25 years ago an unknown Chinese protester stood in front of a tank in defiance of the government. No one knows the identity of the man but he was given the nick name “Tank Man”. This is one of the most iconic photographs of the century.

Kentish plover (Charadrius alexandrinus), Fabio Montes

kissie time

My understanding of phylogenetics is definitely limited so maybe I'm the one who's been getting it wrong this entire time, but if you haven't done so already would you mind explaining the studies about falcons being part of the Australaves clade? I find a lot of people saying things like "falcons are closely related to parrots" which I feel is a bit misleading, but again I could be wrong. Thanks in advance!

Sure! Australaves is the name given to a clade containing the seriemas, falcons, parrots, and passeriform birds. This group was first discovered by genetic analyses in the mid-2000s. As one might expect, this was a very unexpected finding, because prior to this no one had considered that all of these birds might be closely related to each other. (For example, seriemas were traditionally thought to be more closely related to cranes, falcons were thought to be more closely related to hawks, passeriforms were thought to be more closely related to woodpeckers, and so on.)

However, many more genetic studies on birds have been done since then by different research teams sampling different types of genes, vastly greater amounts of genetic data, and larger numbers of bird species, and Australaves has been consistently supported by nearly all of these. We can be pretty confident at this point that Australaves is a real clade.

Within Australaves, parrots and passeriforms are each other’s closest living relatives, and falcons are most closely related to the clade uniting both of them (which has been given the long name of Psittacopasserae). So it would not be incorrect to say that falcons are closely related to parrots, because parrots are indeed among the closest living relatives that falcons have.

However, I’ve occasionally seen people claim that parrots alone are the closest living relatives of falcons, and that is not correct. Instead, parrots and passeriforms are together the closest living relatives of falcons, and falcons are equally closely related to both (much like how a pair of siblings is equally closely related to their first cousin, instead of the cousin being more closely related to one sibling than to the other). The group containing falcons, parrots, and passeriforms (but not seriemas) has another mouthful of a name, Eufalconimorphae!

Two more weeks of gender!

marshmallow has the thots

about FINSH FLYDAY!!!

Obsolete??? Why you gotta do my pal Bufo like that

IM SO ANGRY