Short communications, notes and reports: Lappet-faced Vultures with white feathers

No Abstrac

Some black-and-white facts about the Faeroese whitespeckled Common Raven Corvus corax varius.

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Streptopelia risoria and how Linnaeus had the last laugh

© 2018 The Authors; This is an open‐access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Atribution-NonCommercial Licence, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. The attached file is the published version of the article

Presumed hybrid Eurasian Teal x Garganey in Valencia, Spain, in January–February 2014

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The dark side of birds: melanism—facts and fiction

© 2017 The Authors; Journal compilation © 2017 British Ornithologists’ Club. The attached file is the published version of the article

How common is albinism really? Colour aberrations in Indian birds reviewed

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Unravelling the biogeography of secretive taxa by museum collections: the untold story of the black francolin (Francolinus francolinus, Phasianidae) in the Mediterranean

The black francolin (Francolinus francolinus) (BF) comprises six morphological subspecies distributed from Cyprus and Turkey across Asia to India. In spite of being renowned as courtly gamebird since the Classic Age, this species suffers from paucity of demographic and molecular studies. In order to update the BF biogeographic pattern by pursuing a thorough sampling across the unsafe and remote areas representing most of the specie’s range, tissues from museum specimens (76, XVIIIth c.-­‐1954) hosted in US and European ornithological collections were genotyped at a 185 bp-­‐long fragment of the mtDNA Control Region gene along with modern birds (205) sequenced at the entire gene. The access to ornithological collections opened the unforeseen opportunity to elucidate the genetic affinity of the extinct populations once residing in the western Mediterranean (Italy, Spain), thus settling the debate about autochthony versus allochthony in that region. Three well-­‐defined haplogroups -­‐ each one including a pair of morphological subspecies and matching the phylogeographical pattern inferred with the whole gene -­‐ were found to reflect a westward adaptive radiation, a more complex scenario being nonetheless disclosed in the Indian sub-­‐continent. The nonnative status of the western Mediterranean BFs was ultimately assessed, a tight genetic affinity with conspecifics from Cyprus and southern Asia being found. This finding, which partly confirmed the invoked importation during the Crusades, pointed to the major human impact on Mediterranean biodiversity through long-­‐distance trade across Asia to satisfy the high demand for exotic species by the European aristocracy during the Medieval times and the Renaissance

Historic and modern genomes unveil a domestic introgression gradient in a wild red junglefowl population

The red junglefowl Gallus gallus is the ancestor of the domestic chicken and arguably the most important bird species on Earth. Continual gene flow between domestic and wild populations has compromised its gene pool, especially since the last century when human encroachment and habitat loss would have led to increased contact opportunities. We present the first combined genomic and morphological admixture assessment of a native population of red junglefowl, sampled from recolonized parts of its former range in Singapore, partly using whole genomes resequenced from dozens of individuals. Crucially, this population was genomically anchored to museum samples from adjacent Peninsular Malaysia collected ~110–150 years ago to infer the magnitude of modern domestic introgression across individuals. We detected a strong feral–wild genomic continuum with varying levels of domestic introgression in different subpopulations across Singapore. Using a trait scoring scheme, we determined morphological thresholds that can be used by conservation managers to successfully identify individuals with low levels of domestic introgression, and selected traits that were particularly useful for predicting domesticity in genomic profiles. Our study underscores the utility of combined genomic and morphological approaches in population management and suggests a way forward to safeguard the allelic integrity of wild red junglefowl in perpetuity.© 2020 The Authors. Evolutionary Applications published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited

Taxonomic status of the extinct Canary Islands Oystercatcher Haematopus meadewaldoi

Mitochondrial genes were sequenced from four specimens of the extinct Canary Islands Oystercatcher Haematopus meadewaldoi and compared with African Oystercatcher Haematopus moquini, Eurasian Oystercatcher Haematopus ostralegus and an old unidentified extralimital ‘black’ oystercatcher specimen from The Gambia. At these loci, H. meadewaldoi was approximately 99.65% identical to multiple Eurasian Oystercatcher samples and in phylogenetic trees fell within the range of genetic variation observed in that species. The mystery Gambian bird was resolved as an extralimital H. moquini. We conclude that H. meadewaldoi was most likely a recently diverged melanistic morph or subspecies of H.ostralegus, although further genomic studies will be required to determine whether there has been a period of isolation followed by introgression