Morphological Characters of Bird Species in Taiwan

Abstract

We documented body measurements of birds captured during 1987-1995 banding research in Taiwan by Wild Bird Society Taiwan. A total of 223 bird species with measurements of body mass, length of body, head, tail, bill and tarsus, and maximum wing span were compiled for the database. Body mass, length of bill, and length of tarsus of 85 species that had sample sizes > 20 were reported. In addition, we also compared our data with that from Dunning (1993). Among the ten species eligible for further analyses, we found that eight species showed significant differences in body mass between our data and that of Dunning (1993). Our results together with our recent studies (Lee et al, 2004; Ding et al., 2005) showed that compiling banding research data contribute to predict ecological parameters of bird studies in community, ecosystem and landscape levels