Taxonomie du Pic à sourcils noirs et de la Sittelle à tête brune aux Bahamas

William K. Hayes is graduated from the Laboratory of behavioral ecology and conservation, Loma Linda University Adventist Health Sciences Center. He earned his Ph.D. at University of Wyoming. He has decided to study the taxonomy of potentially endangered Bahamian birds. The idea for these project came to him while I was sitting in an Important Bird Areas Workshop for the Bahamas in April, 2002. As the two-day workshop progressed, it was established that the Bahamas birds were very unknown. For many species, birders have often only a vague idea as to how many remain, and how their relative abundance varies from island to island. And remarks were often made that certain island forms might in fact be distinct but currently unrecognized species. William needed to use some of the statistical tools he had recently learned (from his iguanas research) to do a taxonomic evaluation of those forms most likely to represent distinct-and critically endangered-species.
He decided to work on two: the West Indian Woodpecker (Melanerpes superciliaris) and the Brown-headed Nuthatch (Sitta pusilla), because he knew that the woodpecker subspecies on San Salvador Island had to be critically endangered (with dozens, or at best, only a few hundred pairs remaining), and that the nuthatch subspecies on Grand Bahama Island was supposedly all but gone. The literature on both birds offers reason to suspect that the island forms might be full species rather than subspecies.
In this article, we propose you to present the result of his study.