. Bulletin of the British Ornithologists' Club. Birds. Club Notices 146 Bull. 2001 121(3) the species being overlooked for so long - quite remarkable on an island with such a long history of ornithological studies. Deepal Warakagoda is about to start a research project to learn more about the new owl and to try to establish its exact status. To date he has only been able to locate three individuals. An announcement about the new owl is to appear shortly in the Bulletin of the Oriental Bird Club, The Forktail, and Deepal intends to describe the new species in due course in a paper to be
. Bulletin of the British Ornithologists' Club. Birds. Club Notices 146 Bull. 2001 121(3) the species being overlooked for so long - quite remarkable on an island with such a long history of ornithological studies. Deepal Warakagoda is about to start a research project to learn more about the new owl and to try to establish its exact status. To date he has only been able to locate three individuals. An announcement about the new owl is to appear shortly in the Bulletin of the Oriental Bird Club, The Forktail, and Deepal intends to describe the new species in due course in a paper to be co- authored with Dr. Rasmussen. "Long-billed Vulture" Gyps indicus. Pamela Rasmussen presented a short slide show on work she and Steven Parry have done on the taxonomic status of this. They found that the vulture taxa that have been treated as two subspecies under this species throughout the 20th Century are actually highly divergent and are probably not even sister species. The form occurring along the base of the Himalayas and into SE Asia, tenuirostris, has a great many characters (many of which are paedomorphic) that differ from adults of other species of Gyps, while the form from the Indian plains and peninsula, indicus, is a typical Gyps with only a few, minor novel characters. In brief, tenuirostris and indicus have a differently shaped bill, head, and nares; very different distribution and type of feathering on the head and neck; different soft part colours; a clearly distinct flight silhouette; very distinct shape and distribution of contour feathers; different tarsal and pedal proportions and scutellation; and different nestling and juvenile plumages. Differences in egg structure and in nesting substrate are also evident. Osteological specimens were lacking but bones recovered from one skin specimen of each confirm differences observable in skins. DNA sequences recovered from skin samples by Rob Fleischer await study. Based on morphology, these are unquest
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Keywords: ., bookcentury1800, bookdecade1890, booksubjectbirds, bookyear1893
