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Aves de España y Portugal
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31/01/2014 - Sacarrão & Soares List of Portuguese Bird Names is Online
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| Estamos trabajando en la versión castellana de esta noticia. Te ofrecemos la versión inglesa. | |
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Since 1979, the Sacarrão & Soares list of Portuguese names for European Birds was the standard reference on that subject. Most of the relevant ornithological literature produced in the 1980’s and 1990’s used those names. Examples of both national and international publications include the first Portuguese Breeding Bird Atlas (Rufino 1989) and the mammoth European Breeding Bird Atlas (Hagemeijer & Blair 1997), respectively.
Around 1998, a new list of Portuguese names for European and Western Palearctic Birds was produced and submitted to the Portuguese Society for the Study of Birds (SPEA) for adoption and publication. Following a long controversy, SPEA decided not to adopt or publish this list (see SPEA newsletters no. 20 and no. 27).
In 2000, the authors of the latter list privately published their work, which became popularly known as the Costa et al. list (the surname of the first of five co-authors) and was viewed as an alternative to Sacarrão and Soares’s work.
Two years later, in 2002, the Editors of Airo, SPEA’s scientific journal, decided that only the bird names in Costa et al. list were allowed in papers to be published by that journal. In the following year, SPEA translated and published the 1st edition of the Collins Bird Guide, using two names for most species: one from Sacarrão & Soares and one from Costa et al. Finally, two years ago, in 2012, SPEA translated and published the 2nd edition of the Collins Bird Guide, but this time only the names from Costa et al. were used. It appears that, as time goes by, Costa et al. is gaining ground over Sacarrão & Soares, ground that it was unable to gain back in 1998.
If this rise in acceptance was due to the merits of Costa et al. list (and this list certainly has merits), than that would be a natural and positive phenomenon. However, for many years, the Sacarrão & Soares list had a major handicap: availability. This work was out of print, so that some of the XXI century popular debate on the relative merits of Sacarrão & Soares and Costa et al. is largely based on 2nd (or 3rd!) hand information about the former.
Yesterday, the National Natural History and Science Museum of Lisbon University - the successor of the museum that originally published Sacarrão & Soares list - made the 1979 list and a 1986 errata available on-line at http://digital.museus.ul.pt/items/show/2646
Now that the new generations of birdwatchers, bird photographers and ornithologists will be able to study and compare both lists, I envisage times in which popular bird nomenclature will finally be settled in a quiet and progressive way… or not!
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© Museu Nacional de História Natural e da Ciência
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Luís Gordinho
Editor de Reservoir Birds
31/01/2014
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