The Red Notebook

If my camera were a shotgun, I could have eaten grouse for dinner yesterday evening:

Red Grouse [Lagopus lagopus]

I’ve been trying to bag a decent shot of a red grouse for yonks. They’re so elusive, you see. Can’t say I blame them, what with the landed gentry having made so-called sport from blasting them out of the sky for the last couple of hundred years. Charles Darwin shot more than his fair share of game birds in his youth—mostly pheasants and partidges in his case—but he eventually grew out of it.

This time, I was prepared. I knew there was a grouse hiding, perfectly camouflaged in the heather ahead of me, as I had heard its distinctive go-back! go-back! call. So I had my camera held at eye-level, zoom set to maximum and already focused to about 20 yards, lens cap off, multi-shot mode and servo autofocus engaged, shutter speed set to 1/500th of a second, and finger on shutter. Even so, I was lucky to get this shot: the others were all very blurred.

The red grouse was once reckoned to be the UK’s only endemic bird species. This turned out to be false on two counts: (1) the Scottish crossbill is now recognised as an endemic species, and (2) the poor old red grouse is now regarded as a mere variety of the willow grouse, which is common throughout northern tundra regions in Europe and America (where it is known as the willow ptarmigan).

Nuts to that! When it comes to grouse, count me in with the splitters. Unlike all the other ‘varieties’ of willow grouse, the red grouse’s plumage does not turn white in winter. Forget about reproductive isolation and genetic variation and all that bumf; I reckon not turning white in winter should be enough to earn the red grouse a unique (and endemic) species label.

That was certainly what the majority of people seemed to think in Darwin’s Day. As the great man wrote in chapter 2 of ‘On the Origin of Species’:

Several most experienced ornithologists consider our British red grouse as only a strongly-marked race of a Norwegian species, whereas the greater number rank it as an undoubted species peculiar to Great Britain.

Yeah! That’s more like it! Willow grouse my peach-like arse! Bully for the famous red grouse!

BBC: Not one but ‘six giraffe species’

The world’s tallest animal, the giraffe, may actually be several species, a study has found. A report in BMC Biology uses genetic evidence to show that there may be at least six species of giraffe in Africa.

Currently giraffes are considered to represent a single species classified into multiple subspecies. The study shows geographic variation in hair coat colour is evident across the giraffe’s range in sub-Saharan Africa, suggesting reproductive isolation.

Note the inverted commas in the headline: the chaps at the BBC don’t sound too sure. It’s the age-old question as to when a sub-species becomes a species. There’s no clear-cut answer (although reproductive isolation is usually seen as an important factor). Where some cladists taxonomists see mere varieties, others see separate species. Those who make a habit of seeing the former are known as lumpers; those who see new species everywhere they look are dubbed splitters.

I had been under the impression that lumper and splitter were relatively modern labels, but not so, as this letter from the botanist Hewett Cottrell Watson to Charles Darwin shows:

The grand difficulty for naturalists or botanists of our turn of thought, is, that the use of the word “species” by technical describers is indefinite & variable. Theoretically, it is supposed to mean objects actually & essentially distinct,—so existing as productions of nature, & reproducing only their own selves or similitudes. Practically, it means only an idea of the mind, with no more real restriction in its application to objects, than have the words “genus” or “order“. Taking J. D. Hooker & Jordan as representative men for the opposite factions in botany,—’lumpers & splitters’, the former would reduce the species of Vascular plants to three score thousand, or perhaps much fewer;—while Jordan would raise them to three hundred thousand.

To his credit, Darwin’s great friend, Joseph Dalton Hooker fully acknowledged his reputation as a lumper, writing:

[George Bentham] has now completed the MSS of his British Flora, having studied every species from all parts of the world, & most of them alive in Britain, France & other parts of Europe—Well—he has turned out as great a lumper as I am! & worse

Not that there’s anything particularly wrong with being a lumper (or a splitter), you understand: it’s just a matter of tending to see things from different perspectives. And having differing perspectives is usually a good thing in science.

• Extensive population genetic structure in the giraffe (BMC Biology, 670kb PDF)
• There Are More Giraffe Species Than You Think (Living the Scientific Life)
• Now We Are Six (A Blog Around the Clock)