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Gulls from South-East Kazakhstan_II

Posted: Thu Nov 24, 2011 10:00 pm
by hieraaetus
Here comes a few more:)

Re: Gulls from South-East Kazakhstan_II

Posted: Thu Nov 24, 2011 11:05 pm
by marsmuusse
Wowww, now we are getting ourselves into interesting birds!!!
Hieraaetus, you mention SE Kazakhstan, so I assume we should still call these birds "eastern cachinnans", and certainly head profile of several of these birds advocate this.
But see those birds with black down to P2 (I admit it is not much, just a black spot on the outerweb, but anyway, not at all what you will see in western birds from Ukraine).
For people interested in such birds, I tried to create a page already (but I'm into marinus and heuglini at the moment, and its time consuming, so still not complete at all!):
http://gull-research.org/barabensis/05cyjuly.html

In these remote areas where not many populations are documented it remains difficult to exactly draw a line between eastern cachinnans and the form barabensis, but, following Panov and Monzikov even gulls breeding in the northern region of Kazakhstan are not completely free from cachinnans influences, and clearly several image sof Ross support this. True barabensis, as these authors define it, should be sampled as north as Omsk, like in the Chany Lakes and marshes or islands in the Saltaim Lake.

Extremely interesting this gradual zone of cachinnans into barabensis. If anyone from the forum likes to be involved in creating further webpages on this taxon / these matters, or if you have info or images from trips to these locations, please let me know!
Mars

Re: Gulls from South-East Kazakhstan_II

Posted: Fri Nov 25, 2011 8:21 am
by lou bertalan
i can only subscribe to what mars said: these pics are highly interesting.
adult western cachinnans in extreme individuals can have black marks down to p3 but in this eastern transition zone it seems to be the rule. and ventral tongues are much shorter. seeing and analyzing many such pics from the south belt of steppe/semidesert in central asia might help sorting out true vagrants into central/western europe (although this target still seems far fetched at the moment since we even can't ID barabensis with 100% in a vagrant context).

there are quite some contenders among my pics from romania having a lot of black in wingtip and have a solid p10 subterminal band that might stem from somewhere east but might be within 'ponticus' variation. this is interesting.

great work about barabensis, mars, i didn't know this work already exists!

lou

Re: Gulls from South-East Kazakhstan_II

Posted: Fri Nov 25, 2011 8:42 am
by marsmuusse
Hi Lou,
Well, actually it is "non-exsisting", these barabensis pages; it's just a first very draft of what still have to be done. So now and then I receive images from people who have been to the Arabic Peninsular or images from W India. Fuscus and heuglini should be possible to ID in this region on upperparts. But bulk of the birds are a bit paler and either eastern cachinnans or barabensis (or maybe another taxon? Where do the birds go ringed by Greg, breeding close to Moskow?).
If anyone can help sorting this out, it would be great. Probably the best first step is to get any published articles on the web. And I mean, also translations of Russian publications, dealing with studies in the breeding areas. If anyone has access to these, I hope we can be able to make a progressive step, using Google translator for a first conversion into english, and maybe someone (from eastern Europe, even Russia) can help to finetune the content, putting the translation next to the original version. If we then include tables and figures, and we are able to add illsutrative example birds on 1000px images from breeding sites, we might be able to set wintering birds in a better context regarding origin.

Interesting articles are a valuable contribution to the ORG website I think. In fact, I personally believe that the central part of the webpages on ORG, dealing with field research, migration, moult timing and sequences, etc etc are a bit more interesting than the images. Of course, photo's are attractive, photo's can illustrate easily what otherwise has to be said in 1000 words, but still, the central parts of the webpages describe features on population level.
Recently, I've added Visa Rauste's milestone work on heuglini. Quite simple, I photographed the pages of the article, used photoshop to increase contrast, used Free OCR to convert it into text, and finally checked spelling and grammar using the original manuscript (I'm pretty okay with German). Free OCR is free here:
http://download.cnet.com/FreeOCR/3000-1 ... ag=mncol;1
There are probably better programmes, but if it works, I normally stop searching.

So, if anyone / a few people have time, energy, copied articles (already in PDF would of course be the best!!!) and a digital camera, we may start on barabensis?