Although on the surface it seems that we have slowed down somewhat the completion of the write-up for the various species, the truth is that there have been a lot of work going on behind the scenes.

For example, we have now included where possible, the link to the IUCN Red List assessment page for each species. There are of course a few species without any such link. The simplest reason is that IUCN list is derived from the BirdLife International checklist, whereas our Singapore list is derived from IOC. There are differences in what constitute a species and their range between these two lists. The most apparent example is the Javan Myna in our Singapore checklist which is our most common introduced bird species. There is no Javan Myna in the BirdLife/IUCN species checklist because it’s lumped with the White-vented Myna that is very abundant in Indochina. So it is listed as Least Concern. Yet, the Javan Myna is a rare bird in Java (personal communications), its home ground. So linking it to the White-vented Myna IUCN page is not the correct solution, as that misses out the story of its decline in numbers.

On the bird photos front, we have as of today covered about 100 species, or approximately 25% of the bird species in our list. It’s slow work as uploading and checking each photo takes time, but we are getting there. Our back of the paper calculation shows that collectively there are 346 species in which photos exist of the species taken in Singapore. So a further 50 species were sight records only. That means we have to supplement these with photos taken elsewhere. This is especially true of the migratory waterfowls that no longer have suitable habitat to winter in our region. So our head writer See Toh is now in Tokyo looking hard for ducks to photograph!

In the meantime, the IOC checklist version 6.1 just came out. Our cursory checks shows no further taxonomic updates that affect Singapore birds. If there are any changes, we’ll hopefully be the first to cover it.