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Harlan's Red-tailed Hawk or Harlan's Hawk?


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Not an identification question.  More of a "correct" reporting question.  When looking to see if there was a separate 4 letter Alpha code for Harlan's Red-tailed Hawk, I discovered HRLH for Harlan's Hawk.  Didn't know they'd been officially separated from RTHAs.  Up till now, I've been calling them Harlan's Red-tailed Hawk (RTHA).  Should i start calling them Harlan's Hawk (HRLH) from now on?  I know Eastern, Western, RTHAs etc. don't have their own distinct Alpha codes.  Why wouldn't Krider's Red-tailed Hawk have their own Alpha code? 

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Some people think Harlan's is a separate species, and I suppose some of them wanted a four-letter code for it, but as @IKLlandsaid, the AOS still considers it a subspecies of the Red-tail.  Here are the recent proposal to the AOS to list it as a separate species and the rebuttal.

I don't think anyone thinks Krider's is a separate species.  (In fact, some people think it's not a subspecies, just a color morph.)  That may be why it doesn't have a four-letter code.

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2 hours ago, Quiscalus quiscula said:

I think it has a code so that banders can specify which subspecies if it's determinable.

The Patuxent Wildlife Research Center says they only do this if the subspecies was formerly recognized as a species.  "The taxa for which we have included formerly recognized species are: Townsend's Shearwater, Green-winged Teal, Snow Goose, Canada Goose, Brant, Tundra Swan, Great Blue Heron, Red-tailed Hawk, Northern Flicker, Savannah Sparrow, Seaside Sparrow, White-crowned Sparrow, Dark-eyed Junco, Yellow-rumped Warbler, and Palm Warbler."

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