An Unofficial Checklist of the Birds of Japan
Fer-Jan de Vries
Preamble
On this page you find a checklist of the birds of Japan. It is still a work in progress. The list contains currently about 613 species. I have added as much information on subspecies as I could find in the literature.
I have tried to make this list of species and subspecies as complete and as up to date as possible, with help of the information I receive from
Desmond Allen,
Mark Brazil and
Hiroshi Ikenaga. The list contains currently about 613 species.
The Official Checklist of the Birds of Japan is of course
published by the Ornithological Society of Japan. The fifth and last
edition is from 1974. In a letter to the
Kantori Mailing List Mark Brazil has summarized the changes made in
the pending sixth edition. The new has appeared, I will update accordingly in near future.
The onofficial Checklist of the Birds of Japan has been
constructed from the species
listed in [Brazil] and [Mc Whirter e.a.]. Subspecies as fas as mentioned in [Brazil] and [Mc Whirter
e.a.] have been added. I have presented them using the order and the nomenclature of the world checklist of Monroe and Sibley. The japanese bird names follow the names as mentioned in [Brazil]. The names for species not occuring in there I have borrowed from the World
Bird Index.
That I have choosen [Monroe and Sibley] as underlying taxonomy is
simply that there happen to be available a concise online version
by Rolf de By (of which this is still more
concise local copy.)
References
- A World Checklist of Birds. Burt L. Monroe, Jr and
Charles G. Sibley, Yale University Press, 1993, pp. 400. There
exists an
online version by Rolf de By of which this
is a local copy.
- The birds of Japan.
Mark A. Brazil. Illustrated by Masayuki Yabuuchi. Hardcover,
466 pages. Published by Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991. ISBN:
1560980303.
- A check-list of the birds of Okinawa prefecture with notes
on recent status including hypothetical records. Douglas W. Mc
Whirter, Hiroshi Ikenaga, Himaru Iozawa, Mamoru Shoyama and Kenji
Takehara. Bulletin of
Okinawa Prefectural Museum, Volume 22, pages 33-152, 1996.
-
World
Bird Index of Ken-ichi Tokita from the Abiko City
Museum of Birds and Rie Uchida and Shuusaku Katayama of the Norin Bird Club.
Note that
the Japanese names in [Brazil] sometimes deviate from the ones provided
by WBI: for instance Buteo lagopus = Keashi-nosuri in BoJ but Buteo
lagopus = Ou-keashi-nosuri in WBI.
- Handbook of the Birds of the World, Vol. 1-4. Josep del Hoyo, Andrew Elliot and Jordi Sargatal. Lynx Edicions, Barcelona. (1992-97)
Additions since November 1,
1997
- 74 3020 Black Turnstone Arenaria
melanochephala [Kuro-youjo-shigi]:
Observed by Norio Yamagata on
Kiritapu at Januari 3, 1998. No photographic record. (Communicated by
Ikenaga-san and Katayama-san) - Jan 17, 98 -
- Observations of
Ashy and Grey Drongos on Yonakuni by Kenji Takehara. (Communicated by
Ikenaga-san and Takehara-san)
- Observation of Vivid Niltava in
Spring 1998. (Communicated by Ikenaga-san.)
- Correction of two
typos: rofous -> rufous and fruitii ->
furuitii
The list is very fresh and nodoubtly still
contains numerous errors.
I welcome any comments on, additions to and
corrections to the present list.
Fer-Jan de Vries,
Tsukuba, November
1, 1997.
Last modified: Sat May 23, 1998