Heads up: Some or all of the identifications affected by
this split may have been replaced with identifications of Phacellodomus. This
happens when we can't automatically assign an identification to one of the
output taxa.
Review identifications of Phacellodomus rufifrons 11624
Plain Thornbird Phacellodomus inornatus is split from Rufous-fronted Thornbird P. rufifrons (Clements 2007:277)
Summary: The Plain Thornbird of much of Venezuela is now considered a separate species from the widely disjunct Rufous-fronted Thornbird mainly of south-central parts of South America.
Details: Unlike most taxa subsumed under Phacellodomus rufifrons (sensu Peters 1951, Wolters 1977), P. inornatus was originally described as specifically distinct (Ridgway 1887) and said to be “a very distinct species” from P. rufifrons. Despite its longtime subspecies, treatment, P. inornatus has been suggested for decades to be specifically distinct based on morphology (Ridgely and Greenfield 2001), with the split enacted by Hilty (2003) and Gill and Wright (2006, IOC v.1.0). Now, vocalizations have been shown to differ (Boesman 2016 [No. 95]) and it is genetically divergent from the southern subspecies (Corbett et al. 2020), leading WGAC and Clements et al. (2023) to agree with the two-species treatment enacted by del Hoyo and Collar (2016), although further study of the complex may result in subsequent species-level changes to the taxa remaining in the rufifrons complex. A 2003 SACC proposal to split P. inornatus (https://www.museum.lsu.edu/~Remsen/SACCprop41.htm) did not pass due to insufficient published data.
English names: The English name Plain Thornbird aptly describes Phacellodomus inornatus and has a long history of use, aligning with Hilty (2003), HBW and BirdLife International (2022) and Gill and Wright (2006, IOC v.1.0).
Clements, J. F., P. C. Rasmussen, T. S. Schulenberg, M. J. Iliff, T. A. Fredericks, J. A. Gerbracht, D. Lepage, A. Spencer, S. M. Billerman, B. L. Sullivan, and C. L. Wood. 2023. The eBird/Clements checklist of Birds of the World: v2023. Downloaded from https://www.birds.cornell.edu/clementschecklist/download/ (Link)
Unintended disagreements occur when a parent (B) is
thinned by swapping a child (E) to another part of the
taxonomic tree, resulting in existing IDs of the parent being interpreted
as disagreements with existing IDs of the swapped child.
Identification
ID 2 of taxon E will be an unintended disagreement with ID 1 of taxon B after the taxon swap
If thinning a parent results in more than 10 unintended disagreements, you
should split the parent after swapping the child to replace existing IDs
of the parent (B) with IDs that don't disagree.