Subject: RE: BS: Skylarks
From:
Stilly River Sage
Date: 09 Feb 26 - 05:21 PM
Paul, you're graciously responding to nonsense posted by a member who is smitten with AI and doesn't view it critically.
Muscle strength in small birds may not be as obvious as in the very large ones, but as you point out, endurance is a feature for those birds that migrate. (And of course, one's imagination strays to dinosaurs as distant bird relatives, many that had massive muscles and strength.)
In the New World there are a few varieties of Meadowlarks, and the ones that were always a treat to see when I was growing up were the Western Meadowlark with their bright yellow breasts. Carl Linnaeus, the great namer of things, didn't realize they weren't related to the Old World birds. From Wikipedia:
As a group, the meadowlarks have had a volatile taxonomic history. When Carl Linnaeus described the eastern meadowlark (the first of the meadowlarks to be scientifically described) in his 10th edition of Systema Naturae in 1758, he thought it was related to the Old World larks, and so put it in the genus Alauda with them.[1] In the same work, he put the red-breasted meadowlark in the bunting genus Emberiza.[2] Less than a decade later, he described the eastern meadowlark again, this time putting it into the starling genus Sturnus,[1] which Juan Ignacio Molina also used when he first described the long-tailed meadowlark in 1782.[3] In 1816, Louis Pierre Vieillot created the genus Sturnella, moving the meadowlarks into his new taxon.[4] Most taxonomists accepted the new genus, and the western meadowlark,[5] Peruvian meadowlark[6] and Lilian's meadowlark were all placed in this taxon when they were later described.[3] When Charles Lucien Bonaparte described the white-browed meadowlark[2] and pampas meadowlark,[6] however, he assigned them to another newly created genus — Trupialis, for what he called "ground-starlings"; he moved the red-breasted meadowlark into that now-defunct genus as well.[7]
By the early 20th century, the meadowlarks were split again. Only the "yellow-breasted" meadowlarks (eastern and western meadowlarks, including Lilian's) remained in the genus Sturnella.
Here is their song.
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sj
