Why May Birds Not Really Be What They Seem To Be?

Genetic tests of North American birds have discovered what may be 15 new species, including ravens and owls. These birds look like the common species that we know well but they do not interbreed and may have been wrongly identified for hundreds of years

A study of birds' DNA genetic "barcodes" in the United States and Canada suggest that there might be more than 1 000 new species of birds extra to the 10 000 species we already know about. In Guyana, a study of South American bats has found 6 new species in the 87 that have been looked at so far. This makes scientists think that human studies may have been too superficial to tell almost identical species apart.

The scientists found 15 potential new species among 643 types of bird studied from the Arctic to Florida. The sample covers almost all 690 known breeding species in North America. North American birds are among the best studied in the world but even in a group where people have been looking very carefully there are still genetically different forms that appear to be new species.

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