I recently spent a little time looking at West Coast birds while visiting family. ON my return to the East Coast, I tried entering some subspecies sightings  (e.g., Oregon Junco and Red-Shafted Flicker) using the Clements 2005 tax list with BD3.6.29. I expected these sightings to show up in lists of sightings and reports as the relevant subspecies if I used the Clements tax list and as the parent species if I used the ABA 2006 or AOU 2006 tax lists. They show up fine with the Clements tax list but not with either of the other tax lists, either when listing sightings or creating a sightings report.

What am I doing wrong? Simply changing the tax list changes my number of sightings from 115 to 111, dropping two sightings for each of what Clements calls "Dark-eyed Junco oreganus" and "Northern Flicker cafer".

Hello Bernard,

This is expected behavior.

The ABA tax lists do not come with subspecies defined. However, as with just about everything in BD, you can modify this on your own.

Let's say that you wanted to add all the Junco subspecies to the ABA tax list. Once this has been done, then any sightings recorded at the subspecific level will appear on reports etc when using both the ABA or the Clements tax list. It will also count such sightings correctly for Life List counts/reports.

Here is the process:

1. Click on the Tax View toolbar button. One of the Advanced toolbar buttons. If you don't see it, first select/click the Advanced toolbar button to expose the advanced buttons.
2. Select the ABA tax list that you want to modify by adding subspecies.
3. Click on the Copy toolbar button at the top of the Tax Viewer window.
4. Select the Clements tax list from the upper left taxonomy dropdown
5. In the left tree window, under Clements,
1. expand the Passeriformes Order
2. expand the Emberizidae Family
3. expand the Junco Genus
4. expand the hyemalis Species
6. Do the same (a thru c) under the right tree window for the ABA tax list
7. Now, select all the J. hyemalis subspecies in the left tree by first clicking on SS hyemalis and then shift-clicking (hold down the Shift key and click) on the last subspecies SS carolinensis. This process will take a minute due to code complexity. Just wait for all subspecies to highlight.
8. Now, Click and drag these selected subspecies over to the right tree window and drop them on J. hyemalis.
9. Click the CLOSE button

You just added all the J. Hyemalis subspecies to the ABA tax list!

You can repeat this process for any species you want to track at the subspecific level. Note: by following this blanket process, you may be adding subspecies to the ABA tax list that actually do not occur in the ABA area.

Let me know if I can assist further.

Jeff