A Northern Family Reunion

According to the weathermen, winter's not quite over, and today they seemed intent on proving it. So here's a bird that's named after a place where winter holds sway:

Lapland Longspur (Calcarius lapponicus),
Wind Point, Racine Co, WI 9/25/2013

This is a female Lapland Longspur (Calcarius lapponicus). They nest on tundra in Canada, Alaska, and Eurasia.

She looks rather like our sparrows and even more like the Eurasian Emberiza buntings, and for a long time they were included in the family Emberizidae with them. It was thought at the time that the family got started in North America and expanded west into Eurasia fairly recently.

Work in the 1990's pretty much wiped that concept out. Calcarius is now recognized, along with the Snow Buntings (Plectrophenax) and the McCown's Longspur (Rhynchophanes mccownii), to make up the family Calcariidae. (1) The supposed recent expansion of the family into Eurasia also fell by the wayside: genetic disparities appear to be similar in both Emberizid groups, indicating that they began their current radiations at about the same time. (1,2)

The family Calcariidae is mostly North American, with only the Snow Bunting (P. nivalis) and Lapland Longspur occurring in Eurasia. Here's a female Chestnut-collared Longspur (C. ornatus):

Chestnut-collared Longspur (Calcarius ornatus), Kidder Co, ND  6/2/2013

And since the females are so drab, here's a male Chestnut-collared:

Chestnut-collared Longspur (Calcarius ornatus), Kidder Co, ND  6/2/2013

More recent work by Klicka, et al. clarified relationships within the family itself. (3) Plectrophenax and Rhynchophanes turn out to be sister genera (which explains why mccownii is no longer in Calcarius), and C. ornatus is the sister species to Smith's Longspur (C. pictus), with Lapland as a sister species to that pair. This seems like trivia, but it points out a very interesting pattern: the two southern species (mccownii and ornatus) are not, as might be expected, each other's closest relatives. Instead, each half of the family sent a representative south to colonize the Great Plains. That sort of event is something that we couldn't have deduced without the fine-scale systematics work discussed here. Without that sort of detail, our views of the evolutionary history of our Earth will never be more than broad brush strokes, which is why this sort of work is so interesting to see.

(1) Grapputo, A., Pilastro, A., Baker, A. J., & Marin, G. (2001). Molecular evidence for phylogenetic relationships among buntings and American sparrows (Emberizidae). Journal of Avian Biology, 32(2), 95-101.

(2) Watada, M., Jitsukata, K., & Kakizawa, R. (1995). Genetic divergence and evolutionary relationships of the Old and New World Emberizidae. Zoological science, 12(1), 71-77.

(3) Klicka, J., Zink, R. M., & Winker, K. (2003). Longspurs and snow buntings: phylogeny and biogeography of a high-latitude clade (< i> Calcarius</i>).Molecular phylogenetics and evolution, 26(2), 165-175.