Richard
With a couple of current threads on duck identification, a question arises - does a hybrid mean you get two ticks?
Richard
Half a tick for each parent correctly identified?
Very interesting question Richard!
A lot of birders dislike hybrids. Occasionally they even come in for the kind of disdain otherwise reserved for eggers, bird smugglers, stringers, dudes, robin-strokers and other lower forms of life.
Sure, they are generally oddities, marginal in the scheme of things, but then so are the more extreme examples of vagrancy, and we are all interested in them. I think the difference in attitude arises because conceptually vagrants can be fitted into neat little boxes, and thus ticked and listed, while hybrids can't very easily.
Yet surely it's up to us to tailor the way we record birds to the way nature actually is - not to expect nature to always conform to our tidy schemes.
Personally, I find the untidiness of nature one of the things I really like about it.
Like vagrancy, I imagine that hybridisation must occasionally have some significance, perhaps subtly altering a species' destiny or even contributing to a speciation event.
I find looking at Aythya ducks and trying to work out their parentage and grand-parentage as much fun as concentrating on finding pure-looking individuals.
So three cheers for hybrids. Well, two at least. And obviously hybridisation occasioned by human introductions raises a whole lot of other issues. But we won't go into that.
James