I just noticed that one of my Setophaga aestiva was identified as Setophaga petechia. I could’nt understand how me and so many people had it wrong at first. Then I checked my other Setophaga aestiva and I have none left, they were all converted to Setophaga petechia.
I checked on the overall map, and it did changed for almost everyone. There are almost no Setophaga aestiva left on the map.
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an atlased split is currently set-up, so when that’s committed, at least some, if not all, records will be automatically re-assigned (I haven’t checked it out in depth, so I don’t know if there are any overlap zones that will require reidentification; but certainly hold off for now until the swap is executed)
Please don’t do this—it would only be a waste of your time and effort, since basically all IDs of Setophaga petechia outside areas of overlap (representing around 86% of the total number of IDs of S. petechia) will be updated automatically to S. aestiva after the split is committed, which should happen soon. (The one area where it wouldn’t be a completely superfluous effort is along the coasts of the Neotropics where the two overlap, but even there it’d be better to wait until after the split is finished processing [which could be up to a couple days after it’s committed], since only then would you also be able to re-identify observations as S. petechia if warranted. It’ll be easy enough to find former S. petechia observations from regions of overlap after the split, since they’ll make up the vast majority of genus-level Setophaga observations there.)
To clarify the point in your original post: your and everyone else’s S. aestiva observations weren’t converted to S. petechia, they were always S. petechia. The two were previously considered a single species (S. petechia) in the eBird/Clements checklist (whose bird taxonomy iNat follows), and were only just split in this year’s eBird/Clements update a few weeks ago. The split is in preparation on iNat but hasn’t been committed here yet; when it is committed (which should be in a few days at most), it’ll automatically reassign S. petechia IDs outside the range of S. petechia to S. aestiva, while bumping up to genus level any S. petechia IDs made in regions where the two overlap seasonally (coastal areas of Mexico, Central America, northern South America, and parts of the Caribbean). The only reason S. aestiva is already active (which ideally it wouldn’t have been until after the split) is because some subspecies were already swapped from S. petechia into it, maybe a week ago or so.
(As an aside, this is one of a few cases over the last couple years of a bird split involving large numbers of observations in which one of the outputs of the split was activated many days before the split was ready to be committed [due to subspecies being swapped well ahead of time]. In my opinion, this causes far more problems and confusion than whatever marginal benefit might have been intended, and shouldn’t be done for future large splits.)
In the mean time. my Yellow Warblers are now all Mangrove Yellow as the switch-over happens. I see a few folks are trying to correct that with a Northern Yellow ID but, as you note, that’s unnecessary.
Oh, this is because of this situation I think… The old IDs retain the same scientific name (S. petechia sensu lato) but the common name on them has been updated to reflect the new meaning (S. petechia sensu stricto), which confuses many observers and identifiers who aren’t carefully keeping track of all the changes and names involved.