I’ve always been curious about the little green star that pops up on certain species. I totally understand the terminology and what it means, which is why I’m asking this. I see it appear with salamanders and newts mostly; but I found one instance where the “Endemic” star occurs with the Carolina chickadee, common in the American Southeast, yet not the Brown-headed Nuthatch, which, according to both iNaturalist and other sources, has a much more contained range in the American Southeast. If anything the nuthatch should receive the “Endemic” star too, right? I apologize in advance if this is common knowledge; I’m fairly new here.
It is manually set on the relevant nation, or other geography checklist. All users can set the status, which also documents native or introduced stauts.
It’s the 2nd link there in the centre that says ‘Oprindelse’ (my settings are in Danish, in English it says Establishment Means).
You set it by going to the relevant nation place, opening the checklist for that place via the link at lower left, searching for and editing the appropriate species.
Which ones are entered are entirely determined by past user input. While continent level entries can be done, they are frowned upon. Depending on which exact checklist you enter the information onto, at times it will automatically cascade upwards and create the relevant entries.
It never automatically cascades downwards, ie entering something as endemic to California will not make entries for counties there. Curators, but only curators have the authority to do that.
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Looking at the range map, it appears that the Brown-headed Nuthatch is also present in Bermuda, which would be why it isn’t a US endemic.
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As far as I know that range map would be wrong, it is not known from Bermuda, unless as a vagrant (which opens all kinds of other questions about how those should be classed in terms of endemic status - the other example from above, Carolina Chickadee has been recorded several times in Canada as an example). The Brown-headed Nuthatches in the Bahamas are considered by some authorities as subspecies of S. pusilla, and by others as a separate distinct species which may eliminate it as a US endemic, depending on which authority you follow.
Sorry, I meant “Bahamas” rather than “Bermuda”–that was my error.
is there any update on how theyre doing since the last hurricane? :( and if they are/do become extinct would that have any potential bearing on promoting the endemic status in the US?
I have not seen anything definitive, I have read that some of the parrots and hummingbirds made it through, so there is hope…
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