How can I separate these two species, ashy and ryukyu minivet? Thanks.
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I have no experience with either of these birds, but I found a link that gave somewhat of a description difference that may be helpful.
https://ebird.org/species/ashmin1
I hope that is of use to you.
I will also say, I have pretty much the exact same question about feral pigeons vs rock pigeons. I know the biological differences, but have no idea how to actually see a difference or tell them apart by just looking.
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Feral pigeons are just a subspecies of rock pigeons, so I generally just identify them all as rock pigeons. I know some IDers who call them all feral pigeons. But if they have strange colors, like white or brown, I believe they can definitely be identified as feral.
For example, this is a rock pigeon - I can’t identify it further.
These are feral pigeons.
I did that initially, but people always suggested feral. I don’t think anybody has ever agreed with the rock pigeon ID. Thanks for clarifying!
Yeah, same here. It’s not necessary to get them all to subspecies though, especially since they all seem to be the same one. Next time you observe one you could try asking the identifier why they call it feral.
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You can clearly see all of them are feral, there’re traits that pure birds don’t show, and all pigeons in towns should be called feral, there’re no ssp. to call true wild birds, so the only way is to call all domesticated ones feral and let wild birds be called species. First one clearly had some breed past in his ancestors, look at its head and bill.
It’s not ssp. by the way.
I don’t know what it is other places, but iNat considers it a subspecies.
Nope 
All right, my mistake. What is it then? Variant?
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Yeah, variety, even though it’s a weird use of it for animals.
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Yes, I have, like a ton of times. Nobody ever answered and Google didn’t magically fix it either. I thought about making a post on here asking but never ended up doing it.
The only thing about this is that a lot of people, myself included, don’t know what those traits are, and nobody ever answered me to explain them, and I couldn’t find anything online that gave a definitive answer.
What are the traits you’re referencing?
I just think in general, nothing is really “clear” unless you know enough to see things that way. In this case, I did not.
And this, why? Another thing I truly just don’t understand. I believe you, obviously, I just don’t know why this is and I’d like to, since you’re clearly (and this is something I can confidently tell!) far more knowledgeable than I am on it.
First of all pre populations of wild birds now are pretty small and restricted to not that big native range (comparing to that of now), all domesticated pigeons were breed with doves, getting traits like spotted wings from them, well, having any colour pattern other than wild type is a sign of domestication, but even those birds who show that in most towns are not really pure just because they are morphologically closer to pure birds, first you need to do is to just google if native range is anywhere near where you are, if ti’s not, birds were brought up by humans. And, well, that bird has different head structure seen on many many breeds and not in wild birds: https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/41668868
All the birds you see not just decided to expand from nativa range, they all had ancestors as domestic birds, we still have a lot of pigeon lovers, but it was crazier in past centuries.
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Getting back to the original question, it seems the most obvious difference between Ashy and Ryukyu Minivets is in the chest coloration: Ashy have clear, white chests vs. Ryukyu have ashy gray chests. Apparently Ryukyu is also a smaller species, but I’m not sure how obvious that is in the field. Hopefully someone with more experience will also chime in.
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