Partridges, Quails, Francolins, Snowcocks, Guineafowl, and Turkeys

Resources: Needs will depend on the length and scope of
individual projects.
4.3 Strategic project
Project 10. Taxonomic reassessment of
some partridges and New World quails
Aim: To revise species-level taxonomy in some of the
partridges and New World quails.
Although known from Peninsular Malaysia, Sumatra, and Borneo,
the black wood-partridge (female shown here) is threatened by
severe and continuing habitat destruction.
Justification: Knowledge of Indonesian partridges is poor
(Holmes 1989). The country has the longest list of birds
believed to be threatened with extinction, but in many
cases this reflects problems presumed to have arisen as a
result of habitat loss or degradation, rather than direct
evidence of declines in numbers. The threats facing
Indonesia’s biodiversity are very real, but the continuing
lack of baseline information on partridges prevents any
objective assessment through which to propose the most
appropriate conservation action. New information on the
threatened partridges known to occur on the island is
needed, but existing information must be collated and
assessed. A protected area network was identified in a
recent study of Asian Galliformes (McGowan et al. 1999).
Project description: The island of Borneo covers 755,000km 2
and comprises three countries. This means that establishing
the distribution and status of all its Galliformes will not be
an easy task, but there is much scope for survey teams from
within or outside Indonesia, Malaysia, and Brunei to
survey parts of the island at various times of year. Through
networking with other Specialist Groups, the PQF
Specialist Group will attempt to collate any other site
records for species in Borneo, as well as their apparent
absence from localities within their known areas of
occurrence. At a minimum, information on exact locality,
altitude, date, and habitat type should be collected.
Information on other species should also be collected and
provided to the relevant SSC Specialist Group. All
information should be made available to the WPA Asian
Galliformes Sites Database and BirdLife International’s
World Bird Database.
Timescale: Projects of any duration can contribute useful
information.
© Lynx Edicions
Justification: Conservation, fundamentally, is based on
the management and protection of natural resources, and
the species remains the most practical level at which to
direct conservation action. Such action, therefore, relies
on identifying and defining species limits. However, recent
advances in taxonomic thinking (e.g., species concepts,
Evolutionarily Significant Units) and phylogenetic analysis
have thrown significant doubt on whether current
systematic treatments, in particular the presently accepted
species boundaries within the hill-partridges Arborophila
and wood-quails Odontophorus, are correctly reflecting
biological diversity in these genera. There is an urgent
need for a revision of these species’ taxonomy, as there is
dispute over the several forms that have variously been
treated as subspecies and full species.
Project description: A variety of taxonomic methods should
be used to examine the question of species limits in
partridges and wood-quails, and look at possible
implications for conservation. Further species-level
taxonomic investigation should focus particularly on some
of the Arborophila species of Asia, where there is much
doubt over treatment of the various subspecies (e.g., the
two subspecies of the chestnut-headed hill-partridge and
The threatened Annamese subspecies merlini of the chestnutnecklaced
hill-partridge has been treated by some as a full species.
© Lynx Edicions
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