I got a new Life Bird two years ago and didn’t even know it.

In 2016 the American Ornithological Union split the western scrub jay into two species:  the California scrub jay (Aphelocoma californica) whose West Coast range extends from Washington state to Baja California, and Woodhouse’s scrub jay (Aphelocoma woodhouseii) that lives in the interior Southwest from southern Idaho to southern Mexico.

Woodhouse’s is pictured above, California scrub jay below.

I finally learned of the split last month but it wasn’t in my eBird records.  Duh!  I hadn’t entered my “western” scrub jay sightings from Nevada.  When I did I got a new Life Bird at Red Rock Canyon.

Splitting is nothing new to scrub jays.  The Aphelocoma genus is particularly likely to change and already has split many times.

Since 1995 the “western” scrub jay split into four species and the western name disappeared into the Florida scrub jay (Aphelocoma coerulescens only in Florida), the Island scrub jay (Aphelocoma insularis only on Santa Cruz Island, California), the California scrub jay and Woodhouse’s.

More splits may be on the way.  Woodhouse’s has a tenuous hold on its sumichrasti subspecies and the Mexican jay (Aphelocoma wollweberi) — shown below — lives in such isolated populations in the sky islands of the southwestern U.S. and Mexico that he may split, too.

Interesting as this is, there’s not room in my brain to keep up with it.  eBird will do it for me if I enter all my sightings.   I’ll have to backload my birding history to keep up with splitting scrub jays.

(photos from Wikimedia Commons; click on the images to see the originals)