Saxaul Sparrow - Taxonomy

Taxonomy

The Saxaul Sparrow was first described by English zoologist John Gould in a March 1872 instalment of The Birds of Asia, from a specimen collected near Kyzylorda, now in southern Kazakhstan, by Russian naturalist Nikolai Severtzov. Severtzov had been planning to describe the species as Passer ammodendri for several years and had been distributing specimens among other naturalists. When natural history dealer Charles Dode escaped from the Paris Commune in 1871 with some of his collection, Gould obtained specimens from a set of rare birds Dode exhibited to the Zoological Society of London. Severtzov did not describe the species until 1873, and some later writers preferred to attribute him, but Gould's description takes priority over Severtzov's. The Saxaul Sparrow's species name refers to its desert habitat, coming from the name of the Ammodendron or sand acacia tree, which is in turn derived from the Ancient Greek άμμος (ammos, "sand") and δένδρον (dendron, "tree"). The English name Saxaul Sparrow refers to the saxaul plant, with which it is closely associated. The Saxaul Sparrow usually is classified in the genus Passer with the House Sparrow and around twenty other species, although a genus Ammopasser was created for the Saxaul Sparrow by Nikolai Zarudny in 1890.

The Saxaul Sparrow's relations within the genus Passer are unclear, although with its black throat feathering it has usually been considered part of the "Palaearctic black-bibbed sparrow" group related to the House Sparrow. J. Denis Summers-Smith considered that the Palaearctic Passer sparrows evolved about 25,000 to 15,000 years ago, during the last glacial period. During this time, sparrows would have been isolated in ice-free refugia, such as a certain steppe region in Central Asia, where Summers-Smith suggested the Saxaul Sparrow evolved. Genetic and fossil evidence suggest a much earlier origin for the Passer species, perhaps in the Miocene and Pliocene, as suggested by Luis Allende and colleagues in their 2001 phylogenetic analysis of mitochondrial DNA. This analysis also suggested that the Saxaul Sparrow may be an early offshoot or basal species in its genus, a relative of certain African sparrows such as the Northern Grey-headed Sparrow. If the Saxaul Sparrow is related to these species, either the Saxaul Sparrow formerly occurred in the deserts of Africa and Arabia, or each of the groups of Passer sparrows are of African origin.

Across its Central Asian distribution, the Saxaul Sparrow occurs in six probably disjunct areas, and is divided into at least three subspecies. The nominate subspecies Passer ammodendri ammodendri inhabits three of these areas, one in the Syr Darya basin of Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, and another to the south of Lake Balkhash and the north of Almaty, where it is only common in the valley of the Ili River. In a third area, sometimes recognised as a subspecies korejewi, ammodendri birds breed sporadically in parts of central Turkmenistan, Iran, and possibly Afghanistan, migrating to the south during the winter. The subspecies stoliczkae was named after Ferdinand Stoliczka in 1874 by Allan Octavian Hume, from specimens Stoliczka collected in Yarkand. This subspecies is separated from the other two subspecies by the Tian Shan mountains. It is found across a broad swath of China from Kashgar east to the far west of Inner Mongolia, through the areas around the Taklamakan Desert (but probably not in the inhospitable desert itself), and through the east of Xinjiang, northern Gansu, and the fringes of southern Mongolia. In the extreme west of the Gobi Desert a disjunct population separated from the other stoliczkae birds by the Gurvan Saikhan Uul mountains occurs, which is sometimes separated as a subspecies timidus. The subspecies nigricans, described by ornithologist L. S. Stepanyan in 1961, is found in northern Xinjiang's Manasi River valley.