Sind Sparrow - Taxonomy

Taxonomy

The Sind Sparrow was first described by Edward Blyth from a specimen collected by Alexander Burnes at Bahawalpur around 1840. The species was described in an issue of the Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal which, although dated as 1844, was published only in 1845. It was not recorded for 36 years after it was described, despite the efforts of noted ornithologists Allan Octavian Hume in Sindh and William Thomas Blanford in eastern Iran. This was probably because of its general similarity with the House Sparrow, though additionally, Blyth's description of the species incorrectly described its rump feathers as maroon, and a description by Thomas C. Jerdon contained similar errors. Commenting on his unsuccessful search, Hume wrote that the hundreds of House Sparrows he killed in pursuit of the Sind Sparrow "ought to form a heavy load" on Blyth's conscience, and that if the Sind Sparrow existed "it would be only decent for it…to put on an appearance with as little delay as possible". Hume doubted its distinction, as did other ornithologists. The Sind Sparrow was rediscovered by Scrope Berdmore Doig in 1880, in Eastern Nara district. Ernst Hartert considered it as a subspecies of the House Sparrow in his Die Vögel der paläarktishen Fauna, but Doig and Claud Ticehurst both found the two species breeding side-by-side.

E. C. Stuart Baker suggested the English name Rufous-backed Sparrow, but as this name might cause confusion with other species, Ticehurst suggested the name Sind Jungle-Sparrow, which became the accepted name for the species. This name is shortened to Jungle Sparrow or Sind Sparrow, of which the first was used in the IOC World Bird List, until Sind Sparrow was adopted in 2009.

The Sind Sparrow is a member of the genus Passer, which contains the House Sparrow and around twenty other species. In a 1936 review of the House Sparrow's relatives, German ornithologist Wilhelm Meise suggested that the Sind Sparrow evolved from an isolated population of House Sparrows, noting that the Indus valley is a center of small bird types. British ornithologist J. Denis Summers-Smith considered the Sind Sparrow to be part of the "Palaearctic black-bibbed sparrow" group including the House Sparrow, though not one with a particularly close relationship with the House Sparrow. Summer-Smith considered that these species probably separated 25,000 to 15,000 years ago, during the last glacial period, when sparrows would have been isolated in ice-free refugia, such as the Indus River Delta, where he thought the Sind Sparrow evolved. However, studies of mitochondrial DNA indicate an earlier origin of sparrow species, with speciation occurring as early as the Miocene and Pliocene. Hume and Ticehurst noted a resemblance and possible relation with the Dead Sea Sparrow of the Middle East and Balochistan, and William Robert Ogilvie-Grant and Henry Ogg Forbes noted a resemblance to the island endemic Abd al-Kuri Sparrow in their 1899 description of that species, also remarked upon by Guy M. Kirwan in a 2008 study.