Pamela C. Rasmussen

Professor Pamela C. Rasmussen (b. 1959) is a prominent American ornithologist and expert on Asian birds. She was a research associate at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington D.C., and is assistant scientific associate at the University of Michigan's Museum of Zoology. She is associated with other major centres of research in the US and UK.

Rasmussen has described three new species of birds and clarified the status of others. More recently, she has been involved in large scale collaborations looking at patterns of global biodiversity, and researching the status of South Asian vultures.

She was the main author Birds of South Asia: The Ripley Guide. This is a landmark publication in terms of it greater geographical and species coverage than its outdated predecessors. As a result of her study of museum bird specimens when researching for the book, she was instrumental in unveiling the extent of the theft from museums and fraudulent documentation perpetrated by eminent British ornithologist Richard Meinertzhagen.

Biography

Pamela Rasmussen was the daughter of Helen Rasmussen, a strict Seventh-Day Adventist, whose husband had deserted the family when Pamela and her sister, Sally, were young. Her interest in birds started when her mother bought her the junior edition of Oliver Austin's Birds of the World, and Pamela subsequently always chose to receive bird books as presents.

She took her M.S. in 1983 at Walla Walla University, an adventist-affiliated university in southeast Washington which did not teach evolution, and her Ph.D. at the University of Kansas in 1990, where she studied blue-eyed shags. Currently, Rasmussen is a visiting assistant professor of zoology, and assistant museum curator of mammalogy and ornithology, at Michigan State University. She has been a research associate for S. Dillon Ripley at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington D.C. and is a member of the American Ornithologists Union (AOU) Committee on Classification and Nomenclature, a scientific associate with the bird group of the Natural History Museum zoology section at Tring, and associate editor of The Ibis, the scientific journal of the British Ornithologists' Union.

Research highlights

An 1891 painting of the Forest Owlet, which was rediscovered by Rasmussen in 1997

Pamela Rasmussen discovered and described three new Asian bird species: the Taiwan Bush-warbler Bradypterus alishanensis, the Nicobar Scops Owl Otus alius, and the Sangihe Scops Owl Otus collari. and identified the Cinnabar Hawk Owl Ninox ios, a Sulawesi endemic. She rediscovered the Forest Owlet Athene blewitti in western India, previous searches by S. Dillon Ripley, Salim Ali and others having failed because they relied on fake documentation from Richard Meinertzhagen. In November 1997, Rasmussen and Ben King of the American Museum of Natural History spent ten days unsuccessfully searching two eastern sites before driving west to to the site of another old specimen. King spotted a small, chunky owl with short heavily white-feathered legs and huge claws, which Rasmussen confirmed as the target species whist the owl was videotaped and photographed.

With her colleagues, she clarified the taxonomy of Indonesian white-eyes, establishing the specific status of the Sangihe White-eye Zosterops nehrkorni and the Seram White-eye Z. stalkeri and, more recently, she confirmed the identity of the recently discovered Serendib Scops Owl originally found by Sri Lankan ornithologist Deepal Warakagoda.

In 2005, Rasmussen was part of a large multi-institutional collaboration investigating biodiversity hotspots, which have a prominent role in conservation. The study assessed locations quantitatively for three criteria of bird diversity – species richness, the level of threat, and the number of endemism species. The results demonstrated that hotspots did not show the same geographical distribution for each factor. Only 2.5% of hotspot areas are common to all three aspects of diversity, with over 80% of hotspots registering on only one criterion. Each criterion explained less than 24% of the variation in the other factors, suggesting that even within a single taxonomic class, different mechanisms are responsible for the origin and maintenance of various aspects of diversity. Consequently, the different types of hotspots also vary greatly in their utility as conservation tools.

Indian Vulture, a vulnerable species newly split as a result of Rasmussen's research into the Gyps genus

More recent work has concentrated on further large collaborations studying global patterns in biodiversity. A survey of species richness and geographical range size did not show the expected decrease in range size from temperate regions to the tropics; although this was largely true in the northern hemisphere, the anticipated pattern did not appear to apply in the southern hemisphere. Research evaluating the relationship between extinction and human impact showed that, after controlling for species richness, the best predictors of the global pattern of extinction risk are measures of human impact, with ecological factors being of secondary importance. An examination of the distribution of rare and threatened vertebrate species, showed differing patterns for bird, mammal and amphibian species, which has consequences for hotspot-based conservation strategies.

The importance of energy availability was analysed, and a 2007 paper showed that that global patterns of spatial turnover are driven principally by widespread species rather than restricted ones. This complements other work, and helps establish a unified model of how terrestrial biodiversity varies both within and between the Earth's major land masses.

Pamela Rasmussen’s interest in Asian birds has also led to involvement in more specific conservation-directed projects. Two Gyps vultures, the Indian White-rumped Vulture, Gyps bengalensis, and the "Long-billed Vulture" suffered a 99 percent population decrease in South Asia due to poisoning by diclofenac, a veterinary drug that causes kidney failure in birds that have eaten the carcasses of treated cattle. Rasmussen showed that Long-billed Vulture is actually two species, the Indian Vulture G. indicus and Slender-billed Vulture G. tenuirostris. This is important to conservation, since a captive-breeding program has been established to assist the recovery of at-risk vulture species.

Birds of South Asia

Main article: Birds of South Asia: The Ripley Guide

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Rasmussen's Birds of South Asia was much more up-to-date and comprehensive in geographical and species coverage than its predecessors

In 1992, Rasmussen took the position of assistant to S. Dillon Ripley, the former secretary of the Smithsonian, who was planning to produce a definitive guide to the birds of South Asia. When he became ill shortly after beginning the project, Rasmussen took over the project, and with artist John C. Anderton, produced Birds of South Asia: The Ripley Guide, a two-volume bird guide for the Indian subcontinent which is the first field guide for the area to include sonograms. Volume 1 is the field guide with over 3400 illustrations in 180 plates, and more than 1450 colour maps. Volume 2 (Attributes and Status) gives specimen measurements, data about identification, status, distribution and habits. Vocalizations are described from recordings, and there are over 1000 sonagrams.

1508 species that have occurred in India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Nepal, Bhutan, Maldives, the Chagos archipelago and Afghanistan are covered, including 85 hypothetical and 67 'possible' species, which are given only short accounts. Notable aspects of Birds of South Asia are its distribution evidence-base – the book's authors based their distributional information almost completely on museum specimens – and its taxonomic approach, involving a large number of species-level splits. Its geographical range was also greater than that of older works, notably in the inclusion of Afghanistan.

Many allopatric forms previously regarded as conspecific are treated by Rasmussen and Anderton as full species. Most of these had previously been proposed elsewhere, but the book introduced a number of innovations of its own. Experts on Asian birds, Nigel Collar and John Pilgrim, analysed Rasmussen and Anderton's proposed changes, indicating which had previously been proposed by other authors, and which are novel.

Although reviews in the birding and ornithological press have often been favourable, there have been criticisms. Peter Kennerley, author and Asian bird expert, considered that some of the illustrations are small and garish or technically inaccurate. He also believes that the over-reliance on sometimes very old museum specimens and dismissal of the wealth of observational data filed by amateur travelling birders is a mistake, and states that many of the taxonomic decisions appear to be random choices, unsupported by published research.

Apart from the Meinertzhagen fraud discussed in the next section and the death of S. Dillon Ripley, other problems in the production of Birds of South Asia included the loss of the main map database and poorly-prepared specimens. There were also difficulties reconciling sources, delays in producing illustrations and maps, and in obtaining reliable data for "difficult" areas like Assam, Arunachal Pradesh, Bangladesh and Afghanistan. The Andaman and Nicobar Islands also presented serious challenges with regard to the status and taxonomy of their avifaunas.

Rasmussen considered whether the revised taxonomy of the book, with its many species splits, had conservation implications, but felt that the effect on species richness in South Asia was limited, and would have only a moderate conservation impact, increasing the number of potentially threatened species in the region from 6% of the total avifauna to about 7%.

The Meinertzhagen fraud

Rasmussen revealed the true extent of the major fraud perpetrated by the eminent British soldier, ornithologist and expert on bird lice, Colonel Richard Meinertzhagen. Meinertzhagen, who died in 1967, was the author of numerous taxonomic and other works on birds, and possessed a vast collection of bird and bird lice specimens; he was considered to be one of Britain's greatest ornithologists. However, British ornithologist Alan Knox had analysed Meinertzhagen's bird collection at the Walter Rothschild Zoological Museum in Tring, UK in the early 1990s, and uncovered significant fraud involving theft of specimens from museums and falsification of the accompanying documentation.

Hill Blue-flycatcher (formerly Large Blue Flycatcher), a species with false Meinertzhagen records

When researching for Birds of South Asia, Rasmussen examined tens of thousands of bird specimens, since the late S. Dillon Ripley had strongly favoured the use of museum specimens to determine which birds to include. With Robert Prys-Jones of the Natural History Museum, she showed that the decades-old Meinertzhagen fraud was far more extensive than first thought. Many of the 20,000 bird specimens in his collection had been relabelled with regard to where they were collected, and sometimes also remounted. The false documentation delayed the rediscovery of the Forest Owlet, since previous searches had relied on Meinertzagen's faked records. Rasmussen's successful expedition ignored these and looked in the areas identified by the remaining genuine specimens.

Meinertzhargen had actually been banned from the Natural History Museum's Bird Room for 18 months for unauthorised removal of specimens, and suspicions that he was stealing specimens and library material were documented by staff for over 30 years, twice reaching the verge of prosecution.

Falsified records identified by Rasmussen and Prys-Jones included high-altitude occurrences of Coral-billed Scimitar-babbler Pomatorhinus ferruginosus, out-of-range Kashmir Flycatcher Ficedula subrubra and Himalayan winter records of Ferruginous Flycatcher Muscicapa ferruginea and Large Blue Flycatcher Cyornis magnirostris (now Hill Blue-flycatcher C. banyumas). However, some records such as those for Afghan Snowfinch Pyrgilauda theresae appear to be genuine.