What is a "species"?
This question is important!
Scientists have a system of naming the millions of different types of plants and animals and sorting them into groups. A species is a group of animals or plants that are similar and can breed together to produce fertile offspring.
The scientific species name consists of two Latin words - the genus, which starts with a captial letter and the species, which starts with a lower case letter. The name is written in italics to help us recognise it as a scientific name.
For example, the scientific name for the wedge-tailed eagle is Aquila audax.
The organisation of living things has seven major levels or categories. Each level narrows the field. From the top down the levels are: Kingdom, Phylum, Class, Order, Family, Genus, Species.
So a wedge-tailed eagle would be categorised as follows:
- Kingdom - Animalia (all the animals in the world)
- Phylum - Chordata (animals that have a central nervous system)
- Class - Aves (birds)
- Order - Falconiformes (chiefly diurnal carnivorous birds having hooked beaks and long talons)
- Family - Accipitridae (diurnal birds of prey)
- Genus - Aquila (eagles)
- Species - audax (bold [this describes the eagle's nature])
- * = endemic
- ** = listed as rare or threatened
- Brown Goshawk (Accipiter fasciatus)
- Collared Sparrowhawk (Accipiter cirrhocephalus)
- Grey Goshawk [White Goshawk](Accipiter novaehollandiae)
- Swamp Harrier (Circus approximans)
- Wedge-tailed Eagle (Aquila audax**)
- White-bellied Sea Eagle (Haliaeetus leucogaster**)
- Australian Kestrel (Falco cenchroides)
- Australian Little Falcon [Australian Hobby] (Falco longipennis)
- Brown Falcon (Falco berigora)
- Peregrine Falcon (Falco peregrinus)
- Masked Owl (Tyto novaehollandiae)
- Southern Boobook (Ninox novaeseelandiae)
- Tawny frogmouth (Podargus strigoides)
Many species vary in size and/or colour depending on where they live. Sometimes a distinctive variation of a species is given a subspecies name. The Tasmanian wedge-tailed eagle, for example, is larger and slightly different in colour than the wedge-tailed eagles found in mainland Australia. The name for the Tasmanian wedge-tail, Aquila audax fleayi includes a subspecies name fleayi. Aquila is Latin for eagle, audax is Latin for bold and fleayi is after David Fleay, who was the first person to recognise that the Tasmanian wedged-tail eagle was different to its mainland relatives.
Tasmanian Raptor Species List
Order Falconiformes
Family Accipitridae
Family Falconidae
Order Strigiformes
Family Tytonidae
Family Strigidae
Note:
The Tawny Frogmouth is not an owl or a raptor, but a member of the nightjar family.