A new addition to the genus: Okanagana boweni
In 2019 Jeff Cole (@bugsoundsJc), @silversea_starsong, @joeeggy30 and myself were outside Reno and hit up Tamarack Beach on Pyramid Lake. There we encountered a huge Okanagana congregating around Tamarisk and Artemisia. We recorded songs and collected a good number of specimens. When we got back to the hotel Jeff and I started glaring at the thing because it was clearly not a O. utahensis which was also found relatively nearby despite a similar patterning. It look in shape like a O. simulata but wasn't it either since we'd collect some earlier in our trip back in San Bernardino County. We compared it against more reference material and concluded it was something different. Then we realized that a unknown Okanagana Jeff had collected way south was the same things and we began to get a better grasp of what we were dealing with.
We decided to publish the species as the first step in our revision. After nearly a year the manuscript was ready, having now included a phylogenetic hypothesis, range maps, bioacoustic analyses, and a LOT of images. The species was named after the man who introduced me to birding and changed the course of my life; C. bowen.
And so came about Okanagana boweni Chatfield-Taylor and Cole 2020
This link is to the Holotype from Tamarack Beach as well as the recording I made of it before collecting it. The paper will eventually be Open Access and I'll post a link to it.
