Paul Coopmans

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Paul Coopmans (born June 7, 1962 , † January 1, 2007 in Herentals ) was a Belgian field ornithologist , bioacoustic specialist and leader of bird exploration tours . His research focus was the avifauna of Ecuador .

Life

After a biology degree in Antwerp , which he in 1984 with a baccalaureate -Work on the tit completed, Coopmans worked for a year in Ghent in environmental remediation. In 1985 an ecotourism company gave him the opportunity to do bird watching tours in Ecuador . Because he spoke good Spanish, he was selected from over 100 applicants as one of five candidates who could accompany nature lovers on cruise ships on and around the Galapagos Islands . For two years he acted as a tour guide there. After 1986 he continued his explorations in the Amazon Basin in eastern Ecuador and finally settled in the capital Quito in the late 1980s .

Coopmans was an autodidact ; he learned from books, magazines and field guides, and gradually his knowledge of the South American birds earned him a growing reputation in ornithological circles. He began to work intensively on researching bird calls, especially when, from 1989, he was able to use very sophisticated recording equipment that he had acquired from the renowned Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology in New York. Coopmans was a tour leader for a while at the US ecotourism company Victor Emmanuel, before moving to the British company Birdquest in 1990. In the following 15 years he led more than 70 nature and bird exploration tours, most of them in South American countries.

In June 1992 Paul Coopmans recorded the vocalizations of a type of tyrant near Zamora at an altitude of about 1000 m in southeast Ecuador. He couldn't assign the vocalizations to any species he knew. In 1994 he compared the vocalizations with all similar species and was convinced that the birds from Zamora represent an unknown species. In 2000, the first scientific description as Myiopagis olallai by Coopmans and his colleague Niels Krabbe followed . In 1994 Coopmans and Peter Boesman first took up the call of an unknown screech owl from the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta in Colombia , which was first described by Niels Krabbe as Megascops gilesi in 2017 . In 2001 Coopmans contributed to the book The Birds of Ecuador: Status, Distribution and Taxonomy by Robert S. Ridgely , Mark B. Robbins and Paul J. Greenfield , which is one of the standard works of the avifauna in Ecuador. In the same year, he was able to use his bioacoustic studies to show that Scytalopus unicolor does not represent one species, but three species. Therefore the former subspecies Scytalopus unicolor parvirostris and Scytalopus unicolor latrans were raised to species status. In 2003 Coopmans described together with Paul Salaman , Steven L. Hilty and Thomas M. Donegan the Negretzaunkönig ( Henicorhina negreti ) from Colombia.

Coopmans' most important works include audio CDs of Ecuadorian birdsong, released in collaboration with other bioacoustic experts, including The Birds of Northwest Ecuador Volume 1: The Upper Foothills and Subtropics (1999), Birds of The Ecuadorian Highlands: The Upper Montane and Paramo Zones of Ecuador (2001), The Birds of Northwest Ecuador Volume 2: The Lowlands and the Lower Foothills (2002), The Birds of Southwest Ecuador (2004) and The Birds of Eastern Ecuador, Volume 1: The Foothills and Lower Subtropics (2005). In total, Coopmans recorded the utterances of 600 bird species.

Paul Coopmans was a member of the IOC Standing Committee on English Names, which is responsible for the common English names in the World Bird List of the International Ornithological Congress .

Coopmans was married to an Ecuadorian woman and had two sons. He died on January 1, 2007 of complications from cancer.

Dedication names

Myiopagis olallai coopmansi is a subspecies of the foothill olive tyrant from the Colombian Department of Antioquia .

In 2014 the subspecies Myiopagis olallai coopmansi of the foothills olive tyrant was named after Coopmans. In 2015 the brown-backed olive tyrant ( Elaenia brachyptera ), which was described by Hans von Berlepsch in 1907 as a subspecies of the gray-cheeked olive tyrant ( Elaenia chiriquensis ), was given the common name Coopmans Eleania in honor of Coopmans. The subspecies Zimmerius chrysops minimus of the golden- faced little tyrant has the common English name Coopmans's Tyrannulet.

literature

  • Pete Morris: DB Actueel: Paul Coopmans died , Dutch Birding 29, 2007, p. 72
  • Anonymous: Paul Coopmans (1962–2007) , De Postiljon (wekelijks informatieblad), No. 1/2, January 2008, p. 8 (Dutch)
  • Niels Krabbe: Birding Ecuador: a tribute to Paul Coopmans Cotinga 29, 2008, pp. 12-14
  • Guy M. Kirwan , Juan F. Freile: Current perspectives in Ecuadorian ornithology and conservation Cotinga 29, 2008, pp. 2-3

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Paul Coopmans, Niels Krabbe: A new species of flycatcher (Tyrannidae: Myiopagis) from eastern Ecuador and eastern Peru. The Wilson Bulletin 112 (3), 2000, pp. 305-312
  2. ↑ Xeno-Canto: Megascops gilesi
  3. ↑ Niels Krabbe: A new species of Megascops (Strigidae) from the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, Colombia, with notes on voices of New World screech-owls. Ornitología Colombiana 16, 2017, eA08–1
  4. ↑ Paul Coopmans, Niels Krabbe, Thomas S. Schulenberg: Vocal evidence of species rank for nominate Unicolored Tapaculo Scytalopus unicolor. Bulletin of the British Ornithologists' Club 121, 2001, pp. 208-213, biodiversitylibrary.org
  5. ^ Niels Krabbe: Birding Ecuador: a tribute to Paul Coopmans. Cotinga 29, 2008, pp. 12-14
  6. ^ IOC Standing Committee on English Names
  7. ↑ Andrés M. Cuervo. F. Gary Stiles, Miguel Lentino, Robb T. Brumfield, Elizabeth T. Derryberry: Geographic variation and phylogenetic relationships of Myiopagis olallai (Aves: Passeriformes; Tyrannidae), with the description of two new taxa from the Northern Andes. Zootaxa 3873 (1), 2014, pp. 1-24
  8. ↑ Frank E. Rheindt, Niels Krabbe, Alison KS Wee, Les Christidis: Cryptic speciation in the Lesser Elaenia Elaenia chiriquensis (Aves: Passeriformes: Tyrannidae). Zootaxa 4032 (3), 2015, pp. 251-263
  9. ↑ Bo Beolens, Michael Watkins, Michael Grayson: The Eponym Dictionary of Birds. Bloomsbury Publishing 2014, p. 131
personal data
SURNAME Coopmans, Paul
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Belgian ornithologist
DATE OF BIRTH June 7, 1962
DATE OF DEATH January 1, 2007
Place of death Herentals