An armchair tick refers to "an addition without leaving one's home, typically as a result of a taxonomic change." In plain english, it means that a new species was created by splitting it from an existing one (taxonomic change). Thus a birder is able to add a new species to his list without actually going out to bird. I have previously experienced this in 2014. On February 8th of that year, I birded at Bangkong Kahoy and one of my 12 (😲) lifers that day was the White-throated Kingfisher. Later that year, I saw the same bird at Penang, Malaysia. I included it among the list of species I saw/photographed that day but I did not count it as a lifer because I had already seen it previously at Bangkong Kahoy. A few months after this, the White-throated Kingfisher in the Philippines was split and declared a new species by one of the organizations that maintain World Bird Lists (I think it was Clements). This new endemic species was called the Brown-breasted Kingfisher. Because of this, I gained a new lifer, the Brown-breasted KF (which I saw in BK, DRT, and Baras). However, since I also saw the White-throated Kingfisher in another country, I kept said bird in my list.
About three weeks ago, I learned from fellow Palawan birder, Erickson Tabayag that there were three new recognized Palawan endemics, (this time, I think IOC did the split). One of these is the Palawan Crow, split from Slender-billed Crown. This became an armchair tick for me. However, it was not an addition to my overall lifer count because Palawan Crow only replaced Slender-billed Crow in the list unless of course I can find the latter in any of my trip reports outside of Palawan. Yes, I make a list of the birds I saw after every sortie. It is kept in a small black notebook (now two notebooks), and later copied to an excel file. I wonder which birding mentor I copied this from... hmmm...
Anyway, the prospect of a potential lifer led me to scour my birding notebooks and hard drives all the way back to my pre-birder days (2010), in search of a record, any record, of the Slender-billed Crow seen or photographed outside of Palawan. But nada, zip, zero. I sent all the photos I could find to Maia Tanedo, Djop Tabaranza, and Rommel Cruz, but all of them IDéd these as Large-billed Crow. 😡😡😡. The main problem was, when we bird, we do not usually pay attention to the crows, so no photos, not even listed. 😢😢😢
Last night's search led me to bird photos from my family's November 2018 Japan trip. While checking the internet if the Slender-billed Crow occurs in Japan (it doesn't), I learned that there were two species of crow in that country, namely, Large-billed Crow (Ssp japonensis), and Carrion Crow. This prompted another frantic search in my Japan files if I was able to capture a Carrion Crow. Towards midnight, I found a photo of a crow that looked different. Not wanting to disturb any Filipino birder (due to the late hour), I decided to message Rob Hutchinson, thinking that he was still in the UK (which is seven hours behind). He replied a little past 1am saying that he was back in Manila (patay!). I apologized for waking him up but he said he was experiencing jetlag. So I asked him to confirm the ID of these four:
