Matt Baker’s Bird Family Tree Draws Firm Lines Through Unsettled Science

Matt Baker has produced a family tree of birds with 46 orders, thousands of species, and a remarkable degree of visual precision. Less than two months after his video appeared, the world's leading unified bird checklist recognized only 45 orders.

No birds had disappeared. Scientists had changed how they classified them.

That distinction exposes the central weakness in Family Tree of Birds Version 2.0, published by UsefulCharts on August 28, 2026. Baker presents a sophisticated arrangement of evolutionary relationships but gives viewers too little reason to distinguish established discoveries from disputed interpretations and changing taxonomic conventions.

His classifications are often defensible. Some follow influential genomic research, and his 46-order count matched the global AviList checklist available when he published the video.

The problem is what happens when a particular scientific classification becomes a beautifully organized, apparently definitive account of nature.

The uncertainty that produced the tree largely disappears from the explanation.

The 46-Order Bird Tree That Became 45

Baker makes completeness a selling point of the revised chart.

He explains that the new version includes every recognized bird order, with species counts beside each one. The expansion is substantial: additional groups, more international coverage, and a larger poster capable of accommodating greater detail.

But completeness depends on whose classification is being followed—and when.

In June 2025, AviList, a major international effort to reconcile competing bird taxonomies, published a checklist recognizing 11,131 species in 46 orders.

That figure supported Baker's decision.

Yet Cornell's eBird/Clements checklist had already adopted a different arrangement by October 2025, recognizing 45 orders. It placed jacamars and puffbirds within Piciformes rather than treating them as a separate order, Galbuliformes.

Then, on October 20, 2026, AviList published its first major revision. Its new totals were:

The revision added 41 recognized species while reducing the number of orders by one.

The apparent contradiction is perfectly reasonable. An order is a category in a classification system, not an independently countable object like a living bird.

The changing treatment of jacamars and puffbirds illustrates the distinction. The evolutionary lineages still exist; the decision about which lineages deserve separate orders has changed.

Baker's original figure was legitimate. It was never permanent.

For an educational poster designed to remain on somebody's wall, the absence of an explicit distinction between current consensus and settled biological fact is consequential. Without a clearly identified taxonomy and version, viewers cannot easily tell whether a future disagreement reflects a new discovery or simply a different classification decision. BirdLife International

The Hoatzin: A Branch That Science Cannot Secure

The hoatzin presents a more serious problem because the uncertainty concerns an evolutionary relationship itself.

This unusual South American bird has long challenged researchers attempting to determine where it belongs among modern birds.

Baker identifies it as an evolutionary outlier with its own order, then places it within a broader grouping alongside cranes, rails, and shorebirds.

That arrangement has genuine scientific support.

But it also conceals an important limitation.

In April 2024, an international research team published a major study in Nature, analyzing genomes from 363 bird species representing 218 families.

The researchers reconstructed much of the modern bird family tree while examining disagreements between different genetic datasets.

Their findings supported several important relationships. They also exposed how difficult it remains to establish the position of certain ancient lineages.

The hoatzin was a particularly striking example.

The study's preferred tree placed the hoatzin lineage beside the group containing cranes and shorebirds. Yet the researchers reported that genetic evidence could not statistically distinguish among three possible arrangements surrounding that branch.

It was the only position in their entire reconstructed tree where their analysis could not reject an unresolved three-way split.

Even extensive genomic evidence had failed to settle the relationship.

This matters because Baker's chart makes the hoatzin's position appear comparable to much better-established evolutionary relationships.

A viewer sees a branch. What the underlying research contains is a hypothesis that survived as the preferred arrangement despite substantial uncertainty.

That is not a minor technical qualification.

The distinction between a strongly supported relationship and an unresolved one is fundamental to understanding how evolutionary science works.

Scientists can sometimes determine that several organisms are closely related without establishing the precise order in which their ancestors separated.

A tree that draws every relationship with the same visual confidence erases that distinction.

Baker did not invent the hoatzin's placement. He adopted a position supported by serious research. His failure is that the presentation does not adequately communicate the limits of that support. Nature

The Crow Correction That Conceals Another Disagreement

Baker makes several changes to his crow classifications and explains them as corrections to the earlier chart.

One concerns the northwestern crow, historically recognized as a separate species in the Pacific Northwest.

He tells viewers it is now treated as a subspecies of the American crow.

That statement follows an established taxonomic decision.

But the research behind the decision contains a more interesting evolutionary story.

In 2020, researchers studying northwestern and American crows published a population-genomic analysis in Molecular Ecology.

They identified two distinct genetic histories dating to the late Pleistocene, when glacial conditions may have separated ancestral crow populations.

The researchers found two mitochondrial DNA lineages differing by approximately 1.1%.

They also documented extensive genetic mixing across more than 900 kilometers of western Washington and British Columbia.

The populations were neither wholly unrelated nor cleanly separated.

They had distinct evolutionary histories followed by extensive hybridization.

That evidence helps explain why taxonomists ultimately combined them under the American crow. It does not make their earlier differentiation imaginary.

Baker's subspecies classification is defensible. But the fascinating scientific finding is how two populations could develop separately and then become so extensively connected that maintaining a species boundary became difficult.

The chart preserves the classification while sacrificing much of the explanation.

His treatment of European crows exposes a related difficulty.

Baker corrects his earlier statement that carrion crows and hooded crows are separate species. He now presents them as belonging to the same species.

AviList supports that treatment.

Other respected authorities have maintained a different position.

The British Ornithologists' Union recognized hooded and carrion crows as separate species in 2002, and the British Trust for Ornithology's bird information has reflected that distinction.

The evidence is unusually revealing.

A 2019 study in Nature Ecology & Evolution examined more than 400 genomes from the European hybrid zone between these crows.

Researchers found extensive genetic mixing, despite the birds maintaining visibly different plumage.

More than 68% of the plumage variation examined was explained by interactions involving a pigmentation gene and a region of chromosome 18.

Different appearances were being maintained even while substantial portions of the genome passed between populations.

The disagreement over classification is therefore not simply a matter of researchers failing to identify the birds correctly.

It concerns how much genetic differentiation, reproductive separation, and independent evolutionary history should be required before populations receive separate species names.

There is no universally applicable numerical threshold that resolves every such case.

Baker's revised classification has authoritative support. But describing it simply as a correction risks turning a taxonomic judgment into an impression of scientific finality.

The more revealing lesson is that species boundaries are sometimes difficult to draw precisely because evolution has not produced perfectly separated populations. USGS Publications

Africa, Australia, and an Evolutionary History Not Yet Established

Baker also explains a major division among land birds.

One branch, Australaves, is associated with Australia and South America. Another, Afroaves, is associated with Africa.

He presents these geographical associations as the regions where the groups evolved.

The names themselves encourage that interpretation.

But identifying where an evolutionary lineage originated requires more than knowing where its living descendants are concentrated.

Researchers must consider fossils, ancient geography, evolutionary relationships, continental connections, and the movement of ancestral populations.

A 2015 scientific review in Current Biology, written by Stephen Brusatte, Jingmai O'Connor, and Erich Jarvis, directly addressed these geographical interpretations.

The authors explained that the names Afroaves and Australaves imply likely geographical origins, but additional evidence is required to confirm them.

That is an important qualification.

The existence of the two evolutionary groups is supported by genetic research. The precise locations where their ancestors originated are a different scientific question.

A bird lineage that diversified across Australia today need not have originated exclusively within the borders of the modern continent.

Ancient continents were connected differently. Populations migrated. Entire branches disappeared.

Present-day geography can help reconstruct evolutionary history, but it cannot establish that history by itself.

Baker's presentation moves too quickly from naming evolutionary groups to locating their origins.

The claim is plausible. The evidence does not justify treating those locations as established historical facts. DOI

The Most Numerous Wild Bird Is Not an Easy Title to Award

Near the end of his presentation, Baker identifies the African quelea as the world's most common wild bird.

The claim is familiar in popular natural-history writing.

There is substantial evidence behind it.

Guinness World Records identifies the red-billed quelea as the most abundant living wild bird, citing an estimated breeding population of approximately 1–2 billion individuals.

But estimates of global bird abundance are difficult to establish, particularly for highly mobile species living across enormous geographical areas.

In 2021, researchers published a study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences estimating the global populations of approximately 9,700 bird species.

Their analysis combined expert population estimates with citizen-science observations.

They estimated approximately 50 billion individual birds worldwide, although the uncertainty around that figure was substantial.

Their ten most abundant species included:

• House sparrow: approximately 1.6 billion.
• European starling: approximately 1.3 billion.
• Ring-billed gull: approximately 1.2 billion.
• Barn swallow: approximately 1.1 billion.

The red-billed quelea did not appear among those ten.

This does not establish that Baker is wrong.

The studies use different evidence and estimation methods, and the global abundance analysis itself acknowledges important geographical and sampling limitations.

The quelea estimate also overlaps the house sparrow estimate.

But that is precisely the issue.

The statement that one species is definitively the most numerous wild bird depends on uncertain population estimates that cannot be treated like an exact census.

Baker turns a widely repeated estimate into an uncomplicated superlative.

A scientifically responsible account would identify it as an estimate and explain why the ranking remains uncertain. Guinness World Records

What a Bird Family Tree Cannot Show

The most consequential omission is not any individual species, family, or order.

It is the absence of a clear distinction between three different things:

Evolutionary history: What actually happened as ancestral bird populations separated, migrated, and sometimes interbred.

Scientific reconstruction: What researchers infer about that history from genetic data, fossils, and other evidence.

Taxonomic classification: How scientists currently organize those inferred relationships into categories such as species, families, and orders.

These are connected, but they are not identical.

A new genetic analysis can change a reconstructed evolutionary relationship.

A taxonomic committee can change a classification without discovering a new evolutionary event.

And competing scientific analyses can produce different reconstructions even when examining broadly similar evidence.

Baker's chart largely compresses these distinctions into one visual structure.

This is especially significant because the scientific research underlying modern bird phylogenies has explicitly documented uncertainty.

The 2024 genomic study did more than construct an impressive evolutionary tree.

It examined why different genetic regions can produce conflicting evolutionary signals.

The researchers identified several possible sources of disagreement, including incomplete lineage sorting, ancient hybridization, and differences in evolutionary rates.

These are not merely errors that disappear when enough data are collected.

Some reflect the complexity of evolutionary history itself.

Ancient bird lineages diversified rapidly around the Cretaceous–Palaeogene boundary, approximately 66 million years ago.

When ancestral populations separate across relatively short periods, different genetic sequences can preserve different histories of those separation events.

Consequently, an evolutionary tree can be useful and scientifically rigorous without every branch being equally certain.

Baker repeatedly emphasizes the completeness of his chart, including its recognition of every bird order and the additions requested by viewers.

But a chart that successfully includes all currently recognized groups is not necessarily a chart that communicates the strength of the evidence connecting them.

The missing information is not another bird.

It is a way for readers to distinguish established relationships from uncertain ones. Nature

The Verdict: A Map of Evolution That Hides Its Own Limitations

Baker's most important classifications withstand scrutiny.

His 46-order arrangement reflected a recognized global taxonomy when the video was published. His treatment of northwestern crows follows established taxonomic decisions. His placement of the hoatzin has support from major genomic research.

Those facts make a sweeping accusation of scientific incompetence indefensible.

They also make the central criticism more precise.

Baker communicates the conclusions of evolutionary science more clearly than he communicates their limitations.

The problem is not that every branch is wrong.

It is that the viewer receives too little information about which branches could reasonably change, which remain disputed, and which represent choices made by taxonomic authorities.

The October 2026 AviList revision demonstrates the practical consequences. An educational chart presented as a complete account of 46 orders became inconsistent with the latest global consensus within weeks.

The bird populations did not change because a committee revised the checklist.

The classification changed.

The hoatzin presents a deeper uncertainty: even extensive genomic analysis cannot conclusively establish every ancient evolutionary relationship.

The crow studies show that genetic histories can be more complicated than simple divisions between species.

And the geographical and population claims demonstrate how easily reasonable scientific interpretations become statements that sound more certain than the evidence permits.

None of these problems requires abandoning the project.

A dated taxonomic reference, clearer explanations of contested classifications, and visible indications of uncertain branches would materially improve its scientific usefulness.

The strongest educational charts do more than tell readers what scientists currently believe.

They help readers understand what scientists know, what they infer, and what remains unresolved.

Baker's family tree is impressively complete as a visual classification of birds.

It is less complete as an explanation of the science that produced that classification.

And in evolutionary biology, the difference between those two achievements is not a technicality.

It is the difference between illustrating scientific knowledge and explaining how that knowledge works.

References

1. Family Tree of Birds Version 2.0
UsefulCharts / Matt Baker, August 28, 2026.
Watch the original video

The primary work under examination, including Baker's explanation of the 46 orders, evolutionary relationships, crow classifications, and geographical origins.

2. AviList: The Global Avian Checklist, v2025
AviList Core Team, June 11, 2025.
View the 2025 checklist

Establishes that 46 orders and 11,131 species were recognized by a major international consensus taxonomy before Baker published his video.

3. AviList: The Global Avian Checklist, v2026
AviList Core Team, October 20, 2026.
View the 2026 checklist

Documents the subsequent revision to 45 orders, 250 families, and 11,172 species, establishing the changing nature of recognized bird classifications.

4. October 2025 Clements Checklist Update
Cornell Lab of Ornithology, October 2025.
Read the taxonomy update

Confirms that Cornell had already reduced its recognized number of orders to 45 by including jacamars and puffbirds within Piciformes.

5. Complexity of Avian Evolution Revealed by Family-Level Genomes
Nature, April 1, 2024.
Read the scientific study

Provides genomic evidence from 363 bird species and identifies unresolved deep evolutionary relationships, particularly the uncertain placement of the hoatzin.

6. Cryptic and Extensive Hybridization Between Ancient Lineages of American Crows
Slager and colleagues, Molecular Ecology, February 2020.
Read the research summary

Documents distinct genetic histories and extensive hybridization between northwestern and American crow populations, explaining the complexity behind their taxonomic merger.

7. Epistatic Mutations Under Divergent Selection Govern Phenotypic Variation in the Crow Hybrid Zone
Nature Ecology & Evolution, 2019.
Read the scientific study

Reports genomic findings from more than 400 hybrid-zone crows, demonstrating how substantial gene flow can coexist with persistent plumage differences.

8. Hooded Crow — BirdFacts
British Trust for Ornithology, undated species account.
View the BTO species account

Documents the historical treatment of hooded and carrion crows as separate species and their hybridization; its classification information must be read alongside the newer AviList consensus.

9. The Origin and Diversification of Birds
Stephen L. Brusatte, Jingmai K. O'Connor, and Erich D. Jarvis, Current Biology, October 5, 2015.
Read the scientific review

Explains the evidence underlying modern bird evolutionary research and explicitly qualifies the proposed geographical origins of Afroaves and Australaves.

10. Global Abundance Estimates for 9,700 Bird Species
Callaghan and colleagues, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, May 2021.
Read the scientific study

Provides independently modeled global population estimates, demonstrating the uncertainty involved in identifying the world's most abundant wild bird.

11. Most Abundant Wild Bird
Guinness World Records, undated record.
View the population record

Supports the widely reported estimate of 1–2 billion red-billed queleas, while illustrating how the claim depends on population estimates rather than an exact global census.