They too have a distribution all around Australia, in the north (leucocephala), the northeast (striata), the east (leucoptera), the southeast (chrysoptera), and then across the southwest (pileata). And they are greatly nomadic. They will move all over the place and indeed, there are areas towards the center of Australia in which all five forms have been found at the same location. There are known instances of hybrids between all of them. So all possible pairs, some place in their range as they have moved, have hybridized with one another.

Everybody has put these things into one biological species with these five subspecies. But if you say well, wait a minute, they are all different, they are all diagnosably different: some have different colored patches in the wing; some have black throats, some white; and so on. But if we look at their relationships, however, we see that even though pileata sometimes hybridizes with leucoptera and with chrysoptra, pileata is not their closes relative. Rather, chrysoptera is more closely related to leucoptera - they are each other's closest relatives. They, in turn, are related to pileata. Also, leucoptera, rather than being related to pileata, with which it occasionally hybridizes, is really related to striata.

By taking a phylogenetic species approach to looking at these groups and then understanding their interrelationships, we now also have an historical hypothesis, expressed as an area-cladogram, that one area of endemism in Australia is more closely related to another area. These two areas are more closely related to a third, and then that they are related to yet another area. In that way, you get an area-hypothesis at the same time you're looking at the species interrelationships. Let me give you two examples.

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