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Rejoinder to the Response of Al-Sheikhly et al.

These remarks are prepared in reply to the Response by Al-Sheikhly et al. to our Comment to Zoology in the Middle East questioning a number of assertions made in their paper: Al-Sheikhly et al. acknowledge that, at best, guesswork was involved in their population estimates, despite no such admission in their original paper. With respect to one of our central concerns, namely their claim of polygyny in Basra Reed Warblers, these authors now admit that “Nevertheless, taking into account the qualitative comments and the literature records provided in Porter et al. (2014), we ... conclude that the occurrence of polygyny in the Basra Reed Warbler needs to be confirmed by a more comprehensive study.” Nevertheless, Al-Sheikhly et al. persist in claiming that they could differentiate males and females in the field, without the aid of in-hand examination and colour ringing, stating merely that “the identification of male and female Basra Reed Warblers was unmistakable in the field”, yet offering no evidence of how this was achieved. As no Acrocephalus species is known to be sexually dimorphic, except in some species in biometrics (Kennerley & Pearson, 2010), which requires handling, this claim lacks any credibility, unless the authors observed numerous acts of copulation and possessed some means of identifying individuals in the field to prove that each of the 317 males (p. 110) consorted with multiple females. If the precise totals originally presented to support the claim of polygyny lack credibility, then it draws into question any of the paper’s other results.