Acknowledgements
We thank Terry Chesser and the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization of Australia for providing samples of the royal spoonbills and Carrie K.W. Ma for providing samplings of black-faced spoonbills from Hong Kong. We are grateful for the valuable help and comments by Chih-Ming Hong, Wei Liang, Teng-Chiu Lin, and Benyang Liao. We are in debt to Alan Watson who has greatly improved the readability of this manuscript. This work was supported by grants to C.- T. Yao from the Taiwan Endemic Species Research Institute and to S.-H. Li from the Ministry of Science and Technology, Taiwan, R.O.C., and Y. Liu by Forestry Administration of Guangdong Province, China (DFGP Project of Fauna of Guangdong-202115. It was also kindly supported by endorsement from Mr. Y.-C. Chen.
Author contributions : S.-H.L., C.-T.Y. and Y.L. designed research; C.-F.Y., and Y.C.C. performed research; W.-Y.K., T.H.K, and F.-T. C. contributed new reagents/analytic tools; C.-F.Y., C.C.C., , and Y.C.C., analyzed data; and S.-H.L., Y.L. C.K.L.Y., C.-C.L., Y.F., and C.-T.Y. wrote the paper. All authors approved the final submission.
Competing interests : The authors declare that they have no competing interests.