"Birders care only for more lifers. Taxonomists want a cheap honorific. Nobody touches the splits that actually make sense." This grim pseudo-haiku comes from my late friend Jim Pranty, long-time habitué of Midwestern reservoirs and reluctant witness to ornithology's ever-shifting taxonomic circus. Ad nauseum he preached that the science of naming birds too often resembles a game of musical chairs, where the prizes go to the most flamboyant or conveniently ambiguous forms, while the quietly distinct taxa languish ignored. It is from this vantage that I offer the following account, compiled over decades of dedicated fieldwork and intensive study spanning two continents, with the goal of revealing an astounding assortment of previously undocumented forms found amongst what armchair checklist committees, in their infinite wisdom, have long penned a single, monotypic species. Domineering titans of North Pacific coastlines, a cryptic diversity within the Glaucenscens Comple...