Taxonomy: the last refuge of scoundrels

OK, I know that was patriotism, but I am in a mood at the moment. Taxonomy is concerned with classification. Like, there are animals and there are plants. Among the animals there are vertebrates and invertebrates. Among the vertebrates there are birds. Among the birds there are various families, genera and species. Keep going and you can narrow it down to the bird that is pecking holes in your milk-bottle tops or picking the mortar out of your brickwork.
And that's where the taxonomy hits the fan, because as soon as a species is identified, variations within that species begin to be described. Call them races, call them subspecies, call them figments of the fevered imaginations of fieldworkers who have been in the sun too long. But it's only a matter of time before one species with, say, four variations becomes five different species. And then another fieldworker, who has maybe been in the rain too long, says nah, there's two species and three subspecies. And then another......well, I'm sure I don't have to draw a picture.
Most of this garbage, by the way, has nothing to do with what the bird LOOKS like. It's more likely to be a variation in DNA or the syrinx or oesophagal tract (I am not making this up). It's enough to make a birder take up crossstitch.
OK, so you want to know why this outburst from a normally equable Old Scrote. The answer lies thousands of miles away in the Antipodes. I have been looking at the Australasian group of orioles usually known as the "Brown Orioles", and I discover - what I bet you already knew - that they mimic a related group called Friarbirds. What the expletive, I asked myself, are Friarbirds? So I make a quick encyclopaedic check and am told there are four species in a genus called Philemon. Sounds reasonable.
I then read an article about this mimicry which names three species of Friarbird, victims of oriole mimicry, NONE of which are in my list of four.
So, I go to the most recent authority, Sibley and Monroe, which lists TWELVE species of Friarbird. Maybe subspecies have become species? Maybe new species have been discovered? Maybe Sibley and Monroe were on substances when they wrote that page?
At this point the fire in my belly starts to go out. Taxonomy, shmaxonomy. As George Bernard Shaw might have said: "Those who can, do; those who don't, taxonomize".
Mind you, it makes a change from fretting about global warming and the price of plums.