Genome assemblies
A total of 8 assemblies were produced. In general, assemblies indicated an estimated genome size of approximately 1.2Gb, and a GC content of 41%, with a completeness of 90%. The extra polishing step did not significantly affect these statistics. We proceeded with the assemblies that presented the best NG50 and N50 statistic, for each morph, and with the lesser overlap permission (1000 bp) as it provided longer contigs. Coverages of selected draft genomes were 75x for the grey morph (organized into 11 scaffolds and 1686 contigs) and 63x for the brown morph (organized into 13 scaffolds and 1793 other contigs) (Table1; Table S3). Assembly completeness analyses against avian-specific gene databases with busco revealed high levels of completeness - 97% for both genomes (Fig. S1A-B). Identification of repeated elements showed the two genomes to be very similar in terms of known mobile elements (Table S4). Gene finding tools were instructed to annotate introns, start, stop codons as well as gene coding regions. A total of 20.738 genes/transcripts were predicted in our draft assembly of the grey morph.