Name game ruffles feathers
Some of my best days spent birdwatching have been in places honouring the good and the great of American history. Around the swampy outskirts of the city named after Sam Houston, architect of the Texan fight for independence from Mexico, I marvelled at Swainson’s hawks, Swainson’s thrushes and a skulking Swainson’s warbler.
On another Stateside adventure, I saw Wilson’s snipes and Wilson’s warblers at Cape May, the world famous New Jersey birding mecca that celebrates 17th century Dutch explorer Cornelius Mey.
In Lee Vining, an old Californian mining town named after a gold prospector, I encountered Townsend’s solitaire and Townsend’s warbler.
See a theme developing? Birds named after people are almost as commonplace in America as locations celebrating its favourite figures. Until now, that is. The American Ornithological Society is to abolish the English names of up to 80 birds honouring such characters from bygone times as William Swainson, John Townsend and Alexander Wilson, 19th century ornithologists of European descent.
“Exclusionary naming conventions developed in the 1800s, clouded by racism and misogyny, don’t work for us today, and the time has come for us to transform this process and redirect the focus to the birds, where it belongs,” said an AOS spokesperson.
The renaming of Mccown’s longspur highlights the process, which is set to be rolled out from next year. Named after a majorgeneral in the Confederate Army who shot the first specimen, the bird was given the new moniker, the thick-billed longspur, in 2020.
A new AOS committee will now repeat this process by coming up with names that will venerate “the unique features and beauty of the birds themselves”. This is not universally popular, seen by the birding old guard as woke and virtue signalling.
Among well-known bird names set to change are Baird’s sandpiper, Bonaparte’s gull and Forster’s tern – species that occur frequently in the UK.
It’s often said that when America sneezes, Britain catches a cold. However, the British Bird List follows an international convention on English name taxonomy so no changes to our honorific names are expected.
Renaming of birds is seen by the old guard as virtue signalling