2022-C.pdf (americanornithology.org)
Page 7
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The reason the accipiters are the true hawks is because originally the term “hawk” applied only to smaller, bird-eating birds of prey. The larger mammal-eating ones (eg. buteos) were called “buzzards” To this day the Americas are really the only place where both groups are called hawks.
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That’s kind of my point though. The discrepancy in the general population is probably why most genera don’t have official common name. Because as previously mentioned, when you say hawk, I think Buteo. And to me, buzzard applies to Cathartiformes (New World vultures), because it sounds like a name you would give to a group of birds that primarily scavenge.
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I imagine that it sounds that way to you because you learned the word that way. In the UK and the rest of the non-North American, English-speaking world a buzzard is a Buteo is a buzzard and applying the name to a vulture is just wrong.
Common names are vernacular and vernacular shifts over time and place. Efforts by bodies like the AOS to police vernacular names are mostly pointless other than for purposes of standardizing usage in their own publications. If anybody thinks that high plains cowboys are ever going to stop calling vultures buzzards because the AOS says they should they really need to give their head a squeeze. “Official” common names are only official in the minds of a tiny number of people who have no authority to enforce anything outside a tiny space in society. The exception is in regards to usages that offend for which, in the information age, shaming has become an effective tool for forcing change - at least in corners of society where people still have a sense of shame.
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Indeed.
Sounds like you agree that there’s nothing official about common names.
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If they are also called “meadowlarks”, what do you think their habitat is?
All meadowlarks behave the same and live in the same habitats. What tells them appart is their plumage and geographical distribution. Yellow breasted and Red breasted sound pretty distinctive to me. You albatross and chat examples might work, but they aren’t valid for meadowlarks.
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So calling you “Jake” or “John” instead of Russel would be perfectly acceptable.
I wouldn’t say all meadowlark habitats are the same. A so-called meadow in the eastern US is a different habitat from the fairly dry grasslands in the Southwest US where Chihuahuan species occurs. The term meadow is usually not applied to these grasslands.
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But they’re still grasslands, and Leistes meadowlarks also live in grasslands. The fact that grasslands are different here or there it doesn’t mean they stop being grasslands. Not all grasslands need to look the same.
But the term “grassland” does apply to those meadows.
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The point is that it wouldn’t be appropiate to call Sturnella birds “Grassland meadowlarks” it is not distinctive at all because Leistes birds also live in grasslands. It would apply if Leistes lived in rainforests but they don’t.
I went back and voted. In my natural way of speaking, say I was speaking of all meadowlarks globally, and then I wanted to refer specifically to these as part of that discussion, I would naturally say “the North American meadowlarks,” much the way we naturally distinguish between African and Asiatic species of elephants. Since that is simply a natural way of referring to them, rather than an invented common name, that was the most logical choice. Likewise, Leistes would most naturally be distinguished as the South American meadowlarks.
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LOL, not at all the same thing. Species and persons aren’t equivalent, and persons don’t have common names. Species can’t tell you what name is appropriate for you to call them by–and they don’t have birth certificates. Different people call the same species by different names–and all of them are common names by any definition of that concept. Common names are those used by local peoples–at least that’s the original meaning. Relatively recently, some organizations have taken it upon themselves to create common names to try to force different local peoples to start using the same name. They’re often slow to catch on–if they ever do–among local peoples who used the original common names.
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But S. magna lives in a good portion of South America too, I believe the most distinctive trait of the genus is their yellow breast.
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But don’t confuse a common name with a misidentification or a common name based on one. Turkey vultures are called buzzards by some 'cause early colonists thought they looked liked the buzzards they were used to see in their land, so it was easy for them to call them “buzzards”.
But that’s one way that common names become established. It’s a natural way that our language evolves. Once the name is being used by the locals, it’s a common name and no one can say otherwise.
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But if they were conscious that they were not buzzards they would have used a name alluding buzzards or that describes their similarity with buzzards, instead of directly calling them “buzzards”. So that means there is a misidentification problem here, not language evolution.
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The moderators don’t like us going off topic too far, so I’ll stop there. But it’s a really fascinating philosophical question–one best addressed with a beer and a campfire. I bet there are many organisms with common names that got their start based on a misidentification. I still call them turkey buzzards because I like how it sounds and that’s what my family always called them–and I definitely know they’re not those buzzards.
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But anyway, we are straying far from the meadowlark subject.