For those who do not know, the AOS (American Ornithological Society) has recently announced that they are considering changing the official common names of many bird species, especially birds names after people. I am curious to know what people think of this decision? Personally, I am absolutely ag…

Another concern I have is that I’m bad at learning new names, if eBird adopts 300 new names or whatever it will basically become unusable for me and probably others as well. I’m also not a fan of how politically motivated the whole idea is.

It is far from being a simple question of bird names, we are dealing here with a question of value and respect. There is currently an “American” will to no longer honor slavers, fraudsters, and other looters. It is in this same spirit that ornithological clubs and institutions are trying to make mor…

That’s thing - in the end this may lead to almost half of North American bird names being changed! We are just throwing this amazing nomenclature stability out the window!

One of my favorite neighborhood birds is Say’s Phoebe (Sayornis saya), a species whose genus, specific epithet, and common name honor the American naturalist, Thomas Say. I don’t know if Say did anything controversial in his short life, or if that common name is on the chopping block, but I won’t b…

Stuff changes, people deal with it (positively or antagonistically). You’re asserting that it’s acceptable to change names around if the species is split or lumped into X number of new species, but there I’ve encountered plenty of folks (both online and IRL) who lash out against that and claim to ha…

I really don’t see the big deal with changing names. Us “plant people” are generally familiar with at least several names (common and scientific) for the same species. Sometimes a single species may have several scientific names used by different authors (such as in the case of one author followin…

You will have an excellent summary of the debate at this web address: The Cotton Wood Post

I haven’t seen any proposal to change hundreds of bird names, so that just seems like a straw man argument. In reality, it’s unlikely that more than a few names would change in any given year, which is something that happens already and we have to deal with it. When I started birding there were stil…

I knew this pic will be useful. [image]

Thoughts on Changing Bird Names

Nature Talk

cypselurus April 28, 2021, 10:13pm 14

It’s been thrown out of the window before–the stability you’re talking about is a fairly recent thing. People dealt with it then, and people can deal with it now.

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Thoughts on Changing Bird Names

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