Thoughts on Changing Bird Names

I don’t know how extreme of a slippery slope @raymie was thinking it could be, so I took it to the extreme, to the point that it still wouldn’t be the end of the world.

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Except for Pyrrhuloxia, which I still can’t spell most of the time. I propose Desert Cardinal. ;-)

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Honestly that’s not too far from what I’m expecting to happen. I agree it’s not the end of the world but it seems such a waste to destroy such beautiful nomenclature stability unseen in any other organisms and possibly turn off many birders old and new just for a “small gesture”.

While there’s no chance of me quitting birding altogether for this, quitting eBird is a very real possibility as it may just become unusable to me. Hopefully they will allow an option to use the current names, it would be super easy to implement.

Unrelated, but I wonder if all this is what’s delaying the new Clements update… sigh.

It only looks that way when you use a short baseline. In the decades that I have been birding the constant has been incremental change. The reasons vary - splits and lumps and taxonomic reassignments, attempts at international consistency, efforts at decency and a few that seem to come down to nothing more than a collective inability to settle on a decision (c.f. the gray/Canada jay business). Naming conventions for common names make some sense as part of journal style manuals and that sort of thing but the instability and inconsistency of common names is the reason scientific names exist. I will continue to call whiskeyjacks whiskeyjacks.

Anyway, as a wise person once said, they’re just names, they take some time to learn but not too much.

Although pyrrhuloxia is a functional name - as long as you read Greek.

Fair enough.

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Thanks to the 20 people who agreed with me at the top of this thread.
Names change. We learn new names. Or you call them ex-asters. Still iNatting

Be careful what you wish for. The heritage trees on the slopes of Table Mountain are invasive alien pines. In the recent fire ‘heritage’ trees destroyed Jagger Library at UCT. Mostert’s Mill. A few houses on the urban edge.

Sometimes ‘Let it be’ is actually ‘time for change’

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Holding the door open for someone whose hands are full of groceries is a small gesture.

Stripping references that ‘honour’ someone who believed in or fought to defend a system that believed owning other human beings was acceptable is not.

Renaming ‘geography’ based names because that is where western naturalists first encountered them is needless. But there are some steps long overdue.

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Tagging onto this to add that there is a very stark difference between a name that commemorates someone who believes in / fights to defend a system that deems owning other human beings acceptable (human beings of certain skin tones, on top of that - please don’t think of it as only a ‘small gesture’ to try to make minorities more comfortable in a country where it seems like half the population is still trying to do the opposite) and a name that refers to a seemingly arbitrary location. Just because we change names in the former category doesn’t mean we’re going to fall down a ‘slippery slope’ and start changing names in the latter category. And so what if it does? This is change. I welcome change. Refusing to change solely for the sake of not wanting change is one of the things plaguing American society (admittedly that’s a very broad/vague/generalizing statement but I think it’s true).

As I and others have said already, I would be far more turned off of birding by having to talk about a bird whose name honours someone who supported the dehumanizing and enslavement of people that look like me precisely because they look like me than I would be by the fact that McCown’s Longspur is now called XYZ Longspur.

Also, to address what the OP said about judging people in the past by modern standards being a bad idea, since I think it’s relevant to the discussion and I don’t think anyone’s brought it up yet: these kinds of things (people in the past, etc.) become modern problems because they or their effects are still felt today in modern times and so we should address them with modern standards. The effects of colonialism are still felt and racism is still wildly prevalent, so a name that commemorates that is automatically now a modern issue.

We often say inventions were great in their time, but are not so great now - for example, we can look at computers from the 1940s that took up a large room’s worth of space and say, “Wow, how ingenious they were!”, but now we have far, far better alternatives with fewer flaws, so we aren’t going to be going back to using those 1940s computers. No matter whether they were innovative and impressive for their time or not, we still aren’t going to be using them anymore. Common names of species can be thought of in the same way. In their day, we might not have batted an eye, but now we see that we can do better and move on from that era, just like we did with those gigantic computers.

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I said small gesture because that was another poster said above.

What I would like to see implemented is a some sort of vote. Perhaps all ABA members or eBird users could vote on any potential name change before it is implemented in said place? Assuming the word gets out well and lots of people vote, I would be much less upset about all of this if I knew that’s truly what the majority of birders want. Right now I have a hard time believing that to be true, but if it is I would be much less upset.

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To learn the names in the first place. Relearning names is a different matter altogether and one thing I find extremely difficult.

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You are sixteen years old. Relearning things in general is what you’ll be doing for the rest of your life.

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Unless someone has edited their post, in which case please disregard this, no one in this thread called it a ‘small gesture’ until you did. The words appear to be yours.

You may feel that someone was arguing this to be the case, but at least in my reading of the comment you replied to with the the comment doesn’t suggest that is their viewpoint.

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The post must have been edited, I was quoting someone there.

No it wasn’t. There are I believe 5 posts above your comment which have been edited from their original text submission. None has ever contained, or been edited to remove the phrase ‘small gesture’. You alone have done so. So unless someone has figured out how to make unlogged edits, that’s not the case.

If you feel you are paraphrasing someone, so be it.

Neutral, descriptive names are boring. Calling a species “long-tailed duck” is akin to naming your cat “Boots.” Or for that matter, renaming the Mallard as “green-headed duck.”

Case in point.

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I was just going to add a further thought on my comment about dull descriptive names:

Names like Gadwall, Bobolink, and Wandering Tattler feel like they denote more interesting organisms than names like, say, Ring-necked Duck, Rusty Blackbird, and Buff-breasted Sandpiper. I will admit that Desert Cardinal is just about as good as Pyrrhuloxia, but that is mostly because its descriptiveness is ecological rather than picking out a color or a marking. If instead you had suggested “Gray Cardinal,” that would not be something I could get onboard with.

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But we forget all those old names are in fact descriptive too, often not plumage but part of song or behaviour, still, they have same kind of meaning as long-tailed duck (which I appreciate as an easy name to learn and quite nice sounding one) it’s just in the result of language evolution we can’t see it that easy.

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Long-tailed could also apply to Pintails–seems like a better name could have been chosen

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I still would like to see American Army physician and noted naturalist Dr. Elliot Coues restored to the ornithological literature as in Coues’ Flycatcher instead of the odd “Greater Pewee”. He was a pioneering naturalist in the southwestern US and I do not see any negative social reason for removing his name. Greater Pewee seems to imply that the Eastern or Western Wood Pewees should be renamed Lesser Pewees.

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This is a wild thread, and I can tell tensions are high, but I figured that I might as well share what I’ve heard.

I have had the privilege to talk with people who have problems with a lot of honorific bird names, and who they honor. I have some problems with them myself, especially as a result of those conversations. But there are a lot of variables. For example, in the case of the Weller’s Salamander (Plethodon welleri), an endangered, Blue Ridge endemic that lives on just three or four mountain massifs within a two-hour drive of each other. The species was named for a young (18-year-old) herpetologist who literally died in pursuit of them on Grandfather Mountain. The species was described and named in his honor after specimens in a cloth collecting bag found tied around his waist after his body was found at the bottom of the cliff, hundreds of miles from home in Cincinnati, Ohio. I think taking that name away would be pretty disgraceful, as there’s ample evidence to show that Weller was not only an exceptional and deserving naturalist, but a good friend, leader, and overall person, too.

That being said, “Weller’s” isn’t very descriptive. You can never bolster any species’ identification characteristics/process in a common (or binomial, for that matter) name, but it’s nice to at least have an indicator or unique, interesting attribute mentioned in the name. This is a beautiful salamander, with a unique appearance, life history, and ecological niche. It’s named after a person, but at what cost? And perhaps a bit more painfully, for what reason? I’ve often wondered what it would be like to have an extant species named after myself, but in the end, it always seems somewhat arrogant. I have a lot of respect for those who discover species/have them named by colleagues in their honor, but I have to wonder what that actually does for the animal. Especially if 200 years later, people decide that we’re collectively horrible people and it’s time to shift the name.

Especially nowadays, I also wonder what the new names will be. Will they be accurate, sensible names, or ridiculous names that also disrespect species. I’m a college student now, but I feel like an old man when I see some propositions of names from competent and influential folks. I was using hypothetical (slightly-exaggerated) examples at first, but @jasonhernandez74 later mentioned “Pac-man Frogs” (Ceratophrys spp.) and that’s a better example. I admire the creativity, but really? Name an amazingly unique and beautiful animal after an obsolete video game? You can disrespect animals, plants, and fungi a lot with a name; that’s how many people come to know them.

I always have to think about what a mentor of mine told me about wildlife and their species names; “They don’t care what we call them.” And even if they did, the next major evolution event would leave our human minds muddled. But I don’t think this cultural issue about names is going anywhere, and the results are going to be interesting. Constant name changes could be a monumental mess that could disrupt and further threaten an already politically, culturally, and economically threatened realm of other species on this planet. How can a threatened species be protected without a reliable name to understand, know, and write about? Who gets to change the names? Scientists who actually know the species well? Communities who live in proximity (and arguably know them better, or at least have to/get to live with them)? Political organizations like the Audubon Society (which is having trouble dealing with it’s own name right now)? It’s an interesting predicament, in my opinion.

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Common names should be helpful in describing the species, i.e ruby-throated hummingbird, blue-violets…

Having common names named after people is in no way helpful, only narcissism or pandering.

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