Birds

Why 263 bird species are going to get new English names

/ mike shanahan / 1 Comment
Two birds: Townsend’s Solitaire and Townsend’s Warbler

John Kirk Townsend, who lived from 1809 to 1851, was a prolific American naturalist. In his short life, he collected specimens of several species of bird that were new to science. But he was also an odious racist who raided the graves of Native Americans. He removed skulls from their corpses and sent them to Samuel Morton, one of the founders of scientific racism.

Whether realising this or not, for nearly two hundred years, biologists and birdwatchers have had to utter this man’s name when speaking of birds called Townsend’s Solitaire and Townsend’s Warbler. But those days could soon be over. On 1 November, the Council of the American Ornithological Society (AOS) announced that it would be changing all English-language names of birds in its jurisdiction that have been named after people.

Many scientists are celebrating the decision. Back in 2018, a PhD student called Robert Driver had urged the AOS to rename a bird called McCown’s Longspur (Rhynchophanes mccownii). It was named after was John P. McCown, who fought for the Confederacy during the American Civil War and had been involved in forced relocations of Native Americans in the 1840s.

“This longspur is named after a man who fought for years to maintain the right to keep slaves, and also fought against multiple Native tribes,” wrote Driver. “I ask that the English name of Rhynchophanes mccownii be changed from McCown’s Longspur to a sensible name or, if possible, a name used by Native tribes.”

In 2019, an AOS committee rejected Driver’s proposal. But the following year, it announced a rethink and soon after renamed the bird the Thick-Billed Longspur.

In the meantime, the Bird Names for Birds campaigned had taken off, highlighting other controversial names — such as a sparrow named after a slave owner and racist called John Bachman. The campaign called on the AOS to rename another 149 bird species in North America that bore the names of people.

It’s a position that ornithologist Matthew Halley had taken a year earlier, having previously opposed renaming. In 2020, Halley exposed the grave-digging by Townsend and by John James Audubon, another pioneering American naturalist whose name has also been attached to bird species (as well as schools, streets, protected areas and other places).

Writing on X yesterday, Halley pointed out that calls to end the naming of species after people are not new. Way back in 1799, the American ornithologist Charles W. Peale had stated that it was essential to stop “naming subjects of Nature, after Persons, who have plumed themselves with those childish ideas of their being the first discoverers of such or such things”.

More than two centuries later, the AOS agrees. It will give new English names to 260 bird species in the Americas, regardless of the merits or failings of the individuals after whom they are named. It will also rename three species whose names are otherwise offensive or exclusionary.

Announcing the plan, AOS President Colleen Handel said: “There is power in a name, and some English bird names have associations with the past that continue to be exclusionary and harmful today,” said. “We need a much more inclusive and engaging scientific process that focuses attention on the unique features and beauty of the birds themselves.”

Read more about the AOS’s English Bird Names Project or read the full report of recommendations to the AOS Council

Photo credits: Left — Townsend’s Solitaire (Don Henise / Wikimedia Commons). Right — Townsend’s Warbler (Francesco Veronesi / Wikimedia Commons).

Who eats figs? Everybody

/ mike shanahan / 4 Comments

“The proper way to eat a fig, in society,” wrote DH Lawrence, “is to split it in four, holding it by the stump, and open it, so that it is a glittering, rosy, moist, honied, heavy-petalled four-petalled flower. … But the vulgar way, is just to put your mouth to the crack, and take out the flesh in one bite.”

I’m a vulgar fig-eater. Few things give me more pleasure than when I bite into a ripe one and eat it up. With the right fig, the flavours can be so intense, so rich that it seems clear to me that no other fruit can compare. But the figs I eat are of just one of nearly a thousand fig species, and what eats the others is really interesting.

figeaters
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The mystery bird that called for a dictionary of vanishing voices

/ mike shanahan / 2 Comments

birddiction2

In the summer of 1897, the call of a mysterious bird sparked a brief but thorough quest whose hand-sized outcome is a curious testament to the speed of change in our world.

A retired engineer called Charles Louis Hett heard the bird near his home in Brigg, a small town in Lincolnshire in the north of England. Certain he had seen the bird’s call described in print a few days earlier, Hett scoured his books — but he couldn’t find the paragraph so he couldn’t identify the bird.

What followed was a six-month burst of research and writing. Hett scavenged scraps of information from books. He corresponded with strangers around the country. He walked in the wilds with his ear to the sky. His aim was to build consensus around a definitive descriptive list of the calls of nearly 400 bird species. By January 1898, his small ‘bird dictionary’ was on sale.

A few years ago, my mum found a copy of it in a second-hand bookshop and gave it to me. It still amazes me as I hold it in my hands. Among the calls Hett listed are the Red-throated Diver’s “ak-ak-kakara-kakera“, the Whimbrel’s “tetty-tetty-tet” and the “tst-tst-tsook-tsook” of the Red-backed Shrike. Just like the French-English/English-French dictionaries I remember from secondary school, Hett’s book first lists the hundreds of calls and the birds that make them; it then lists the bird species and the calls that each makes.

But it is what comes next that interests me most — a list of 1,300 local and old-fashioned names for British birds*. There you can find the Stanepecker (for Turnstone) and the Scawrie (for Herring Gull), the Rusty Crackle (for Blackbird) and the Teapot (for Goldcrest) — each one is a name that is rarely, if ever, uttered today.

It’s hard to imagine how Hett managed to compile so much information in just six months, working from a tiny town about 100 years before the Internet entered public life. What’s more striking is that an effort to replicate Hett’s mission today would likely fail. Many of the names will have slipped out of use. Gone extinct.

Many of the birds have gone too. The new State of British Birds report [PDF] shows that populations of many British birds are in steep decline. In the past three decades alone, several species have declined by more than 80 percent. Extinction beckons. “Since 1966, we’ve lost 44 million individual birds from our countryside at an average rate of 19 birds every 10 minutes,” says a joint statement from the organisations behind the report.

We don’t know what populations were like when Hett heard his mystery bird but we do know that modern threats — pesticides, habitat loss, climatic change — had yet to make themselves known.  The only danger that Hett himself noted was from people who killed birds so they could identify the corpse — something that helped motivate him to publish his dictionary. “The destruction of an uncommon bird for the purpose of identification, is a barbarism,” wrote Hett, who hoped his book might prove an “aid to identification without slaughter.”

It is easy to dismiss Hett’s world as a long-forgotten yesterday. But, given that the oldest person alive today was born some months before Hett heard his mystery bird, the dictionary shows just how much the world can change in a lifetime. And it seems likely that some of the species Hett listed will have fallen forever silent —  in Britain at least — by the time I pass my copy of his book on to my own child.

*[By 1902 Hett had published an updated list [PDF] that more than doubled the number of synonyms to nearly 3,000 names — an average of more than seven for each real species.]