The Naming of Birds Is a Difficult Matter
In honor of the American Ornithological Society’s recent announcement that they would rename all North American bird species that are named after people, allow me to take you on a little jaunt through the history of academic bickering.
The history of ornithology is studded with arguments about what birds ought to be called and who should have a say in deciding. Every edition of the AOS (formerly AOU) Checklist of North American Birds has been accompanied by a flurry of complaints about the names listed. In addition to birds, there have been similar discussions around insects, mammals, and plants, as well as endless side discussions relating specifically to hyphenation, capitalization, apostrophes, and spelling, and many spats concerning subspecies between the ubiquitous lumpers and splitters. One wonders how the authors ever found time to go birding.
An important caveat before we dive in: This discussion, based on articles from North American ornithological journals, is a discussion between privileged scientists in the ornithological community, the very sorts of people eponymous birds are usually named after. It’s just as much a catalog of these scientists’ biases, lack of perspective, and problematic behavior as it is a history of common names.
The first article I was able to find was “The Common Names of American Birds” by Ernest Ingersoll, which appeared in 1883 in the predecessor to The Auk, the Bulletin of the Nuttall Ornithological Club. It’s an interesting exploration of the state of common names in a time predating the AOS/AOU checklist, when names were not nearly as standardized as they are today. Ingersoll notes etymologies, regional variations, and Native American names for birds; he himself seems agnostic about which name is “correct,” except to note that the proper plural of “titmouse” is in fact “titmouses.” (He was fighting a losing battle on that one.)
The argument begins in earnest in 1885 with Ernest Thompson Seton, who had caught wind that the first AOU checklist was being assembled, including a full list of common names, and wrote to the newly-formed Auk with his thoughts on the matter. Seton would later help found the Boy Scouts, and his opinions were strongly influenced by his experiences teaching children about nature. Eponymous names like Baird’s Bunting and Leconte’s Sparrow (as well as such nonsense names as “Semipalmated Plover”) were immediately in his crosshairs for very commonsense reasons: They’re hard to remember and they don’t suit the bird, and, in any case, common names should be the names that regular people use daily, not names invented by scientists. “There is no doubt that scientific names are entirely in the hands of scientists, but it seems to be overlooked that popular names are just as completely in the hands of the people,” he says. As for the eponymous scientists, he made an argument that will be familiar to anyone following the debate about monuments: If they’re truly important figures, they won’t be forgotten just because they don’t have something named after them.
But not everyone was so rosy about common names. Things began to get contentious in 1899 with Richard C. McGregor’s article “A Plea for the General Use of Scientific Names,” which appeared in the Bulletin of the Cooper Ornithological Club. At this point, the idea that all birds should have common names was relatively new, and McGregor was not a fan. “[W]hy we should advocate the use of such names as smew, jabiru, limpkin, parauque, grassquit and dickcissel,” opined McGregor, “is a fact I do not understand.” He believed that birders should learn scientific names for several reasons: There are too many species to give individual common names, having to learn two lists of names is overly onerous, and common names can be confusing or misleading, with many names often referring to one bird and vice versa. If ornithologists coined a common name for every bird, he argued, where would it end? Would paleontologists need to coin common names for thousands of extinct species?
McGregor’s argument sparked immediate backlash; the next year, the prolific Joseph Grinnell struck back at McGregor’s “illogical” claims in an article in The Condor, “Against the General Use of Scientific Names.” He made an argument which would be repeated many times over the next century: Common names are more accessible to laypeople. As for the proliferation of different names for the same species, he was confident that the AOU’s recent attempts at standardization would win out and a single common name would emerge as the broadly-recognized name for each species.
The next blow in the common name battle came from Jonathan Dwight in his 1909 article in The Condor, “The Popular Names of Birds.” Dwight, who comes across as a harrumphing traditionalist in the literature, rails against such trends as removing the possessive case from eponymous names, wondering if it would be followed by such reforms as “Red-id Vireo” and “Blak-capt Chikady.” Dwight was clearly the farthest thing from a reformist (according to him, “There is hardly a name on the list that would not be subject to removal if everyone’s whims were consulted”), but in his article we see a hint of another argument against eponymous names: They’re grammatically difficult. This may not seem like a very big deal, but having read the literature, I can confidently say that removing eponyms would have saved a tome’s worth of spilled ink on this specific point.
In 1919 Ernest Thompson Seton is back with a delightful article in The Auk, “On the Popular Names of Birds.” (If you’re going to read only one article from this story, this is the one to check out.) Comparing overly obtuse bird names to scholars who rewrote the Bible in purple prose to make it more “dignified,” he lays out the following principles for a good common name: “The name must be simple, easily said, descriptive, short, and is much stronger if in some way it ties up the bird’s characteristics with familiar ideas.” Names like Blackburnian Warbler and Townsend’s Solitaire struck him as “clumsy, meaningless, un-English and detrimental.” A good evocative name, he says, may be the catalyst that gets a child interested in birds. And he makes another important point: When we replace a local name with a neologism coined by scientists, we lose the local knowledge about a species.
A new version of the AOU checklist came out in 1921, and, like clockwork, in 1923 there appeared another article in The Condor, “Thoughts on English Names for Birds in the A. O. U. Check-List” by W.L. McAtee. McAtee was bearish on the entire concept of a list of common names, especially for subspecies; he thought there were too many regional variations to ever come close to matching popular usage. But he did recognize that bird guides for laypeople required common names; as to which names to use, he thought “highly artificial names are not the best.”
The matter was barely laid to rest for a year before Ernest G. Holt (for those keeping score, that’s our third Ernest) brought it up again in a 1924 article in The Auk, “A Plea for More Rational Common Names.” Here was another ornithologist adamantly opposed to such neologisms as Hick’s Seed-Eater and Lawrence’s Bent-Billed Flycatcher, saying “no such epithets are ever hurled at them by their human nationals.” Since he studied Latin American birds, it will be no shock that a strong current of racism undergirded his argument — he claimed that nobody in South America loves birds except as food. Despite his clear disdain for the inhabitants of the countries where he worked, he too agreed that common names should be the names really used by the locals, rather than names made up by scientists, on the grounds that the former may be useful to ornithologists trying to communicate with the locals, whereas the latter are of no use to anyone.
Witmer Stone, editor of The Auk, responded to Holt’s letter to note that English common names were helpful for species in zoos, and that it was better for such names to be chosen by ornithologists than by some random exotic-animal dealer. But he concurred that Lawrence’s Bent-Billed Flycatcher was indeed atrocious.
With a new AOU Checklist came a rash of articles about nomenclature in the 1940s. In 1944 McAtee reappeared in The Auk with “The Possessive in Vernacular Names,” weighing in on the then-contentious debate about whether or not eponymous name should be in the possessive case. (There are a good dozen letters on the apostrophe question alone, which I won’t cover here. Didn’t these people have anything better to do?) He’s in favor, though he acknowledges the awkward pronunciation of species like Coues’s Gadwall and Mearns’s Quail. Thankfully, this particular argument, at least, has been laid to rest, but it leads McAtee to end with this suggestion: “A compromise that would seem to offer a way out to adherents of both sides of the controversy would be to omit all personal references in standard vernacular names.” McAtee is thus the first ornithologist I could find to suggest abolishing eponymous names — and it was all because of an argument about grammar.
Eugene Eisenmann and Hustace H. Poor took issue with the new AOU Checklist (surprise, surprise) and in 1946 felt the need to add their voices to the growing chorus of ornithologists complaining about the AOU’s nomenclature and proposing their own lists of rules for how birds ought to be named with their article in The Wilson Bulletin, “Suggested Principles for Vernacular Nomenclature.” Their third rule states “A species should not be formed from the name of a person. Personal names are lacking in associative value, are more difficult to remember, and are likely to be mispronounced; e.g., Holboell’s Grebe, Bewick’s Wren, Craveri’s Murrelet.” (Birders will notice that many of these problem names have already been changed in the intervening years.) They are the first ornithologists in my research who not just suggested but fully advocated abolishing all eponymous names entirely.
In 1947, B. W. Tucker and David Lack published a piece in The Auk, “Vernacular Names of Birds,” that agrees with and expands upon Eisenmann and Poor’s points. While they’re not quite as adamant about abolishing eponymous names, they suggest that “Specific names which refer to a region or a person…are less satisfactory than descriptive names, so should be avoided where a satisfactory alternative is available.”
But not everyone was so rosy on Eisenmann and Poor’s suggestions. Also in 1947, Ludlow Griscom wrote to The Wilson Bulletin, raking Eisenmann and Poor over the coals in his article “Common Sense in Common Names.” He considers the quest to give every bird a common name “psychosis.” With sneering superiority (he calls Latin Americans “atrocious” at observing nature), he proclaims that a consistent, logical schema of common names is not possible and that anyone who believes it is must know nothing about birds. While he acknowledges “All agree that Blackburnian Warbler is a dreadful name,” he claims that the alternatives are just as bad. Like McGregor, he thinks ornithologists should stick to scientific names and stop trying to untangle common names altogether.
Another response to Eisenmann, Poor, and Griscom comes from Alexander F. Skutch in his article “On the Naming of Birds” in The Wilson Bulletin in 1950. He defends common names and thinks that they should be allowed to develop naturally the same way the rest of the language does; changing names like Palm Warbler because they’re inaccurate strikes him as just as silly as telling a man named Smith to change his name because he doesn’t hold that occupation. The job of the AOU, then, would be similar to making a dictionary: They would observe and record how bird names were being used. The Blackburnian Warbler comes up again as “not particularly appropriate;” indeed he’s not much of a fan of eponyms at all, considering them “an injustice to the thousands of people who use them…in an effort to do tardy justice to the memory of some savant long since in his grave and, we hope, beyond the petty jealousies involved in priority of publication.”
The common-name argument would continue to be a sideshow in the ornithology community for the for the next seventy years, but these first few decades hit the highlights and covered the main historical arguments against eponyms:
· They’re difficult to spell and remember.
· They tell you nothing about the species.
· They dampen laypeople’s interest in nature.
· They erase local knowledge.
· They commemorate people who don’t need to be commemorated.
But the most important conclusion is that everyone hates the name “Blackburnian Warbler.”
All images via Wikimedia Commons.
Works cited:
Ingersoll, Ernest. “The Common Names of American Birds.” Bulletin of the Nuttall Ornithological Club, vol. 8, no. 2, 1883, pp. 72–78. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/24723382. Accessed 27 July 2020.
Ernest E. T. Seton. “The Popular Names of Birds.” The Auk, vol. 2, no. 3, 1885, pp. 316–317. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/4625287. Accessed 27 July 2020.
McGregor, Richard C. “A Plea for the General Use of Scientific Names.” Bulletin of the Cooper Ornithological Club, vol. 1, no. 6, 1899, pp. 114–115. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/1360830. Accessed 27 July 2020.
Grinnell, Joseph. “Against the General Use of Scientific Names.” The Condor, vol. 2, no. 1, 1900, pp. 20–21. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/1361154. Accessed 27 July 2020.
Dwight, Jonathan. “The Popular Names of Birds.” The Condor, vol. 11, no. 2, 1909, pp. 43–45. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/1361832. Accessed 27 July 2020.
Seton, Ernest Thompson. “On the Popular Names of Birds.” The Auk, vol. 36, no. 2, 1919, pp. 229–235. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/4073042. Accessed 27 July 2020.
McAtee, W. L. “Thoughts on English Names for Birds in the A. O. U. Check-List.” The Condor, vol. 25, no. 1, 1923, pp. 23–25. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/1362607. Accessed 27 July 2020.
Holt, Ernest G., and W. S. “A Plea for More Rational Common Names.” The Auk, vol. 41, no. 4, 1924, pp. 641–643. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/4074296. Accessed 27 July 2020.
Taverner, P. A., and Witmer Stone. “Vernacular Nomenclature.” The Auk, vol. 51, no. 2, 1934, pp. 279–281. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/4077954. Accessed 27 July 2020.
McAtee, W. L. “The Possessive in Vernacular Names.” The Auk, vol. 61, no. 2, 1944, pp. 335–337. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/4079407. Accessed 27 July 2020.
Eisenmann, Eugene, and Hustace H. Poor. “Suggested Principles for Vernacular Nomenclature.” The Wilson Bulletin, vol. 58, no. 4, 1946, pp. 210–215. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/4157523. Accessed 27 July 2020.
Tucker, B. W., and David Lack. “Vernacular Names of Birds.” The Auk, vol. 64, no. 3, 1947, pp. 498–500. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/4080435. Accessed 27 July 2020.
Griscom, Ludlow. “Common Sense in Common Names.” The Wilson Bulletin, vol. 59, no. 3, 1947, pp. 131–138. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/4157594. Accessed 27 July 2020.
Skutch, Alexander F. “On the Naming of Birds.” The Wilson Bulletin, vol. 62, no. 2, 1950, pp. 95–99. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/4157850. Accessed 27 July 2020.
Grant, Martin L. “The Origin of the Common Names of Birds.” Bios, vol. 22, no. 2, 1951, pp. 116–119. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/4605362. Accessed 27 July 2020.
Banks, Richard C., and M. Ralph Browning. “Comments on the Status of Revived Old Names for Some North American Birds.” The Auk, vol. 112, no. 3, 1995, pp. 633–648. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/4088679. Accessed 27 July 2020.
