Marbled godwit. Ruddy turnstone. Red-necked phalarope. Pine siskin. Who on earth is naming these birds?
Meet the American Ornithological Union, or AOU. This association of professional bird scientists was established in 1883 and was modeled after the British Ornithological Union, established 24 years earlier. The AOU does many things to advance the study of birds in North America, but there is one thing it does that delights and frustrates amateur birders. It names the birds, then sometimes renames them.
To be fair, somebody’s got to do it. Without a common standard for naming birds, chaos would ensue. The same bird would have different names across the globe. That already happens, of course. Maine’s common loon is known as the great northern diver in Britain. But at least we birders are consistent on this side of the Atlantic, thanks to the AOU.
Scientists are constantly tinkering with their understanding of species distribution and evolution. The AOU receives tons of evidence every year, asserting that certain birds should be taxonomically reclassified and that certain bird populations should be split into multiple species or lumped back into one. That’s a topic for next week. For this week, it’s enough to grasp that somebody is actually in charge of naming birds.
But long before there was an AOU, birds had names. Many of the names come from England and often reflect archaic words, especially if the bird was edible. Partridge and ptarmigan are examples. Because they gather in large flocks, shorebirds were long hunted for food, and so plover, dunlin, and curlew are more examples of Old English names. Phalarope comes from the Greek, meaning coot-footed. Dowitchers are shorebirds with a name that originates from the Iroquois tongue, probably as an imitation of its call.
More recently, whoever discovered the species got to name it. It might be named after a person or named for conspicuous behaviors, sounds, field marks or color. Some color names are particularly amusing. The hepatic tanager is a southwestern bird with a name that means liver-colored. The plumbeous vireo in western states is lead-colored. Like the scarlet tanager, the vermillion flycatcher of the southwest is just too red to be called merely red.
So it has been AOU’s job to update names whenever appropriate, such as when species are reclassified. The AOU also tries to simplify names and make them more consistent with English names used worldwide. Thus, the oldsquaw was renamed the long-tailed duck in 2000. In 2010, the greater shearwater name was shortened to great shearwater, conforming to what the rest of the world was calling it. With a change so small, why bother?
But, hey, if they’re going to tinker with simple changes, there’s a lot of names that make me scratch my head. Why is it named a northern cardinal when there is no southern cardinal? In fact, there are northern mockingbirds, shrikes, gannets, shovelers, flickers, fulmars, pintails, waterthrushes, harriers and goshawks but no southern birds of those names.
There are eastern and western bluebirds, kingbirds, screech-owls, wood-pewees and meadowlarks, so the geographical references in those proper names make sense to me. But there are eastern phoebes and no western phoebes. There are eastern towhees but no western towhees. So what clarity does the “eastern” bring?
When I was growing up, our eastern towhee was called the rufous-sided towhee, which was certainly a more helpful name to a neophyte birder. It was split into two species in 1996, and because the spotted towhee out west also has rufous sides, something had to give. But eastern towhee is the best they could come up with? Its range goes all the way to Texas, for goodness sake.
Likewise, there are western sandpipers, grebes, gulls and tanagers but no eastern-named equivalents. Along the upper Pacific coast, there is even a bird called the northwestern crow.
Some names are hopelessly obscure. The name of our pileated woodpecker refers to the crest on his pileum, which is Latin for the top of his head. Out west, the flammulated owl name refers to flame-shaped markings in the plumage.
WWBD: What Would Bob Do? I’d start by renaming the short-billed and long-billed dowitchers. These shorebirds have absurdly long bills with little actual difference in size so the current names are unhelpful. In 1983, the AOU changed the name of the short-billed marsh wren to sedge wren and shortened the long-billed marsh wren to marsh wren, so why not?
To paraphrase: “What’s in a name? A rose-breasted grosbeak would sing as sweet.”
Bob Duchesne serves as vice president of Maine Audubon’s Penobscot Valley Chapter. He developed the Maine Birding Trail, with information at mainebirdingtrail.com. He can be reached at duchesne@midmaine.com.