The North American birding community has been in a state of turmoil over birds named after people. I’m not American, nor Canadian, but I have lived in Canada on and off and I frequently visit and bird in North America. I subscribe to several birding podcasts where the topic of renaming has been discussed, and birding friends have sent me links to a change.org petition, objecting to the American Ornithological Society (AOS) decision to revisit and rename all eponyms on the North American bird list. I did not sign it, although I do have some qualms about how the AOS is going about this matter.
I sympathise with the motives and reasoning of that segment of the birding community that has called for the renaming exercise. Some unsavoury 19thCentury characters stand out in the 80 or so eponymous bird names on the AOS list, including names of people associated with slavery and mistreatment of first nations people. These bird names trigger strong negative feelings among some birders, and they have spoken up loudly about this in recent times. I take their word for the depth of their sentiments, and I respect their feelings.
The controversies over naming within the North American birding community have gone beyond bird names, encompassing in their scope the naming of the Audubon Society. Audubon the man was connected with slavery and has been heavily criticised for his practices as a scientist, including plagiarism. The Audubon Society has decided to retain his name in theirs, but some chapters – Seattle, Chicago, Detroit and others – have chosen to rename themselves. Audubon’s Warbler would be clearly in the sights of the eponym-renaming exercise but unfortunately the same opt-out solution would not be available.
The call for renaming is also part of a wider trend in the USA to rename streets, monuments, military bases and so on. Birding is not impervious to the wider social and political movement to reckon with the USA’s fraught inter-racial and settler past and its legacies. So, too, with the backlash. Resentments that these ‘woke’ elements have intruded on familiar traditions and unexamined legacies in the worlds of birding and ornithology mirror a wider reactionary moment in American political life. The re-visiting and the backlash have generated unhelpful extremes of polarisation across the board.
But this is only part of the story. The turmoil over bird eponyms is not simply a relatively small part of a wider culture war. Aside from wishing to change names that hurt, offend and discourage members of the birding community and potential new recruits, proponents of change argue that prioritising names that help with ID, or that reflect the lived experience of birds and our relations with them in today’s world, would be more appealing and could make communication of the case for learning about, caring for and conserving birds more persuasive. There is a general argument to be made against all eponyms, not just the distasteful ones.
The choice of whom to name a bird for is usually made as a reward or an honour. Most still-current bird eponyms originate from the 19th Century. Long dead dignities, friends and patrons (and some of their wives, sisters and daughters) are celebrated, as well as scientists. These names stay alive beyond their historical moment. Perhaps the significance and relevance of the named dignitary or scientist also lives on, but often this is not the case. The name enters the language, with the original intent and significance often forgotten, or interpreted in new ways as time passes.
We accept the currency of many of these bird names in large part because we tend to prefer the familiar. In some cases we may share or appreciate the meanings originally signalled by them, but this brings some extraneous (including political) considerations to play. And the significance of many eponyms is completely lost on most of us, as in the case of (to pick a random example) Belcher’s Gull. Who was that guy, Belcher? And what did he have to do with Gulls?
Birds deserve more consideration than this. Naming a species after a person is, among other things, an act of possession. It is a telling symbol of the way we too often treat nature more generally, as a means first and foremost of satisfying our interests and desires. The very fact we are now arguing about bird eponyms is a case of this. Common bird names in everyday use should celebrate nature, not a somewhat random selection of long dead people. Those who bestow these names today should also have this in mind, more than how much the named person deserves an honour. There are other ways to achieve that end.
Common bird names should help us recognise, treasure, and empathise with the natural world. They should, above all, be descriptive of some aspect of the bird as we encounter it. Vernacular bird names typically do this admirably. In southern China, the Masked Laughingthrush is named by the locals ‘The Seven Sisters’, because these smart-looking birds bustle around the village in large family groups engaging in loud, argumentative but cheerful conversation and play. Scientist may baulk at the anthropomorphism in such a name, and some sisters may object to the gender typecasting, but they would have to agree that the name brings the bird to life and engages the observer with a memorable association – not that this means I am suggesting we adopt this as the English name, its existing name is fine.
As for Belcher’s Gull, the name evokes or describes next to nothing about the Gull. Sir Edward Belcher (1799-1877) did at least have an association during his naval career with the bird’s geographic range, as he surveyed the Pacific coast of South America and probably encountered these Gulls on his travels. But best not to dig too deep into his life and career: Sir Edward, born in Nova Scotia, was a minor figure in British Imperial history, a surveyor of conquered lands, a notorious martinet as a ship’s captain and a failed naval expeditioner, whose wife legally separated from him claiming that he twice infected her with venereal disease. His services to the British Empire are celebrated in street names in Hong Kong, where he was the first in 1841 to survey the harbour for the British. A Belcher’s Street in Kennedy Town may be OK, but as to putting his name to a bird – no, thank you.
Admittedly, a good number of non-eponymous common bird names also do a bad job. The genus of tiny, green phylloscopus warblers, most of them with white or cream wing bars, includes several species with almost perversely , unhelpful names, for example Two-barred Warbler and Greenish Warbler. Indeed, so subtle are the readily observable differences between some species – including many in this family – that descriptive names based on appearance don’t work very well. But if appearance doesn’t help, we can turn to song (in the case of Cisticolas – Zitting, Rattling, Trilling, Bubbling, Churring and so on…) and habitat (desert, mountain, alpine, marsh, woodland etc). Onomatopoeic names, such as Whip-poor-will, are among the popular favourites.
Resort to geographic labels relating to a species’ residency is a convenient way out in other cases. On the Andaman and Nicobar Islands there are twenty-eight endemic birds, of which twenty-four are unimaginatively named after one of these island groups. One is the Andaman Scops Owl – there are around fifty species of Scops Owl with similar names based on their home patch (including also a Nicobar Scops Owl). At least, these names don’t arouse controversy and they do tell us something essential about the bird. The legacy of non-eponymous names is not stellar, and neither would a renaming exercise without eponyms expect to hit the sweet spot every time. But where an eponym offends or simply conveys nothing of any value or contemporary relevance, most alternatives would be an improvement.
A commonly advanced argument for not doing away with eponymous bird names is that it would disrespect not only ornithology’s heritage but also present-day scientists who retain the naming privilege, and some of whose names are attached to new species in rightful celebration of their work. This latter point is, indeed a difficult and sensitive conundrum. But ornithologists and taxonomists will still own the scientific binomial, and no-one has seriously suggested that they lose that naming right. There is scope there to celebrate and honour (as in the case of Larus Belcheri).
It is of course also important that the various rules of precedence, avoidance of duplication and so on, as set out in the International Code of Zoological Nomenclature, be maintained in the binomial system, which will continue to underpin the common names erected upon it. The binomials can stay frozen in time for as long as ornithologists want, or the dictates of science allow.
It also makes some sense to preserve the history of the original binomial eponyms bestowed at the time of the first identification and classification of a species. Retaining a historical dimension within the system of scientific names reminds us, in the case of eponyms, of the individuals involved in the scientific process, the context of their times, the ways in which discoveries happened, how the science evolved (including the scandals) and so on. Changing eponyms among the common names will not mean we lose access to this history, nor that we are necessarily under-valuing it.
When it comes to conferring common names, others have a claim to participate as well as the ornithologists and other experts who have historically peopled the various naming committees. Naming would particularly benefit from the input of all those who are likely to be frequent users of the names, such as bird lovers at large, nature writers and other communicators – not to mention, dare I say, a poet or two (not to say that ornithologists may not also be poets). I was going through Australian bird names just recently and was struck by how the best ones are peppered with literary devices such as alliteration, and rolled off the tongue – Bluebonnet, Butcherbird, Willie Wagtail, Jacky Winter. Never mind that Willie Wagtail is not actually a Wagtail (it’s a Fantail); those of us who want or need to know this cope perfectly well with this anomaly.
But many bird-lovers are now at the forefront of the objectors to replacing eponyms. They like their familiar names – Cooper’s Hawk, Anna’s Hummingbird, Wilson’s Warbler and so on. Sticking with the familiar – a preference for ‘stability’ as taxonomists put it – is a valid consideration, but not to my mind a powerful one on its own in the case of common names. Common bird names should be allowed to evolve and change with the times, and with the wider cultural and social forces that shape our everyday language.
Already, within the current naming systems, common names of taxa, including eponyms, change frequently as taxonomic changes are approved by scientists. We birders may grumble about this, but we move on. In any case, nothing stops us from sticking with using our preferred names for conversations within our respective communities. I still hear birders talk of Dovekies rather than Little Auks. As we die, so might these names.
Many objectors take special aim at the process that has led to the AOS renaming decision. Reading the Council’s description of it, however, does not reveal a particularly sudden, non-transparent, irregular or undemocratic set of decision-making steps. We typically tend only to pay attention to such matters after the event, when we protest outrage to hide the fact that we didn’t take the trouble to follow what was happening in the first place. More understandably, the wholesale nature of the decision was a shock, and this has helped provoked the scale of the backlash.
But we should give some credit to the reasoning behind the AOS Council arriving at their position of committing to a wholesale renaming exercise. Their ad hoc committee, after much discussion, found it impossible to arrive at consistent, agreed criteria for selecting ‘acceptable’ from ‘unacceptable’ eponyms. If Audubon is unacceptable, what about his close friend Brewer and the birds named by Audubon after Brewer, notably Brewer’s Blackbird? An ‘ad hoc committee’ is not the place to make such definitive judgements. The Council drew the logical conclusion that they should commit to a wholesale renaming of all eponyms, without exception, through a new process..
Hopefully, some political nous will be shown, and the process they are setting up to take this forward will take account of the strength of feeling on all sides. The process should allow for representation of all points of view, and sensible resolution of differences through face-to-face discussion (I’m an optimist!). And where there is broad agreement on retaining a particular eponym, the Council might leave it open that the need for renaming need not apply. Anna’s Hummingbird, for example, might survive such a process, unless a more apt and evocative name found broad favour. But I support the in-principal decision to proceed with a full-on renaming exercise with a new, more participatory process. Piecemeal incrementalism in the current mode would most likely drag to a halt and take so long that the bickering would be never-ending and widespread disillusionment would result.
Finally, as a non-resident of the USA, I also sympathise with the fear that this decision by the AOS will impinge on other scientific and birding communities in unwelcome ways. Americans have a talent for blundering around the world misunderstanding and offending people with their good intentions, and there is some risk of that happening in this case. Most obviously, for the naming of non-resident birds, there must be a way of reconciling specifically US grievances and issues with the wishes and preferences of its neighbours. The AOS has acknowledged this in its commentary on the renaming decision as it applies to non-resident birds. The process must be attuned to these complexities, and discussion and persuasion must be the tone of proceedings. Even Belcher’s Gull might survive such a process, and if so, we should all just accept it and move on.