Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire Renaming birds

This news was posted in early November. Bumped into another article. Some of the highlights:

The American Ornithological Society announced Nov. 1 that it will rename North American birds to dissociate the animals from namesakes with problematic pasts. Several birds, such as the Townsend’s warbler and solitaire, are named after racists.


Judith Scarl, CEO and executive director of the society, said the project could help reverse longstanding biases among birders. (Biases among birders? Really?)

Audubon's shearwater, a bird named after naturalist and slaveowner John James Audubon, is among the birds on the ornithological society's list. The Audubon Society is named for the same man but decided to keep its title, a choice that led to resignations and local chapters going rogue.

(Audubon is a racist so we must change birds named after him but keep the name The Audubon Society. hypocrites!)

Susan Bell, chair of the National Audubon Society’s Board of Directors, explained the organization's name "has come to represent so much more than the work of one person." ( would think this applies to the bird names too!)


The list below, provided by Saenger, notes some of the birds that breed in, migrate to, or visit Pennsylvania that could be affected by the renaming effort:

Baird's sandpiper
Baltimore oriole (named after Lord Baltimore) The baseball club is going to love this one
Barrow's goldeneye
Blackburnian warbler
Bonaparte's gull
Brewer's blackbird
Cooper's hawk
Forster's tern
Henslow's sparrow
Lincoln's sparrow
Ross's goose
Swainson's thrush
Wilson's phalarope
Wilson's snipe
Wilson's warbler

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/t...c48ccbf7724195a01dd43641969d42&ei=13


I will most likely continue to use the bird names I learned decades ago.

I am willing to bet for most of our lifetimes when any of us looks up a newly named bird the source will also say the bird formerly known as .......

I believe I felt suitable umbrage the first two times this was brought up.

I have been working to learn the Latin names of plants and might start on birds.

Well la dee da Mister, I’ve been on a Walter Brennan movie marathon and can’t read every jot and tittle on here

I just watched this bird renaming update on my recycled 4 times passed down electronic voice over youtube vlog

Well holy schit

I too am loathe to see yet another institution go “woke” at the hands of radical progressive feminists.

OTOH after about 60 years of looking at birds I myself never bothered to look up who all those people were.

Henslow’s sparrow has always been my fallback lifer, the last NA bird to look for if all my other remaining lifers get seen.

Turns out Henslow was a pioneering Brit Naturalist whose students included Audubon himself. He was also the guy who put another student called Charles Dawin on that famous voyage (damn, now half the ‘Fire want him cancelled too 🙂).

The real Ornithological stud though was a rebellious Lowland Scot and formerly imprisoned textile mill worker called Alexander Wilson. That guy arrived on these shores without a penny to his name and subsequently covered thousands of miles on foot studying our then unexplored bird life, the true father of American Ornithology.

McCoun, formerly of longspur fame, was quietly cancelled previously without us noticing on account of some time after shooting that little bird along the Rio Grande he became a Confederate General.

McCoun’s Longspur is now officially and clumsily called the thick-billed longspur. I’m really hoping they do a better job on Henslow’s sparrow.

On the greater issue, I am against the changes but will concede I didn’t grow up looking for a Nkruma’s bunting or Gonzales’ oriole.

Ya might want to hold off on that.

Most often if the common name is named after someone that guys name appears in the scientific name with “ii” after it. No word yet if they’re going after these.

That and the fact that DNA and RNA analysis has resulted in a reshuffling and in some cases re-scientific naming many of our birds. Fer example most all of the formerly and familiarly placed in the genus “Dendroica” warblers are now in the genus “Setophaga” with a few spin off elsewhere.

Trust me, the birds don't care what you call them.

I've kept it simple. If they aren't waterfowl, grouse, robins, raptors, corvids, (magpie include), owls, they are "Dickie birds".

That came from a yarn spun by one of my college profs. They were out on some sort of non birding scientific venture, and Dick was a rabid birder, enthusing about all the small , mostly brownish birds being seen. Th others just lumped said birds into the "Dickie bird" category.

Works for me, for the last 50 years. Ignorance is not always underrated.

OK, there is a mob of black-capped chickadees in the lilac bush right now.

Little bastds are probably racist with that name.... Cute tho.

Most of the birds are under the genus LBB (little brown bird).

Dickie bird.

Baquack Obama was a former President of the birds

Leftists are like the Islamic State that tears down ancient temples....but leftists tear down confederate statues and bird names.

I'd had about enough of this woke jbird-namoing schitt about the time they started referring to old squaws a "long-tailed ducks."

If one wants to see volumes, just wait until the Botanical Congress has to rename all the plants in the world.

Well, the Long-tailed Duck scientific name is 'Clangula hyemalis' if that would make you feel better.

Yep, as I previously posted this nonsense royally pisses me off..

It's not renaming birds, it's erasing white scientists