Dozens of birds to be renamed to shun racism

[bif]

Very cool article:

https://www.yahoo.com/news/dozens-birds-renamed-effort-shun-130308239.html?.tsrc=fp_deeplink

I can already hear the right-wingers screaming about what a woke thing this is.

[Farmer-Rick]

1. Some of the honorific names attached to birds

Were names of racist people. Glad to see them gone. Those names were the most difficult to remember. And I really like the idea of giving the birds more descriptive names.

I name my chickens based on their color, feather patterns and age. It makes it easier to count them.

[Bettie]

2. Yout wait until after they've hatched, right?

I hear it is better to count your chickens after hatching, rather than before!

Sorry....couldn't resist.

[Farmer-Rick]

4. Hehe

Very funny 🤣

[Wingus Dingus]

3. Dumb.

[AllyCat]

38. Care to elaborate on why you think this?

[Wingus Dingus]

41. #1--I'll bet there's very few truly offensive bird names.

(quietly change the really really bad ones if necessary, don't need to trumpet it)

#2--Bird names are not why black people or any other groups of people aren't watching birds.

#3--Smacks of empty virtue signaling.

#4--I don't like name changes unless there's a clear and compelling reason to do it.

[AllyCat]

42. If we don't say why, we will just repeat the mistake later.

That’s my opinion. I’m tired of everything named after old, dead white guys. Descriptive names are appealing to anyone learning about birds or trees or history.

For instance a manta ray is a sea tortilla

[carpetbagger]

72. Welcome to DU.

I don't think Winfield Scott's mention in public discourse is diminished by changing the common name of a bird to something more descriptive, like Yucca Oriole, which I've seen proposed. There's an element of "why are we honoring enslavers and such in science", but the AOS decision was more in line with a larger movement away from naming organisms and landmarks after people who stumble upon and their leaders. So as such it also includes folks like Scott, Couch, and Hammond among others, who fought (such as it is, Scott couldn't mount a horse by 1861 and Hammond was the Army Surgeon General) for the Union in the war that ended official slavery.

[Valdosta]

92. Indeed.

This is different in kind from taking down statues of general Lee.
Those statues honor what he did for the bad guy losers.

Whereas birds named for the one who first described them is nothing of the sort.

[usonian]

5. Jim Crow must go.

Just saying.

[RobinA]

6. I'm Not A Right Winger

and I'm not going to scream about it, but this is a quintessential BS woke thing. Very performative. They could have accomplished the same thing by saying, "Hey, we're changing bird names to make them more descriptive and therefore easier to remember" and no one would have thought twice. But instead they went for the diversity points by making that the point.

Do they honestly think that renaming a McKown's longspur because the discoverer of that bird later became a Confederate general is going to attract African Americans to bird watching? Do birders even know who McKown was? Do African Americans not get into birding because some birds are named after not nice people? As a female, I don't research the pasts of every person who has ever had a bird named after him to see what his opinions of women were. Similarly, I sure African Americans have better things to do than research what side of the Civil War various bird-discoverers were on.

What nonsense.

[Wingus Dingus]

7. Well, I have boobies/tits, and I DEMAND THEY STOP NAMING

BIRDS AFTER MY LADY BITS OR I CAN'T ENJOY NATURE ANYMORE!!11!

[maxrandb]

9. One of my favorites that often visit the birdfeeder

is the "Tufted Tit Mouse"

Don't know how to post images on DU, but they are cute birds.

https://images.app.goo.gl/rnbbJSkHvSQxnynZA

[Wingus Dingus]

10. Yes, they are adorable--I don't live in the eastern US anymore but

my parents still do, and they get titmice visits on their feeders.

[Chautauquas]

13. Last spring I was sitting on my deck

When a Tufted Tit Mouse landed on my arm. It hopped up onto my shoulder and then onto my head where it yanked 3 or 4 strands of hair out of my scalp before flying away. A few minutes later it returned, landed on my wife's head and yanked out a few strands of her hair. We were happy to contribute to it's nesting efforts.

[Deminpenn]

90. That's both funny and interesting

It must have taken a lot of discipline not to have fliched while the bird was pulling out hair.

[Wednesdays]

12. The word "tit" (bird) has always been around

The word "tit" referring to lady parts is just a bastardization of the word "teat" (as are derivations like "tatas," etc.).

[whopis01]

73. Actually teat derives from tit (or titt)

In Old English tit (or titt) meant breast or nipple. In Middle English this has evolved to teat. Its older origins are Germanic and Greek.

Tit referring to a bird came later, around the mid 16th century. It derives from Scandinavian and Icelandic words. Titlingur was the Icelandic word for sparrow.

[Sympthsical]

20. We get turkey vultures

Or as I like to call them the Byzantine Terrors.

No one around me gets it, and I am ok with that.

[Wingus Dingus]

29. You don't like turkey vultures? Nature's little undertakers?

I think they're cool! Also, I'm not the brightest, so you have to explain "Byzantine terrors" to me as well.

[Sympthsical]

33. They're really neat

That wingspan is insane. Sometimes I see them leering at me from the trees when walking.



One time, I saw a squirrel tail on the sidewalk. No squirrel. Just the tail. I knew.

But the thing is, I live next to a vineyard. For whatever reason, sometimes a bunch of them will just . . . chill there on the posts. I'm not sure what they're doing. Just kind of . . . there. Watching. So much watching. And by a few, I mean several dozen. Several dozen giant six-foot wingspan birds. Watching you en masse.

It's unsettling.

(Modern Turkey used to be the Byzantine empire)

[Wingus Dingus]

37. Duh, I didn't make that connection with Byzantine empire--whoosh, right over my head.

I get them landing on and across the road from me (I'm bordered by empty ranch land) -- Always pulling out my binoculars to satisfy my morbid curiosity and see what got hit, or mangled by coyotes--although vultures migrate south in the winter where I live in Colorado.

[LeftInTX]

75. There was an illegal dump near our old house

People were dumping meat...

I took my kid and we watched vultures.

We have both black and turkey vultures here. Black vultures seem more common in winter. We have alot of them. They perch on street lights and radio towers etc. The local radio tower at the park is full of them because it's on a cliff overlooking a floodplain. Turkey vultures are solitaire and fly so high. We also have Caracaras, which are often in pairs. It's a falcon/mexican eagle, but is considered a scavenger.

[Wingus Dingus]

77. I'm not sure I've ever seen a black vulture, but I definitely

look for Crested Caracaras when I go to southern New Mexico and Arizona--haven't seen any yet.

[LeftInTX]

79. They're often in pairs and tend to be in trees. (Kinda like hawks)

[Wingus Dingus]

81. Thanks, I will keep that in mind.

[a kennedy]

62. I love watching them soar, they hardly ever flap their wings, they just use the wind

currents to fly, so effortlessly they just float.

[LeftInTX]

61. You mean they're not Turkiye Vultures?

I think we should change the official name of all turkeys to turkiyes, just to irk Turkey, which switched it's name from Turkey to Turkiye because it didn't want to be associated with an American bird. So, let's just call them turkiyes just to offend those Byzantine Terrors.

[carpetbagger]

78. Funny story of turkeys...

They got the name by the early English settlers who knew them as a Turk product. The birds were traded from Mesoamerica at contact to West Africa, across Africa and then to Egypt (part of the Ottoman Empire, hence Turkey) where they were raised and exported to Europe.

[Disaffected]

21. The best part is

Great Tits and Lesser Tits.

[Wingus Dingus]

23. My juvenile self will never stop giggling at that.

[Walleye]

39. My breast surgeon doctor has a beautiful illustration hanging on her wall of the waiting room

A small flock of shorebirds, looking at the caption you see they are called blue-footed boobies. I laugh every time I see that

[Wingus Dingus]

43. How can you NOT laugh?

I dig her sense of humor.

[Scrivener7]

44. The example they give is a bird named for a Confederate general. Do you object to changing that?

[Wingus Dingus]

52. If it really upsets people, I don't have a problem with it.

But there has to be a pretty good reason why a name is deemed unacceptable, once it's been accepted into common language and usage. Like, I would say, no "Stalin's Sparrow". Totally change that one.

[WhiskeyGrinder]

11. They started by considering removing names of terrible people, and then expanded the idea to make names more

descriptive. How is that performative?

[bif]

16. I've said this before...

I could post the word "the" and several people would jump all over me for saying it. People just love to argue here. Ridiculous.

[Brenda]

70. No fucking shit. nt

[jfz9580m]

17. I kinda agree

I am well to the left, but sometimes I don’t get some of this stuff. To the extent that I am pretty live-and-let-live I figure if someone finds this stuff useful, it is not for me to harangue them-it is usually fairly low power people whatever the rw narrative is.

The bigger problem is that I feel that people who are very vocal about race and gender from the left are taken as representative of say all non-white, left wing women (a group I belong to). And that I don’t like.

It is tricky because if one basically does not really get this stuff as a nonwhite female, a right wing culture warrior or a type of sleazy contrarian (Jonathan Haidt/Steven Pinker/Yasha Mounck/the IDW) assumes you are agreeing with them, which is definitely not the case!

I don’t feel one has to take one of the typically two or three default positions out there on these things. I generally think that this is performative.Otoh the rw outrage over these things is also bs. As is whatever Jonathan Haidt represents(in my book anyway).

What I do think is that this stuff does take up more airtime from both sides than more practical issues that require real and not symbolic change. I don’t buy that “we can walk and chew gum stuff” anymore. Everything is finite.

A) it does suck up a lot of airtime and B) While Ramaswamy’s right wing outrage over “Woke Inc” is drivel, it is true that these things are pushed from the business community woke by people who don’t want any serious changes to the status quo (unlike say the degrowth movement or anti capitalist movements or the people fighting for abortion rights). On the left this is the politics of the Barbie movie: 1) it of interest to right wing nutcases for faux outrage as they would prefer anything to discussion of anything serious; 2) it is the sort of toothless change that a type of sleazy business person likes and 3) there is the actual left that does buy into this stuff sincerely enough I am guessing..whereas from the same general area of the left, I don’t buy it. I don’t think it makes anything better and it may even backfire sometimes.

I mean we may no longer gender manholes
-I mean potholes....otoh Roe v Wade was overturned. I see so little discussion of abortion sometimes on that type of left..which was what made me sour on it. How can one of the biggest human rights issues of this era be a footnote?

We get a lot of symbolic and illusory drivel while in every real way we are getting fucked over :-/.

[AllyCat]

40. Not nonsense. As the article states, these are verbal statues

To some horrible people. More descriptive names are appealing to anyone learning about birds while getting rid of racist names.

I’m tired of honoring white dudes.

We need to say why we are getting rid of the names so we don’t do it again.

[Wingus Dingus]

45. We can't honor white dudes?

Not even Lewis and Clark?

[AllyCat]

46. Straw man argument

(Was straw man white?)

[Wingus Dingus]

49. "I'm tired of honoring white dudes".

[AllyCat]

55. I didn't say we can't.

Just tired of them getting all the props and women and BIPOC, LGBTQ getting marginalized.

[WhiskeyGrinder]

8. This is a fantastic change. K&R

[Wingus Dingus]

14. On the topic of encouraging black birdwatchers, there's this comedy bit I love:

?si=0giMo0I0Zy_OvH-S

We can ALL enjoy red-chested robins. And trail mix.

[lpbk2713]

15. Now if someone could only do something about Uranus.

[Wingus Dingus]

18. They tried to get us to call it YOUR-uh-nus...

but that ain't sticking yet...

[Wednesdays]

24. That's just as bad.

It reminds one of pee.

I prefer to go back to the original Greek: oo-RAH-noos.

[Wingus Dingus]

26. Yeah, it's weird. I can't imagine calling it that.

OoorAHnooos is too foreign-y for us in 'Murka, where we butcher French place names like there's no tomorrow.

[Jedi Guy]

48. "...where we butcher French place names like there's no tomorrow."

When I was about six, my family moved to southern Mississippi. A little east of our town, between us and Pascagoula, was a small town called Gautier, pronounced, "GO-shay." My parents, being from the Midwest, pronounced it, "GO-tee-yay."

They never lived that one down. We left Mississippi in late 1998 and I still tease them about it sometimes.

[Wingus Dingus]

51. LOL, your poor parents, trying to be accurate.

In Pennsylvania, there's a town named DuBois. Yep, it's not doo-BWAHH. It's DOOO-BOYS.

[Jedi Guy]

53. DOOO-BOYS, amazing.

When we left Mississippi and moved to Tucson, it turned out that the largest town between there and Phoenix is Casa Grande. My Dad was a linguist in the Air Force way back when and had learned Spanish, so he pronounced it correctly as "CAH-sa GRAHN-day."

As it turns out, the locals (at least the Anglos) pronounce it, "CASS-a GRAND."

[Wingus Dingus]

54. Welp, today I learned to stop calling it "Casa Grand-ay" when

I go to Arizona...

[Jedi Guy]

56. :)

[Sympthsical]

76. Sounds like it's just some town that they used to kno----oow

Midwesterner. After fourteen years, me and California are still a thing.

I just learned last week that San "Ruh-fell" and San Rafael are the same place.

I thought they were different towns. There's a town next to me called Suisun. How do you think it's pronounced? Well, you're wrong.

[Wingus Dingus]

80. Gotye, I remember that guy! Rah-fay-EL is not the right pronunciation?

Suisun--my guess is "Susan" but I'll bet that's not it.

[3catwoman3]

59. This is the first time I heard about the original Greek...

…pronunciation. I like it.

[3catwoman3]

58. It sounds like "urine us."

Not an improvement.

[Xavier Breath]

19. I hope they won't feel it necessary to change the name

of the full-throated, red-necked chickenhawk. Hear a lot of them like to cluster near the banks of the Potomac.

[whathehell]

22. Well, why not?

It does insult those who are "red of neck", doesn't it?

[Xavier Breath]

27. Welp, you have a point.

No sense impugning this poor fellow.

[whathehell]

94. Thank you..

You are correct, even though he is a funny looking little guy.

[ForgedCrank]

25. I don't

really much give a damn what right-wing idiots think.
I also don't much care what birds are called, but this is pretty dang stupid.

[bif]

28. As an example of a misnamed bird

The Kirtland's Warbler. It's named after the fellow who discovered it. The bird only nests in Michigan and Central America. It really should be called the Michigan Warbler. (Not to mention, Kirtland was an Ohioan).

[Wingus Dingus]

30. OK but was Kirtland a notoriously bad dude?

If not, let Mr. Kirtland have his bird. Scientific discoveries are named after people all the time. Are we going to re-name Clark's Nutcracker too? Who wants to take away William Clark's bird?

[WhiskeyGrinder]

47. .

Scientific discoveries are named after people all the time.

Should they be?

Who wants to take away William Clark's bird?

Not a fan of things being named after slave owners, myself.

[LauraInLA]

82. It should be the Central American warbler ;). EOM

[Wonder Why]

31. They should be numbered. Bird-1, Bird-2, Bird-3,... "Look, it's a 29." "No, it's a 666. Better call Johnson's wife."

"She'll take care of it. She'll exercise it."

"That's exorcise. But I just looked it up in my Bird Number Guide. We're both wrong. It's a 69!"

"Oh, No! Shoot the Bird. Shoot the Bird!"

"She's gonna get mad if you do that to her! And, you're the president of the Bird Numbering Society so Johnson will impeach you."

[Dirty Socialist]

32. The Red-necked Grebe

Will now be called the Appalachian Grebe, even though it’s mostly a western bird

[Walleye]

34. So I guess we can still keep the names Whip-poor-Will and Bob White

I like when a bird name incorporates the sound of their song. Or is descriptive like white throated sparrow, you know what that is right away

[Voltaire2]

64. What if the etymology is that a man named Bob White named the bird? nt.

[TreasonousBastard]

35. The article does mention the failed renaming of...

The Audubon Society, but doesn't bother mentioning that Audubon hisself was a slave owner and minor trader.

[Lokilooney]

87. Rules for thee but not for me

Of course I've never been a fan of renaming things because the person doesn't encapsulate 100% of values as of now at exactly November 1st 2023 at, lets see what time is it...10:51pm CDT. We better rename the Hippocratic oath, as naming something after someone with 5th century BC values is very problematic...

[Disaffected]

36. I for one think

the Common Merganser should also be renamed to save the poor creature further embarrassment (and folks continually asking them how it's spelt).

[LeftInTX]

50. I looked at the list...They are proposing naming the common names, not scientific names.

Common names don't really count. It's the scientific name that matters.

Wandering J__ is a popular plant. A purple variety does very well in South Texas. And the ultimate pass along plant. It did so well, they decided to market it and sell it. The nurseries and catalogs just changed the name to "Purple Heart". The scientific name remained the same although eventually it all of them were put in the same genus as spiderworts.

Tradescantia zebrina, the common houseplant formerly known as Zebrina pendula...This one is now known was Wandering Dude

Tradescantia pallida, commonly known as Purple Heart

[DBoon]

57. "The Wandering Dude"?

[LeftInTX]

60. Yep... the dudes of all colors and creeds will wander!

[Voltaire2]

63. What they are doing is getting rid of all honorific names, because those are stupid.

Not just the people you know little or nothing about who happened to also be horrible slave traders or worse, not just all the birds you've never heard of and didn't give a shit about until you reacted to the headline.

Read the article.

The people who actually care about birds - scientists and hobbiests - want this change because honorific names are idiotic. There are already formal scientific names, this change just adjusts the common names to also be descriptive. It's a good thing.

[Wingus Dingus]

65. I like how you assume that nobody here on DU "actually cares about birds".

I actually care about birds, I am a bird hobbyist of sorts, and I still think it's mostly pointless virtue signaling/wokeness for the sake of woke to change names that are in widespread common usage, are in countless printed bird books and guides already, and for the most part haven't been known to upset people. Except for the Andean Cock of the Rock. That's just pornographic.

[carpetbagger]

83. Andean Cock of the Rock is a fabulous drag queen of a bird.

I've seen them in Ecuador.

Although I hope they don't rename the birds after obscure field marks, I think it's better now than in another hundred years. There are many better permanent names for common plants and animals, and it's the eponymous naming that stands out as the anomaly, with organisms not bearing common names of people before or after the several decades of western expansion in the 19th century. .

[Wingus Dingus]

85. I've only seen them in photos, but they are magnificent looking.

As far as naming birds after people, just recently--2016--the scrub jays of the west were split into two species, the California scrub jay and the Woodhouse's scrub jay (after naturalist Samuel Woodhouse). That was only 7 years ago. Guess they're going to rename it again, just to avoid people's surnames? Seems very silly to me.

[carpetbagger]

91. The eponym goes back to the 1800s.

I think it was one of the species described by Baird at the Smithsonian based on army specimens.

[Voltaire2]

86. I might have exaggerated for dramatic effect.

But not by a lot.

[RobinA]

93. I Actually Care

about birds and I agree with you completely. Pointless and meaningless. I'm just happy they didn't cancel Audubon when that move was afoot.

[WhiskeyGrinder]

68. Whew, some of the replies in this thread.

[lame54]

69. We must stop this "wokeism" and preserve their real names...

Before we blow them out of the sky

[jfz9580m]

89. !

That was great..
Nicely done lame54..
(Not to mention destroy their habitats with a nice giant mall selling plastic shit made in sweatshops the world over or with yet another overcrowded urban jungle where wage slaves sweat over bullshit jobs).

[dweller]

71. Damn

Tough breaks Larry
😐


✌🏻

[prodigitalson]

84. the Valkyrie? some pretty hitlerian associations, there

[David__77]

88. Nothing wrong with that.

[hunter]

96. We should just stick with the names Adam and maybe later his "helper" Eve gave them...

... as later inventoried by Noah and his family on the Ark.

And Adam gave names to all cattle, and to the fowl of the air, and to every beast of the field; but for Adam there was not found an help meet for him. Genesis 2:20

My personal take is that the author of that was possibly being sarcastic too. Name all the animals? Are you fucking kidding me?

Naming all the animals really wasn't a possibility before Carl Linnaeus applied eighteenth century accounting technology to the task.

Personally, I'd like to know what names people who lived here in the Americas gave these birds before the European invasion. I'm certain these birds had Native American names. Naming is what humans do.

[newdayneeded]

97. Gosh, let's not stop there....

Halley's comet will now have to be renamed white ball comet.