Bird Names for Birds

The thick-billed longspur, a North American bird species whose former common English name (McCown's longspur) was changed in 2020

Bird Names for Birds is a campaign to abandon eponyms in taxonomy and honorific common names for birds in an effort to support equity, diversity and inclusion in the American birding community. The campaign, launched in June 2020 with a public petition, follows years of unsuccessful proposals to replace common names that honor anti-abolitionist and Confederate figures, or historic figures with a legacy of oppression against indigenous people. It urges the American Ornithological Society to commit to "address the issue of eponymous honors and other potentially derogatory, oppressive, or simply irrelevant holdovers in English common names".

Background

In 2018, Robert Driver, a graduate student at East Carolina University, filed a proposal to the North American Classification Committee (NACC) of the American Ornithological Society (AOS), requesting to change one of the most contentious bird names—McCown's longspur, named after Confederate general John Porter McCown. The proposal was dismissed by NACC citing the need to maintain stability in naming conventions but also deferring the matter to further discussion. With few exceptions, previous proposals to NACC to address problematic common bird names—such as the Maui parrotbill or the Inca dove—remained unsuccessful. When they did, like in the case of the long-tailed duck (formerly known as oldsquaw, a name with derogatory references to indigenous people), NACC stated that equity, diversity and inclusion considerations were not part of the decision.

In 2020, following weeks of widespread "Black Lives Matter" protests following the killing of George Floyd and calls for racial justice in the United States, Confederate monuments and memorials celebrating historic figures with a racist legacy were toppled by protesters or removed by city officials across the country. Instances of racism in the birding community and initiatives like Black Birders Week, building awareness about the challenges experienced by Black nature enthusiasts on the heels of the protests, brought a renewed sense of urgency to the issue of honorific and eponymous bird names with links to slavery.

Campaign

A long-tailed duck. The common name of the bird formerly known as oldsquaw (a term with derogatory references to indigenous people) was changed by the AOS to in 2000.

On June 22, 2020, the Bird Names for Birds campaign was launched through a letter to the American Ornithological Society, penned by ornithologists Gabriel Foley and Jordan Rutter, and co-signed by 180 other individuals. The letter emphasizes that multiple proposals to change problematic common bird names had been submitted to AOS, unsuccessfully, over the years. The co-founders of the initiative note that "honorific names cast long, dark shadows over our beloved birds and represent colonialism, racism and inequality. It is long overdue that we acknowledge the problem of such names, and it is long overdue that we should change them." Beside McCown's longspur, other common bird names with problematic eponymous or honorific references mentioned by the campaign include: Bachman's sparrow, Townsend's warbler, Bendire's thrasher and Hammond's flycatcher. By August 2020, over 2,300 individuals had signed the petition, which received formal support by the American Bird Conservancy.

On July 24, 2020, a second proposal to change the McCown's longspur's name was submitted to NACC by Robert Driver and by NACC chair and Smithsonian researcher Terry Chesser, after consulting with the AOS Diversity and Inclusion Committee.

Response

On July 8, 2020, AOS president Kathy Martin announced that the society's leadership was developing "new society-level policies in our nomenclature", and that next steps would be formally announced during the 2020 edition of the society's annual conference. On August 7, 2020, NACC announced the decision to change the common name of Rhynchophanes mccownii from McCown's longspur to thick-billed longspur, as a literal translation of its genus name, Rhynchophanes, following a unanimous vote. The organizers of the Bird Names for Birds campaign welcomed the decision, but emphasized the need to address other 149 common bird names that they consider equally problematic.

Precedents

Proposals to address the controversial legacy of eponyms in science have been made in a variety of disciplines. Medical eponyms associated with Nazi human experimentation or Nazi politics have long fallen out of favor or have been selectively deprecated by the medical community. Since 2007, the Israel Medical Association Journal and European Neurology have maintained lists of eponyms honoring Nazis and their collaborators. Some physicians have argued the use of eponyms in the medical nomenclature should be discontinued altogether, while others have argued that such eponyms should be retained as "a means of conveying immortal dishonor."

In 2015 the Swedish Ornithological Society completed its first global list of over 10,000 Swedish bird names and, through the process, decided to remove a number of potentially offensive names it had identified.

The 2020 protests against racism further encouraged academic institutions and scholarly societies to remove offensive references from journal names or academic prizes. In August 2020, NASA announced the decision to deprecate widely used nicknames for a number of astronomical objects, acknowledging that "they are not only insensitive, but can be actively harmful." In a press release, the agency noted that Eskimo is "widely viewed as a colonial term with a racist history, imposed on the Indigenous people of Arctic regions." The decision established that planetary nebula NGC 2392, historically known as the "Eskimo Nebula", among other astronomical objects, should be uniquely referred to by their catalog numbers.

See also

• Black Birders Week

External links

• Official website
• List of North American Eponymous and Honorific English Common Bird Names maintained by Bird Names for Birds.