Birders argue over plan to change dozens of bird names

Say goodbye to Bachman’s Sparrow, Scott’s Oriole and Townsend’s Warbler. Those three birds are among a half-dozen that will get renamed first under a plan by the American Ornithological Society to do away with common bird names that honor people.

But whether or not the society will keep going after that, and get rid of all eponymous bird names, remains to be seen.

Last year, the society announced a plan to do just that. The goal was to rename over a hundred North and South American birds, to purge bird names of links to racism and colonialism without having to engage in contentious and time-consuming debates about the morality of every historical figure that had ever been honored in a bird’s common name.

The sweeping move, however, surprised and upset many birders and ornithologists.

This week, opponents and proponents will get to have their say at the society’s annual meeting in Colorado, which features a forum on Thursday to discuss the bird renaming plan.

“I cannot predict what is going to happen there,” says Kenn Kaufman, an author of field guides and a fellow of the society.

He’s seen his fair share of birding controversies, like when birders debated whether they had to actually see a bird or just hear its call in order to add it to their birding life list.

This controversy, though, is in its own league, says Kaufman.

“Something at this scale, I don’t think has ever happened before,” he says. “The decision was put out there, there was a very strong reaction in some quarters, and so the initial decision might wind up being altered.”

"Verbal Statues"

On May 25, 2020, George Floyd was killed on the same day that a white woman called the police on Christian Cooper, a Black man out birding in New York, heightening awareness of social justice issues in society more generally and in birding specifically.

That year, the American Ornithological Society took action on a proposal to rename a bird that had previously been named after a high-ranking Confederate officer. McCown’s Longspur suddenly became the Thick-billed Longspur.

This renaming proposal had been rejected a couple years earlier, but times had changed. Confederate statues and monuments were coming down in cities and towns.

And a group called Bird Names For Birds was urging the society to do more to address problematic bird names, likening eponymous common names to “verbal statues.”

After forming an ad hoc committee to study the issue and make recommendations, the society announced its plan to rename all birds named after people, along with changing any other names deemed offensive.

The birds would get new names selected to highlight each bird’s key features.

"Names have power and power can be for the good or it can be for the bad," society president Colleen Handel told NPR at the time. "We want these names to be powerful in a really good way."

Kaufman says to him, the arguments for just renaming all of these birds made a lot of sense.

Consider Clark’s nutcracker, he says, which is named for William Clark of the Lewis and Clark expedition. Some consider Clark to be a great American hero, says Kaufman, but he also kept a man named York in slavery and refused his pleas for freedom.

“The arguments about whether or not he deserves to have a bird named for him,” says Kaufman, “could get to be pretty dicey.”

Canceling Heroes

But this spring, over six thousand people signed a petition urging the society to reconsider its plan, saying it should use a case-by-case method.

This was followed by a resolution signed by over two hundred of the society’s own fellows. These ornithologists said that while the society could do a pilot project to change clearly offensive bird names, it should hold off on moving beyond that until it had better consulted with its members, with measures such as an opinion poll.

“An important point here is that changing bird names sends a stronger message if the names are restricted to offensive names rather than replacing all eponymous names,” says Steven Beissinger, professor emeritus with the University of California, Berkeley, who helped organize the resolution.

A lot of important ornithology history is embedded in names, he says, noting that Henslow’s sparrow honors John Stevens Henslow, a mentor of Charles Darwin and a committed abolitionist. The Blackburnian warbler, meanwhile, is named after Anna Blackburne, a pioneering female scientist of the 18th century.

“This decision to get rid of eponyms also extends to Central and South American birds,” says Beissinger. “It might offend many Latin American ornithologists by canceling their heroes for whom birds have been named.”

He points out that Juan Gundlach, considered to be the father of Cuban ornithology, has a hawk named after him, and there’s a flycatcher named after Chico Mendes, a conservationist who was murdered because of his work to preserve the Amazonian rainforest.

A Positive Process

In May, when the society announced that it had chosen six birds to rename in a pilot project, “it felt like exciting progress," a co-founder of Bird Names for Birds, Jordan Rutter, told NPR in a July email. “There was a lot of community support around it.”

But few details beyond the six birds had been provided, Rutter noted.

Handel, the society president, says that after the discussion held this week at the annual meeting, “we will be incorporating ideas and suggestions from our members into the plans for the pilot project.”

“Our members have expressed strong support for the pilot project,” Handel added. ”With everyone's help, it can serve as an enriching experience for all those who participate in it. The results of the project will then provide guideposts for our next steps.”

The six birds chosen for the pilot project seem to be ones that almost everyone could agree should be changed, says Robert Driver of Duke University.

“People who have birds named after them that are well-documented white supremacists, or grave robbers of Native American skulls, and things like this,” says Driver.

To him, selecting these six birds seems like a way for the society “to actually walk back a little bit and change some high-priority ones first and then reassess what the feeling is after these major ones are gone.”

Driver was behind that proposal to change the bird named after Confederate major general John McCown, and he says he’s come to appreciate the process the proposal went through, despite the initial rejection and all the time it took.

“To me it was a positive process, overall, and the community really got to learn about John P. McCown,” he says.

He says changing every single honorific name, in contrast, would mean that ornithologists would not be forced to confront the past in the same way.

“We don’t have to worry about what Scott did or Townsend did or Bachman did or Audubon did or whoever,” says Driver. “We’re changing them all. They’re all going.”

That’s why, even though he knows the society didn’t want to argue over every individual bird species, he personally thinks there would be some benefits if this effort ends up going bird by bird, “slowly un-turning every stone, and finding out all this history, and really diving into it.”