Bird names are one of the treasures of the English language. Some are onomatopoeic, like chickadee, bobolink, and dickcissel. Some are extravagantly latinate, like ferruginous hawk, olivaceous flycatcher, or flammulated owl. Some are just very, very old. Our Anglo-Saxon ancestors were talking about swans, sparrows, and ravens when William the Conqueror was a boy.
I spent hours as a child sitting in the backseat of the car poring over Roger Tory Peterson’s field guide as our family drove to and from birdwatching excursions. I wanted to grow up to be an ornithologist. (“No, honey, it’s pronounced ‘orthodontist,’” the nice ladies back in North Carolina used to tell me.) Part of the romance was that the names were not boring and descriptive. Whip-poor-will, bristle-thighed curlew, tawny frogmouth, Blackburnian warbler—named, incidentally, after a woman, naturalist Anna Blackburne—these were names that it was a pleasure to write down in my personal life list.
One of the first bird names on the chopping block is the oldsquaw, a type of duck described by guidebooks as “noisy and garrulous.” Other names for it include oldwife, old granny, Aunt Huldy, scoldenore, and scolder. Its Cree name was Hah-ha-way, which suggests that names alluding to its shrill call at least meet the criterion of being descriptive. Certainly more so than the woke campaigners’ preferred name, “long-tailed duck,” which is what they call the duck in England.
Not all bird names are derived from old white men. The chachalaca gets its name from the Nahuatl verb meaning “to chatter.” Anhinga is a Brazilian Tupi word. But even if they were, so what? It’s a lexicon worth preserving for the richness of its stories. Whooping cough has been eradicated but its echoes live on in the cry of the whooping crane. Zenaida doves were named by Charles Lucien Bonaparte, the emperor’s nephew, during his family’s exile in Pennsylvania. He wanted to honor his wife, Princess Zenaide, by linking her name with birds that symbolize conjugal bliss. Isn’t that better than anything a woke committee could come up with?
Ornithologist Dr. Elliott Coues, who cofounded the AOS in 1883, preferred strict literalism in bird names. He objected to calling large black shorebirds “oystercatchers” on the grounds that “oyster opener would be a better name, as oysters do not run fast.” Coues’s colleagues ignored his narrow-minded carping back then, and the name “oystercatcher” survived to be logged in my life list when I was 11. To preserve the richness of American bird names for future generations, today’s politically correct literalists deserve the same brushoff.