“The time has come for us to transform this process and redirect the focus to the birds, where it belongs,” says CEO.
(November 1, 2023)—Today the American Ornithological Society (AOS) announced that in an effort to address past wrongs and engage far more people in the enjoyment, protection, and study of birds, it will change all English bird names currently named after people within its geographic jurisdiction. The AOS will also change the process by which English names are selected for bird species. The effort will begin in 2024 and will focus initially on 70–80 bird species that occur primarily within the U.S. and Canada.
Scientific names will not be changed, but the English (NA) names will be changed to better reflect the animals, not named after people.
Three owls would be subject to name changes.
- Blakiston Fish Owl
- Verreaux Eagle Owl
- Wallace’s Scops Owl
This post already has potential to go wrong, but it can also begin some opportunities for education.
The movement of a collective of birders has been working on this for a few years, so there is lots of info about the project and its goals, and the history of the controversial figures is better documented than the owls currently named after them.
Would you guys want a writeup of all of this, or is this too political or negative for this group? I’ll respect your decision, but I’ll probably do an article to share somewhere. I just want to know if you all want this to be a SuperbOwl thing.
It’d be written from a neutral standpoint, just factual info.
I wouldn’t call it pointless. It means something to someone if these people work for years for these changes.
It obviously won’t “solve” anything, but it can let some people enjoy things a little more. In just the 3 people the owls are named after, we have one guy who, even in his day, was considered an extreme racist, one who used the military to force people into reservations, and one who did human taxidermy without consent.
Naming also has never had much in the way of guidelines, and many animals are formally “discovered” multiple times, so many already have multiple names. The Morepork has over 20 names in use today. Even more if you include other owls with Boobook as part of their name, another name then Morepork is known by, since that word is an onomatopoeia for the sound they all make.
Part of the changes being worked on will be to just stop naming new animals after people to begin with, since no one person has “discovered” any animal. It encourages naming them after characteristics of the animal itself. So Blakiston’s Fish Owl, the largest owl in the world, could be named Giant Fish Owl or Great Fish Owl. But Blakiston did a number of bad things to the animals and people of Hokkaido, Japan. Those actions have significant impact to people still living today.
And lastly scientific naming would be unchanged, because that is the real named used, determined by international committee, so that is a different process to undertake on a global scale. So for any professional scientific study, names won’t be a problem.
Yeah, I get it, I do. I’m just not convinced it’s worth doing. Like you said, for some critters, the list of names is already absurd. Adding another just to eradicate a name that most people looking up the bird would also have to look up to even know they were horrible people just seems like a waste of time, resources, and attention.
If anything, just focusing on wider public awareness of scientific names would be a more efficient way of reaching the same goal.
I dunno, maybe I’m not in touch with the people the current names impact, maybe it’s a bigger deal than I’m aware of.
I appreciate you saying that. I’ve had a number of things in my life I couldn’t really understand until I met people affected by them and got better perspective on the issue.
I only looked up the owls on the list, and they are pretty obscure names, and obscure owls. You’d never find either without looking. But people are debating removing Audubon’s name from things, which is a huge name for anyone interested in birds. Some of these guys did do a lot of amazing things, but also some really negative things. But the project goal isn’t really too pick and choose who’s good or bad, just not to name any animal after a human. We’re all fallible, so just give it an animal name, not a human one.
Thank you for being level headed about all this though. It’s been interesting watching the down votes flowing through this thread, with it being worded as civilly as possible.