Recent Highlights

Bird Names

Cadena, C. D. et al. 2023. Ad Hoc English Bird Names Committee Recommendations for Council of the American Ornithological Society (AOS). Report to AOS. November 1, 2023.

Hampton, S.C. 2023. From a Native perspective, bird names are being decolonized. Native Hoop 132: Dec 2023.

See also my blog posts:

The trials of John P. McCown: Why the case-by-case approach is already dead. The Cottonwood Post, February 28, 2024.

The fun part: New bird names. The Cottonwood Post, May 14, 2022. Focuses on 82 species, providing scientific and historic names, as well as their names in other languages.

Reflections of a Native birder: The one Indian killer bird name I really have trouble with. Memories of the People, June 6, 2021.

Erasure, white fragility, and the verbal monuments of bird names: Should we hold people in the past accountable to present-day mores? Memories of the People, June 4, 2021.

Honorific bird names facts and figures. The Cottonwood Post, May 30, 2021. Provides background on when, where, and by and for whom all these names came from. See the chart below.

Featured in:

American Birding Podcast. January 4, 2024. Inside the Bird Name Committee.

Ed Yong’s article in The Atlantic. May 25, 2023. The Fight Over Animal Names Has Reached a New Extreme.

Sierra Club Magazine. April 27, 2024. What’s in a bird name? By Julia Zarankin.

High Country News. January 5, 2024. (Re)name that bird! Now’s your chance.

The Bird Banter Podcast. December 11, 2023. The Bird Banter Podcast #166 with Steve Hampton, Additional Info. (This includes discussion of other birding topics as well; the bird names discussion starts at 14:10.)

The Nature Conservancy Magazine. August 25, 2023. The Movement to Rename Species. By Suzanne Goldsmith.

Audubon Magazine. Summer 2022. What’s in a bird name? By Ariana Remmel.

BirdNote podcast. June 1, 2022. Bring Birds Back: Season 2, Episode 3. What’s in a Name?

Science News. August 25, 2021. Racism lurks in names given to plants and animals. That’s starting to change. By Jaime Chambers.