birdsoup

Bird names can be confusing.  One reason is that birds can actually have three or more different names.  First, there is a scientific name which consists of two Latin words and follows a structured naming system established by the Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus.  The first word is the genus name, the second is the species name.

Unless you are British, most birders never use (or know) the scientific name.  They just use the common name, such as American Goldfinch or just “goldfinch” if there is only one common goldfinch species in the area.  Finally, there may be a colloquial name, a name used historically by local residents to identify a bird.  For example, my mom referred to a goldfinch as a Wild Canary.  Some birds have different colloquial names in different parts of the country.

So a single species may be identified by three different names

Scientific Name:          Turdus migratorius

Common Name:          American Robin

Colloquial Name:        Robin Red-breast

The American Ornithologists Union (AOU) is the official arbiter of both the scientific and the common name.  It maintains The Checklist of NA Birds which is “the standard” for identifying the more than 900 species seen in NA.  Periodically the list is update.  These update often cause arguments and confusion, not among the birds, but among birders.

One source of confusion is the definition of a species.  In the old days birds were consider a separate species if they did not interbred with other species, or, if they did, their offspring were infertile.  Today DNA is used to separate species.  As more and more information becomes available the total number of species changes.  The process is often called Lumping or Splitting.  In Lumping, two birds that were once considered separate species are lumped together into a single species.  Splitting is just the opposite with one species suddenly becoming more than one species.  It is all confusing, but as long as the birds know what is going on it really doesn’t matter.  There is one advantage for a birder who maintain a Life List – when a species is split you often get to add one species to your life list.

In my next few blog posts I will talk more about bird names and how they got that way.  For example, I will explain why if you want to see a Cape May Warbler, you don’t want to go to Cape May.  Or why you never see a red belly on a Red-bellied Woodpecker.