American Ornithological Society changing the names of birds named after people | Hacker News Reader

American Ornithological Society changing the names of birds named after people

slate.com

28 pointscrescit_eundo42 comments

> Some worry that society’s zest for tolerance has created intolerance.

From a linked article within this article about changing the name of a bird in 2000.

I completely agree. These proposed changes are not always necessarily representative of what the majority wants.

You can gerrymander groups of people in more ways than just voting districts. Social power should be distributed to all, not just those who have found the pulpit from whose stage they will readily kick the rest of us back into the crowd who must listen.

Interesting, whenever the discussion comes up to rename things, I propose that we should do the reverse: name things after animals. Instead of "George H.W. Bush Library Center" we could call it "Albatross Library Center". Obviously, naming things after animals leads to much less discussion. We can even choose fitting names (e.g., Gentoo Linux).

Agreed, or trees. Where I work we have to pick code names for the components we develop and the nerds around here always pick sci-fi or fantasy themes. I've been lobbying for using trees or flowers, to no avail.

I like to use the names of fruits in Spanish, but I might branch out into trees and flowers, thanks for the idea.

What do we do when albatrosses are exposed as secret Nazis?

We go with species such as the dodos. I mean, they're never going to be exposed as Nazis now!

I don't care about the renaming (it's a nice solution to the political correctness problem) so much as the bird site they link to throughout the article: https://www.allaboutbirds.org

I found the cutest video of an owl digging for prey in the snow: https://www.allaboutbirds.org/guide/Boreal_Owl/photo-gallery...

It's all about the little things

Edit: Baby owls! https://www.allaboutbirds.org/guide/Eastern_Screech-Owl/phot...

That species is now renamed to snow-digging owl.

Awwww! I hope birds inherit the planet after we are gone

It's unusual for a society that, we are told, is steeped in systemic white supremacy, to be erasing its own scientists from its language. But I don't have a whiteness studies degree, so I don't know all the mysterious ways in which white supremacy operates.

It’s not erasing scientists or history. The article notes that some birds are just named after benefactors or friends or whatever the namer-of-the-bird at the time was. Things that are inherently untreated to the bird species itself.

The move isn’t about rejecting our white supremacist history - it’s about giving things names that are informative and meaningful with regard to the bird itself. The article explains this pretty well with several examples.

The white supremacy angle comes from the consideration that a bird that was known very well across indigenous generations as one name was decidedly named something like “John Smith’s Warbler” because John Smith “discovered” the bird and that’s what has been codefied. Meanwhile native knowledge of the same species was deliberately wiped from history by way of forced assimilation and genocide. The white supremacy bit being that whatever the predominately white folks learned or knew of a species superseded what the people who’d lived there for generations had known about the species.

> The move isn’t about rejecting our white supremacist history

That's clearly the motivation. Per the article: "The movement really began in 2020, when the group Bird Names for Birds successfully petitioned the AOS to change the name of a species of grassland bird then named after Confederate Maj. Gen. John P. McCown to the inoffensive (and more descriptive) Thick-billed Longspur."

> it’s about giving things names that are informative and meaningful with regard to the bird itself.

This is an after-the-fact rationalization to make the change seem more scientific. But names in general aren't mnemonics, they are just... names. Just consider the base names of most birds: duck, heron, eagle, hawk. The name itself tells you nothing about the bird, they are just sounds attached to a particular shape of bird (maybe they have some historical etymological meanings, but if so, they are not generally known). Yet people have no trouble remembering what a duck is. They don't need to call it a wide-beaked water bird.

This can even apply to names that are supposed to be descriptive, e.g. I had no idea what "pileated" meant until recently when I looked it up, but I've known what a pileated woodpecker is since I was a kid.

The same, of course, applies to all sorts of parts of nature: e.g. it's Mars, not "red planet", grass, not "bendy skinny plant", etc. (p.s. when are they coming for the planet names? We've claimed entire other worlds for the Roman empire!)

> a bird that was known very well across indigenous generations as one name was decidedly named something like “John Smith’s Warbler”

In English. Its English name became "John Smith's Warbler". Its Cherokee or Apache name was and is unchanged.

This is a symptom of a common Anglosphere/American perspective - that US culture and the English language belongs to and must somehow reflect the peoples of the world, and not just the English and their colonies.

It’s funny how it’s never about politics, only about good ideas. The names “blacklist” and “whitelist” were perfectly fine to describe the completely innocuous things they are, and everyone had no problem understanding them for hundreds of years. All of the sudden they’re “unclear” and “not very descriptive”, and we need to pick names that are “informative and meaningful”. Weird, the timing of that determination.

I would respect the people advocating for this stuff a lot more if they weren’t blatantly using doublespeak to my face

They will simply be renamed back to whomever they were named after once this wave of madness has past. Leningrad is Saint Petersburg again, Danzig is called Gdańsk, etc. One of the ways of making sure this happens is to simply keep on using the real names and consider the new names aberrations.

Think Saint Petersburg will ever go back to Nyen?

Berlin, Ontario renamed itself to Kitchener in WWI. Now there's a (not very strong) movement to rename the city again because the British General the city was named after (Horatio Herbert Kitchener) was responsible for the creation of concentration camps in the Boer War.

Of course, like Saint Petersburg, Berlin wasn't the first name for settlements in that area.

People rename things and I personally am okay with that. Like Shakespeare said, a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.

As a side note, there is also a push to change the name of an important knitting technique, Kitchener stitch, which was named in honor of the General.

I think this makes sense, but it's a pretty big nerf for the "Historian" card in Wingspan (2 points per bird named after a person). ;)

They're already planning to update the game in response:

> Given that these names are officially changing, when the AOS finalizes their name selections for sets released so far, it’s likely that we’ll make a pack of the renamed birds and offer them on our webstore. At that time we will also likely change the names of those birds in the game, rendering the historian bonus card an artifact of the past.

https://stonemaiergames.com/games/wingspan/

It’s going to be a pain to go through my set at find the ones to replace! Although I suppose I could just wait until they come up during game…

Personally I would say you should just ignore this altogether. There's zero reason to go along with such a silly change for the sake of change.

I actually think it's a good change

As a birder, that is some good refactoring and QoL improvements for identifying birds.

I would not want to keep GoldenPalaceDotCom monkeys [0] equivalents in the bird world.

0: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madidi_titi_monkey

The West, in its impatience to collapse, will leave no man unradicalised.

"We just wanted to watch birds."

Seems like a bit of a leap from the renaming of birds to collapse?

Can you explain the causal chain there?

Hardest problem ~in CS~ in life? Naming things. Once you name something, that's it, there's no taking it back. You can rename it for future material, but the old name is never completely going away. The trick is in how you direct people whom encounter the old name towards the new. I don't think it can be done perfectly. How does one know what they don't already know, how does one know to look for something they don't know they're missing? There's also limited time to learn things: you can't learn everything, especially if new things are being created even while you learn others. I think that's just life.

Does it eventually cut off all the knowledge associated with the old name, due to the difficulties it introduces in discoverability? Is it harder for only the generation used to the old name, and not an issue for new generations that only know the new name? Or does the newer generation simply not know what they don't know?

I am generally in favor of renaming things to non-person descriptive names, like mountains (McKinley->Denali) or highways [0], which often run into the same accusations of "cancel culture." The power dynamic is certainly interesting to observe whenever it's being fought over, but people need to let go of ego and realize that they can't take birds, mountains, highways, high schools or military bases with them. Everything is temporary. Learn you some Buddhism.

[0]: https://www.ktoo.org/2022/03/09/bill-would-start-process-of-...

Remembering that the only job God gave Adam in the Biblical creation story is to go name things. We've always been aware that "giving things good names" is instinctual and important.

> people need to let go of ego and realize that they can't take birds, mountains, highways, high schools or military bases with them

It's not about taking, it's literally about giving.

If I posthumously donate all of my wealth to building housing for the homeless, I want my goddamn name associated with the project. Not out of any sense of vanity (while alive, I'm only ever anonymously charitable) but because I want to set a example for future generations to follow. At some point people will ask "who the hell was this guy that I see his name every day" perhaps and see that this was testament to what I wanted to give back to the world, and why.

Taking my name away from it and calling it "Bird House for Humans" means nothing to anyone. Birds didn't build the fucking thing. It didn't just grow from seeds they shat while flying by either. Birds are assholes who give nothing, shit everywhere and steal everything. They would never build anybody a house, least of all one for you.

It's just more anti-meritocratic nonsense. There's no point in doing anything nice if you're just going to get written out of history books by shills for Big Bird. Nobody forgets Hitler, Pol Pot or Jeffrey Dahmer and what they stood for, but it's my name and values at risk of being deliberately forgotten because someone was on a power trip.

It's existentially insulting.

No matter your impact, you will eventually be forgotten, which IMO is the best case scenario–in the worst case, you're reviled for a while for something you'd never even understand or imagine while you were alive, and then forgotten anyways. The longer you're remembered, the higher the likelihood that society's values change enough for vilification. The best you can do is to try to instill your values in those around you while you're alive to live decent and comfortable lives, enough that you believe they will propagate them to those they care about after you are gone, and so on and so forth. There doesn't have to be any one name attached to such values.

> but because I want to set a example for future generations to follow.

There's the rub, innit? If you're a eugenicist, we don't wanna follow your example anymore. But we'll keep the building.

I'm gonna be simple about this. It's stupid that they did this. It's stupid that there are articles about it. The tweets about it will be stupid, discussion here will be stupid, this comment, frankly, is stupid, I hate all the stupid, and I would like the culture war stupidity, on all of its levels and from all sides, to finally, finally stop. Arrrrrrrrrrgh.

Ironically, this is the least stupid thing I’ve ever read about culture wars.

Some people are just incapable of anything useful. But they sometimes get power and do unnecessary things. I noticed such groups are ferocious in justifying their existence.

It will always be a Wilson’s Warbler to me

Nothing wrong with nostalgia for those who have it. Although as someone who is new to learning all the birds, it will certainly help to have more of the names actually reflect something practical about the bird that helps with remembering it. I hope they call it something like black-crowned yellow warbler.

Wilson’s warbler vs. black-crowned yellow warbler, I prefer the first one. For the same reason I'd choose zebra over "black and white striped horse". I have no idea who that Wilson in the name is and I prefer to be ignorant. The fact that both of the words start with "w" is enough to make the name easy to remember and kinda fun.

That’s fair, and I wouldn’t really disagree if it was one of the only ones. But we already have a black and white warbler, blackpoll warbler, chestnut-sided warbler, yellow-rumped warbler, magnolia warbler, Canada warbler, Nashville warbler, and at least a dozen others. It might be cute and fun to change them all to alliterative names, but it would definitely be way more confusing. I honestly don’t really mind having a few with random names, but I don’t think it’s a great loss either.

The bird formerly known as prince... the same way Pluto is still a planet.

I don't think any of the birds in the header image are actually named after people (loggerhead shrike, Eurasian sparrowhawk, Eurasian tree sparrow, and I'm not good with owls but I think it's a little owl.

Instead of giving people the bird, they take the bird away from people.

In Soviet Russia, bird names you!

This is really going to impact how I play Wingspan.

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