Scrubbing off the eponyms

By Bill Chaison
Of a Feather
On Nov. 1 the American Ornithological Society issued a press release. It announced a pilot program in 2024 that would rename many North American birds. At issue are primarily birds named after people (eponyms). Some of the referenced persons committed offensive acts during their lives and there is a feeling with the AOS that they should therefore not be honored.

“Exclusionary naming conventions developed in the 1800s, clouded by racism and misogyny, don’t work for us today, and the time has come for us to transform this process and redirect the focus to the birds, where it belongs,” said Judith Scarl, Ph.D., AOS Executive Director and CEO. “I am proud to be part of this new vision and am excited to work in partnership with a broad array of experts and bird lovers in creating an inclusive naming structure.”

This kind of initiative is often called “woke-ism” and used to be called “politically correct.” People described as culturally conservative often oppose programs like this. In this case the AOS executive director justifies their project by pointing out that “North America has lost nearly 3 billion birds since 1970. To reverse these alarming bird population declines, we need as many people as possible to get excited about birds and unite to protect them.”

A national organization like the AOS is unlikely to have come to this conclusion based on anecdote. I suspect it has paid for polls and surveys to discover what is usually obvious in any crowd of birdwatchers: most of them are white and well-to-do.

Many young people today are hypersensitive to the effects of the past on the present. It is the scientific consensus that current rapid changes in the climate system are caused by greenhouse gasses produced by fossil-fuel burning. This demonstration of the past influencing the present is foremost in the minds of a lot of people under 40. There are many things about the past that can’t be changed but renaming birds named in the 19th century is not one of them.

This movement has already begun. The species once called McCown’s longspur is now the thick-billed longspur. The new descriptive name is a translation of its Latin genus name Rhynchophanes. The campaign to alter what North American birds are called will affect only their common or vernacular names, not their scientific or Linnean ones. This longspur was originally described in 1851 by George Newbold Lawrence, but Lawrence called it the rufous-winged lark bunting.

The specimen named by Lawrence was collected by Capt. John Porter McCown while he was stationed in the Rio Grande Valley of Texas. McCown shot many birds and sent them to Lawrence and three were found to be new to science. Rhyncophanes mccownii (it will keep its trivial name) breeds in the Great Plains from Wyoming up into southern Alberta and Saskatchewan, but it winters in Texas and northern Mexico.

In 1845-1846 McCown participated in the military occupation of Texas, then part of Mexico. It marked one of the earlier exercises of the Monroe Doctrine and not all Americans were on board at the time. Henry David Thoreau went to jail after refusing to pay his taxes because they supported the war effort. So, we have one strike against McCown: any potential birdwatchers with Mexican heritage may not be keen to honor him.

A career military officer, in 1856-1857 McCown moved on to Florida to fight in the Seminole Wars. This will not endear him to any native American birdwatchers. In fact, he fought in the Utah War (1858) against the Mormons and then moved on to garrison duty in the Nebraska and Dakota territories where the prime directive of the U.S. Army was ridding the Great Plains of tribal peoples. It is difficult to find a historical figure involved in more controversial conflicts than John Porter McCown.

And this was all before he joined the Confederate Army in 1861. During the Civil War McCown rose to the rank of major general before arguing with Gen. Braxton Bragg and being court-martialed, after which McCown criticized the Confederacy as a “damned stinking cotton oligarchy.” The Tennessee-born soldier retired to Arkansas, where he became a teacher, then a farmer before dying, presumably exhausted, at age 64.

To criticize a historical figure like McCown for the values he held during his lifetime is called “presentism” in the history trade. Unfortunately, imperialism, racism, and sectarianism were all quite common in American society during the 19th century. What was less common was to be an amateur naturalist.

While posted to Texas McCown met John James Audubon in 1849, perhaps his inspiration to collect in the Rio Grande valley. He subsequently documented the presence in the border region of the black-bellied whistling-duck, green kingfisher, verdin, cactus wren, vermilion flycatcher, pyrrhuloxia, and great-tailed grackle. In addition to the formerly eponymous longspur, he also discovered the olive sparrow and the ash-throated flycatcher.

In their proposed campaign to scrub surnames from bird names, the AOS does not single out historical persons like McCown, with his unattractive moral baggage. Rather, they propose to excise all human names as adjectives. It is therefore not analogous to the recent campaign to remove Confederate statues from public places. No one, as far as I know, wants to also remove the statues of Ulysses Grant from Capitol Hill or Winfield Scott from Pennsylvania Avenue.

Other candidates for renaming include Lucy’s warbler, which honors Lucy Hunter Baird, daughter of the first curator of the Smithsonian Institution, Spencer Fullerton Baird. He is in turn is the namesake of Baird’s sandpiper and Baird’s sparrow. Baird was a scion of the prominent Biddle family of Philadelphia, which includes all manner of military officers, financiers, diplomats, and philanthropists. But most notoriously includes Sydney Biddle Barrows, the “Mayflower madam.”

There are skeletons in every closet. The extended Biddle clan is free to fondly remember Lucy and her father, but there is no reason we all have to honor them.

— Bill Chaisson has been a birdwatcher for over 50 years. These columns are archived at shinhollow.wordpress.com.