152 Birds Named After People Will Be Renamed - But How?

An anonymous reader shared this report from Slate:

Last November, the American Ornithological Society, or AOS, announced that it would change the common names of all American birds named after people. There are 152 such 'eponymic' names (that is, birds that are named after a specific person, like Bicknell's Thrush) on the AOS' official checklist, and the group is planning to start with between 70 and 80 species predominantly found in the U.S. and Canada. In the coming years, birds like Cooper's Hawk, Wilson's Snipe, and Lincoln's Sparrow will be stripped of their eponyms and given new common English names.

The eponymic naming issue has been heating up in the bird world for a few years now. Birds got their English names when they were 'discovered' by Western scientists, or otherwise identified as a new species. This meant ornithologists had the honor of coming up with whatever moniker they wanted, and frequently named birds in honor of a benefactor, a friend, or the person who shot the first known specimen. But a growing number of ornithologists and nonscientist birders are questioning why we're stuck with names decided on a whim hundreds of years ago, especially when the names aren't very good...

Rather than attempt the impossible task of reviewing the people with birds named after them one by one, the AOS said it would just scrap them all and start from scratch. But that's where the real challenge comes in — because lots of bird names are pretty bad. Not offensive bad, like named after a Confederate general, but just unsatisfactory bad. There was never any standardization for how common bird names were granted, which means those names are all over the place and provide little guidance for what renaming should look like.

Birds are named after their identifying features, size, habitat, the sound they make, or where they were first discovered. So the American Ornithological Society announced it will 'conduct an open, inclusive, and scientifically rigorous pilot program in 2024 to develop its new approach to English bird names in the U.S. and Canada.'

[T]here are few specifics yet, and no easy way to organize the public and whittle down suggestions in the lawless and nonsensical world of bird names. But the AOS has committed to change: Unlike the closed-door decisions of the past, this will be a public process. The plan is to take suggestions — from field marks, Indigenous names, colloquialisms... from anywhere — narrow it down, somehow, to a few options, and let people decide... Our new bird names won't be ideal — none of them are — but, for the first time, they will belong to us.

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