the Forest   /   el Bosque

Those Bungled Bird Names

The confusion started when British colonists arrived in the New World.

By George H. Harrison

This article appeared in the Sept.-Oct. 1992 issue of the magazine International Wildlife.   They have kindly given permission for me to reprint it here.

On Scotland's Fair Isle, a British bird-watcher in a green waxed jacket and knee-high Wellington boots peers through his telescope at -- ho hum -- a robin. On Mount Desert Island, Maine, an American birder in a blue Gore-Tex parka and L.L. Bean hiking boots squints through her binoculars at -- sigh -- just another robin. Nothing notable here for the lifelist, that coveted sightings that all serious birders keep, except that neither bird-watcher's bird much resembles the other's.  The Fair Isle robin  is a small bird, the size of a wren in fact, with a red-feathered breast, while the Mount Desert robin is a heftier creature, twice the size, although again red-breasted.  So, isn't a robin a robin?

Truth is, "robin" is a relative term, and the British robin (Erithacus rubecula) is a species of a far different feather than the American robin (Turdus migratorius).  In fact, throughout Great Britain and North America, many birds bear identical names yet are as different as Wellingtons and hiking boots. Blame it all on Columbus and the footloose Europeans who followed him to a New World.  While putting down roots, many newcomers took it upon themselves to hand out names, Adamlike, to all the fowl of the air.  In the case of homesick colonists from England, that meant that no bird with a hint of breastly ruddiness was safe from being tagged a robin.

But the confusion thickens.  Not only did newcomers give familiar names to barely familiar new species.  They also pinned fresh names on "European" birds that also happened to inhabit the New World.   Alike from topknot to toenail, these birds now have one name in England, another in North America. Alas, bewailing these botched bird names is pointless.  Official taxonomic names of bird species are assigned through a time-honored process overseen by scientific cranks and drudges.  But common names sprout weedlike from everyday life and language.  To name is human, to misname . . . well, it happens all the time.

Fortunately, the new names have not always stuck.  Otherwise, North American birders would still be contending with a riot of robins.  With memories of Merry Old England's "robin redbreast" tugging at their homesick hearts, English in the New World dubbed as robins both the eastern bluebird (yet another red-breasted thrush) and the rufous-sided towhee (a ground-dweller with a red breast that was called, naturally, ground robin).  Another early robin was the northern oriole, whose breast is actually orange; creative colonials called it the golden robin. Rampant robinism was just the start.  For example, amateur ornithologists gave the name buzzard to New World soaring vultures, because the unfamiliar birds resembled (vaguely, mind you) large, soaring members of the hawk family known as buzzards in Great Britain.

Meanwhile, colonists seemed unable to recognize New World birds that were the same species they had known in England.  Thus, Great Britain's great northern diver was re-christened the common loon.  Likewise, England's arctic skua is the same evil-tempered species as North America's parasitic jaeger. But these are names, mere words, which unlike sticks and stones do no harm.  However, when living, breathing, Old World birds were brought to North America, real misery was unleashed.  On March 6, 1872, a band of innocents calling themselves the American Acclimitization Society freed 80 European starlings in New York City's Central Park.  The society's dream was to introduce to the United States every species of bird in William Shakespeare's plays.

"Nay, I'll have a starling shall be taught to speak nothing but 'Mortimer'," the English rebel Hotspur declared in Shakespeare's Henry IV.  Thus came starlings to America, where the pushy birds have displaced several native species, not least the eastern bluebird. Which as we all know was once a robin.  And which therefore brings to mind Juliet's question in that other play of Shakespeare's. "What's in a name?" asked the ill-starred lover.  To which any modern bird-watcher might reply, "Trouble, baby, trouble."

Note:  Since this article was written (in1992), the nomenclature for the rufous-sided towhee has changed.  It has been divided into eastern towhee and spotted towhee, and there is no longer one known as rufuous-sided.

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