The bird you see here is a Ruddy Duck. Whether you find it in California, North Dakota, or Massachusetts, the powder-blue bill, white cheeks, chestnut body, and cocky sprig of a tail will tell you it’s a male Ruddy Duck. Every field guide, online database, and state hunting guide you consult will agree on its name: that’s a Ruddy Duck.
This is something of a manufactured consensus, however, and a relatively new one at that. Go back a hundred years, and the proper name for this duck depended on whichever state, river, or pond that you found yourself. It went by blatherskite in Virginia, bobber on the Potomac River, buck-ruddy in Wisconsin, bumble-bee-buzzer in Arkansas, and chunk duck in New York. Travel around the United States, and you could hear local hunters call it hardtack, sleepy duck, stub-and-twist, wiretail, dummy duck, dicky, dinky, dipper, dopper, dumb-bird, and god-damn. In 1923 Waldo McAtee collected 92 folk names that people throughout the country had given the duck, each one representing a unique way of knowing and relating to the bird.1
The profusion of names for this odd duck was by no means an exception. Nearly every bird was bestowed with an extensive collection of names, varying by community and locality, that have been all but forgotten to us today. Cedar Waxwings were cherry-birds and chatterers. Buffleheads were king butterball and Scotch dipper. Screech Owls were called little dukelet and shivering owl. Even the ubiquitous Mallard went by green-head, English duck, or French duck, depending on who you asked.
A country as large and diverse as the United States naturally gave rise to an incredible proliferation of local names. Each group of European immigrants developed ways of describing local birds in their own native language. Birds that were hunted for market or for sport developed the greatest number of names, since those were the birds that people interacted with most frequently. The market hunters who spent their lives chasing and harvesting these birds grew intimately familiar with their quarry, and were responsible for coming up with many inventive names.
Thanks for reading Bird History! If you made it this far, please consider subscribing for free to my Substack to receive my new posts by email and support my work.
Waldo McAtee dedicated much of his life to cataloguing and celebrating the country’s many folk names, and through his research he developed an admiration for the people who came up with them. He explained how the nation’s hunters and backwoodsmen “were men of originality and force of character, and names invented by them had interest, charm, or humor—a tang of the boisterous out-of-doors in which they were conferred and a spirit and utter appropriateness that commend them to all men.”
Coining names for birds was more than a practical necessity. It was an expression of joy, creativity, and humor. “Our gunners seem to delight in inventing new names for the objects of their sport,” wrote McAtee, and the staggering half a million2 local and regional bird names he collected during a long career demonstrated what he called “American prolificness in nomenclature.”
In spite of their overwhelming variety, the names that colonists applied to America’s birds generally fell into a handful of categories.3 Some of the names they took from birds in England and applied them haphazardly in America. Foremost among these was the Robin, a small red-breasted flycatcher, who gave its name to America’s red-breasted thrush. Colonists liberally applied this name to other birds as well. They called the Eastern Bluebird blue robin, the Baltimore Oriole was golden robin, and the Eastern Towhee was ground robin. Our sparrows, warblers, and vultures were similarly all named after unrelated but superficially similar birds that colonists were familiar with back in Europe.
Then there were names suggested by a bird’s voice. Bitterns were called slug-toot and hit-log, for example, after their strange resonant call, while Canada Geese were crybabies. Some names were derived from a bird’s behavior. For shooting out a stream of excrement whenever they took off, Green Herons earned the name shitepoke. American Woodcocks were called Labrador twisters for their looping display flight. Other names came from a bird’s appearance. Mergansers were sawbills, nighthawks were bullbats, and coots were chicken-ducks.
To these categories, McAtee added folk names that came from misunderstandings or shifts in pronunciation. People called cormorants McCormack in New Jersey. Canada Geese went by Kennedy in Nebraska. Widgeons were Norwegians (Utah), Great Blue Herons were blue herrings (Kansas), and Sandhill Cranes were Sam Hill cranes (Texas). A personal favorite is sibitron (New Jersey), which seems to be a contraction of “it’s a bittern.”4
To most Americans, this situation was perfectly normal. Everyone knew the names of the birds in their backyards, and hunters knew the names of birds in their patches. Neighbors agreed on what birds were called, and didn’t concern themselves that people a hundred or a thousand miles away had decided on different ones. To residents of Edgartown, Massachusetts, for example, Black Scoters had always been pumpkin-blossom coots, and it was never too much of a bother to explain as much to a confused outsider.
But to the nation’s ornithologists, this disorder meant trouble. The foundation of science was taxonomy, and the foundation of taxonomy was assigning a unique Latin binomial to each identifiable and distinct species. When America’s most esteemed ornithologists gathered together in 1883 to form the American Ornithological Union (AOU), the country’s first national ornithological organization, one of their first orders of business was to address the “unstable and far from uniform system of nomenclature” then in place.5 When God created the world, he chose Adam to name its beasts. In America, the birds would be named by committee.
It took three years of work for the ornithologists on the Committee on the Revision of the Classification and Nomenclature of the Birds of North America to complete their authoritative Code of Nomenclature and Check-List of North American Birds. By the time they finished, they had established a standard process for assigning scientific names to birds and officially catalogued the 768 species and subspecies of birds then known to frequent the United States and Canada.
In addition to assigning each bird its Latin binomial, the committee members also gave it a common name in English, explaining that “Vernacular names, though having no standing in scientific nomenclature, and being not strictly subject to the law of priority, have still an importance that demands the due exercise of care in their selection.” Picking a single name would help address the confusion that resulted from the proliferation of folk names: “It not infrequently happens that well-known, abundant, and familiar species have several nearly equally familiar vernacular designations, in which case the most euphonious and otherwise most fitting should be selected and given prominence.”6
While scientists saw this exercise as a remarkable achievement, most Americans shrugged in response. Few were even aware that the names they’d been using their whole life were now considered incorrect. Two years after the AOU’s list was published, Gurdon Trumbull wrote that “Many of those English names which perhaps we all ought to adopt, such as ‘Hooded Merganser,’ ‘Hudsonian Godwit,’ ‘Bartramian Sandpiper,’ ‘Pectoral Sandpiper,’ etc., are used about as little by the inhabitants of the United States generally as the strictly scientific names,” while the folk names the AOU meant to replace were “as familiar in certain localities as ‘cow,’ ‘dog,’ and ‘cat.’”7
In his 1888 book Names and Portraits of Birds which Interest Gunners, With Descriptions in Language Understanded of the People, Trumbull collected hundreds of names by which game birds were known throughout the Eastern states. Part of his motivation in assembling these names was that in their absence, ornithologists “had the field much to themselves, giving us their long lists of scientific synonyms with little rivalry from the gunners’ side of the house.”
Trumbull was writing for an educated audience, and he knew the biases they carried against unlearned backwoodsmen. He felt it necessary to remind judgmental readers that memorizing a bird’s Latin name didn’t mean you actually knew the bird. Trumbull patiently explained that “names which appear to us absurdly grotesque and outlandish are mediums of communication between men as wise as ourselves, though educated in a different school,” a type of knowledge that sprang from experience rather than book learning. Sailors, farmers, fishermen, and above all hunters coined names which preserved a unique way of relating to nature and “should command respect.” Trumbull continued: “It is just now painfully popular to misrepresent and malign the so-called ‘pot-hunters;’ yet these dear old fellows taught us pretty much all we know about hunting, and from them ornithology has gathered its most important contributions.”
While the AOU’s naming committee was still deliberating, a somewhat more fiery dissenter wrote to the ornithological journal the Auk that he had “no doubt that scientific names are entirely in the hands of scientists, but it seems to be overlooked that popular names are just as completely in the hands of the people.” Ernest Seton criticized the “so-called popular, but really translated, scientific or spurious English names given to our birds” by ornithologists in their ivory towers. “If you show to an ‘out-wester’ the two birds mentioned above as Baird’s Bunting and Leconte’s Sparrow, and tell him that these are their names, he will probably correct you, and say one is a ‘Scrub Sparrow,’ the other a ‘Yellow Sparrow.’”8
Not all names invented by ornithologists were faulty in Seton’s eyes. If they were “short, distinctive, and, if possible, descriptive,” they would help spread the knowledge of and interest in birds. Junco and Vireo, for example, were “the only successful artificial names” that Seton could come up with, both of them having been translated from the Latin scientific names given these unique American families of birds. These were just as snappy and memorable as other names devised through earthy American inventiveness that had obtained official status, like Roadrunner, Bobolink, Canvasback, and Bufflehead. But he regarded honorifics (Wilson’s Snipe, Swainson’s Hawk), geographic terms (Nashville Warbler, Virginia Rail), and clunky descriptions (Red-shouldered Hawk, Black-throated Blue Warbler) as purely provisional until a better name could be identified.
Seton’s concern was less about which name was most “correct”—if such a thing could even be said to exist—but rather which names fostered the most interest and positive communication about birds among the common people. “Names like Blackburnian Warbler, Nashville Warbler, Clay-colored Sparrow, Townsend’s Solitaire, are utterly impossible,” he argued. “They are clumsy, meaningless, un-English and detrimental… If the ornithologists had set out definitely to build an eternal barrier to popular interest in birds, they could not have done it better than by establishing such impossible names as are cited above.” Seton predicted that these inadequate descriptions could not stand the test of time. “Such clumsy names as White-throated Sparrow, Black-and-White Warbler, Red-shouldered Hawk, are, of course, not names at all, but cumbrous descriptions and doomed to failure.”9
Of course, the AOU still calls those birds the White-throated Sparrow, the Black-and-White Warbler, and the Red-shouldered Hawk, and as a result, so do we (it’s worth noting that these names outlived the American Ornithological Union, which was renamed the American Ornithological Society in 2016).
The formalization of bird knowledge was a project that embodied generational change. Children learned correct names from books, and then field guides, while the older generation who knew only local names died off. Even as he was documenting the country’s folk names, Walter McAtee was watching them disappear: “As the period of professional gunning was approaching its end, however, travel became more general, bird names were transferred more freely, and new names were introduced by the more book-learned amateur sportsmen.”10 Old bird guides used to list alternative names in each species entry, but they don’t any more. They don’t need to. The only name worth knowing is the one that the AOS has selected.
It’s hard not to see a national, unified naming system as an inevitable product of modernity. Folk names work well, both in past and present times, in small and stable communities where names are a matter of consensus and tradition. But having official names seems like a necessity in a world of national laws, markets, and regulations. If you can be prosecuted for killing the wrong type of bird, it’s important that we can all agree what that kind of bird that is. Field guides, scientific language, conservation programs, and the birding app on your phone all demand this sort of shared understanding, and the AOU’s (excuse me, AOS’s) official list list, now in its seventh edition, is the one they all rely on for consensus.
It feels funny to have a small group of unelected ornithologists be responsible for telling me what to call the bird outside my window, but I suppose it’s only appropriate that in a world organized by bureaucracy our bird names should also be determined by committee. Is this the right process for deciding how birds should be named? I really don’t know, and I don’t know if there’s a better one out there. Of course their decisions, and their invented principles for reaching those decisions, will be limited and imperfect. Their successors will debate those rules and processes, and names will change accordingly. And we’ll ultimately accept the names they come up with, same as we’ve done since 1886.
- McAtee, Waldo Lee. Local Names of Migratory Game Birds. United States: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1923. ↩︎
- Kevin Winker, A brief history of English bird names and the American Ornithologists’ Union (now American Ornithological Society), Ornithology, Volume 139, Issue 3, 7 July 2022. ↩︎
- Trotter, Spencer. An Inquiry Into the History of the Current English Names of North American Land Birds. United States: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1910. ↩︎
- McAtee, W. L. “Folk Etymology in North American Bird Names.” American Speech 26, no. 2 (1951): 90–95. https://doi.org/10.2307/453391. ↩︎
- American Ornithologists’ Union. “The Code of Nomenclature and Check-List of North American Birds.” New York: American Ornithologists’ Union. 1886. ↩︎
- Ibid. ↩︎
- Trumbull, Gurdon. Names and Portraits of Birds which Interest Gunners: With Descriptions in Languages Understanded of the People. United States: Harper & brothers, 1888. ↩︎
- Seton, E. S. 1885. The popular names of birds. Auk 2:316-317. ↩︎
- Seton, E. S. 1919. On the popular names of birds. Auk 36:229-235. ↩︎
- McAtee, Waldo Lee. Local Names of Migratory Game Birds. United States: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1923. ↩︎