On Wed, 26 Apr 1995, Don Baccus wrote:
> I write for the oregonian on natural history (very) occasionally,
> as well as other places, and I can never decide how to
> present bird names: capitalized or not.
>
> I.E. "Tundra Swan" or "tundra swan". Obviously birds which include
> proper nouns should have that capitalized (i.e. "Cooper's Hawk"
> or "Cooper's hawk", but never "cooper's hawk" or god forbid
> "coopers hawk"!).

I think the rules for this are quite clear. Follow the format in any
published checklist, which are based on AOU. Names that are not preceded
by a hyphen are capitalized in bird names.

Tundra Swan
Double-crested Cormorant
Black-throated Gray Warbler
Black-and-white Warbler
Le Conte's Sparrow

Some exceptions occur (of course):
Black-crowned Night-Heron

This does *not* occur with other critters or plants, where only proper
names are capitalized:

Townsend's Chipmunk
western gray squirrel
Texas rat snake

-------------
Michael R. Smith
Univ. of Washington, Seattle
whimbrel at u.washington.edu
http://salmo.cqs.washington.edu/~wagap/mike.html