Tweets,

I think it boils down to two conflicting stylistic canons. Within the
ornithological community capitalization is standard and the lower-case
style annoying. Within the larger editorial community the all caps
approach is annoying as it is inconsistent with parallel usage, such as,
"coffee table" or "love seat." As to whether bird names are "proper
names," it seems they are not as a bird name applies to a potentially
infinite set of individuals. But then, why is it ok to write "Buick
Skylark"?

Gene Hunn.

On Wed, 26 Apr 1995, Don Baccus wrote:

> >Don, in all ornithological journals in English (not so in some other
> > languages), species common names must be capitalized. It seems to me that
> > this holds in most birding magazines, too. In newspapers and some other
> > magazines (Time, for example), bird common names aren't capitalized.
>
> The Oregonian has allowed me to do both without comment (I did this
> as a test). But, then, they pretty much stopped editing my
> stuff after I learned to write in sentences of six words or
> less, with none of the words big.
>
> Is it the dumbing down of Americans which is the problem, or just
> the dumbing down of newspaper editors?
>
> > Capitalization is not the rule for other taxonomic groups, and the bizarre
> > consequence of this is that you'll see a report or paper in which "the
> > tigers chased the Ostrich through the western hemlock forest" (or something
> > like that).
>
> Right, which is perfectly acceptable in a technical or
> semi-technical (ala Natural History) journal.
>
> I normally read issues of whoever I'm contacting, anyway (no
> where close to Natural History!) because one needs a feel
> for the level (or lack thereof, in the newspaper case) of
> reading ability, etc they target for.
>
> If the newspaper hadn't let me use both styles, I'd have never
> thought of this - I began in the caps style, saw other columns
> done in lower case (which I personally prefer for personal,
> aesthetic reasons, and which fits the convention for mammals
> etc), tried that and they took it. So I was left scratching
> my head.
>
> > There was a note in Birding several years ago that bird common names had
> > become proper names from usage (and "official" status) and that it was
> > therefore correct to capitalize them.
>
> I can accept that. It is also interesting to note that I'm not
> the first to wonder about this.
>
> Of course, proper nouns don't normally become trashed or reinvented
> as frequently as bird names! Maybe we should only capitalize
> those that survive three or more revisions of the AOU checklist!
>
> Should it be "Duck Hawk", "duck hawk" or perhaps " 'duck hawk' "
> now that this is an improper, rather than proper noun? :)
>
> -Don Baccus-
>
>
>