Subject: Re: Caps and Bird Names and Readers
Date: Aug 22 14:54:34 1996
From: Dennis Paulson - dpaulson at mirrors.ups.edu


I think you're absolutely right, Jerry, and I liked your little essay!

These names "belong" to these birds and only these birds, and they should
be recognized as proper names, as was argued a few years ago in Birding. A
pileated woodpecker is *not* necessarily the same as a Pileated Woodpecker,
and we need a convention for noting that. In addition, it just makes sense
to call them Pileated Woodpeckers in print since we have officially deemed
them such.

I think one place that you'd run into trouble with this (and this has been
mentioned many times before) is that there is even less precedence for
capitalizing the common names of other taxa of animals, not to mention
plants. My plant books are at home, but I just looked at the only one I
have in the office, a brand-new field guide, and it uses lower case for all
the plant names. It has been argued repeatedly that sentences such as "the
Long-tailed Jaeger eats long-tailed voles" shouldn't be printed. I think
there is a tendency more and more for common names to be capitalized,
although I haven't done a recent survey of journals and books. We made the
decision to capitalize all names in the "official" list of dragonfly common
names just generated, in part because we figured this would be the style at
some time in the future.

Dennis Paulson, Director phone 206-756-3798
Slater Museum of Natural History fax 206-756-3352
University of Puget Sound e-mail dpaulson at ups.edu
Tacoma, WA 98416