I'm sure that many on Tweeters will be dusting off their copy of
"Elements of Style" purchased a thousand years ago and tell you
"oh, no, never capitalize." And this convention is still held
by many newspapers and magazines. Newspaper editors routinely
correct my copy when I capitalize standardized English names.

Most technical ornithological journals (ie. _the Condor_ and
_Journal of Field Ornithology_) now instruct authors to capitalize
the first letter of each word in a standardized English name to
clearly differentiate between blue jays (generic decription of many
jay species) and Blue Jays (_Cyanocitta cristata_). Many less technical
nature oriented magazines are also adopting the practice.

As for Wigeon, the offical, standardized English name according to
the AOU and pigeon has no "official" d, either. People who continue
to put a d in wigeon probably need to buy a more contempory dictionary.

on 2/13/06 8:17 AM, Tucker, Trileigh at TRI AT seattleu.edu wrote:

Hi Tweeters,
I know we've got a lot of grammarians and spelling experts here - thanks
in advance for your advice. When writing about a species, I have been
assuming that it's not proper to capitalize the name in the course of a
statement: for instance, "The great blue heron landed on top of my spruce"
would be correct. Is this right? Or should it be written, "The Great Blue
Heron landed..."?
And while we're at it, is "widgeon" *ever* the correct spelling? I don't
think so, but I see it so frequently that I've begun to wonder!

Trileigh Tucker
Lincoln Park, West Seattle

--
Mike Patterson
Astoria, OR
celata at pacifier.com

SNOWY OWLS on the Lower Columbia - links to current information
on the 2005 irruption event:
http://home.pacifier.com/~neawanna/SNOW/SNOW20051120.html