Proper writing of bird common namesBoy - now you're getting into religion. I am firmly in the camp that bird names SHOULD be capitalized. I am probably in the majority among serious birders, at least around here. But many people who come from a publishing background will see things differently.

Here is my reasoning:

1) In normal scientific writing, organisms are refered to by their latin names when refering to specifc species.
2) In the birding world, we are highly concerned with identification to species - we do not casually write about birds and animals, we write specifically.
3) Based on (1) and (2), birders should use latin names but...
4) The American Ornithologist's Union has defined, in a scientific tome, an equivalence between specified "common names" and their equivalent latin names. This means that when I use the common name American Robin, every ornithologist and serious birder KNOWS indisputably that I mean Turdus migratorius. This allows these "common names" to be used as a direct synonym for the latin names of the species.
5) Use of these "common names" as synonyms for latin only works if the reader can recognize them in context.
6) These "common names" usually are of the form adjective-phrase noun, and many of these adjective-phrases include common, descriptive adjectives.

Ergo, we should capitalize the "common names" for clarity. Clarity pretty much trumps all rules of punctuation as necessary, and here it is necessary.

Without capitalization, it is too easy to missunderstand what is written. Was that blue jay a Blue Jay, a Steller's Jay, or a Western Scrub-Jay? One might comment, after having seen a Little Blue Heron in Washington, that it was "a great blue heron to see around here." Of course if it was a juvenile, you might oddly write: "The little blue heron was white." ???

As to your second point, the AOU uses "Wigeon", and so we use "Wigeon". To write "widgeon" is not incorrect in common English, but it is not part of the official "common name".

== Michael Hobbs
== Washington Ornithological Society webmaster
== http://www.wos.org
== WOSWeb at wos.org


----- Original Message -----
From: Tucker, Trileigh
To: tweeters at u.washington.edu
Sent: Monday, February 13, 2006 8:17 AM
Subject: [Tweeters] Proper writing of bird common names


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



------------------------------------------------------------------------------


_______________________________________________
Tweeters mailing list
Tweeters at u.washington.edu
http://mailman1.u.washington.edu/mailman/listinfo/tweeters