Proper writing of bird common namesGene - I find myself doing this sometimes, and I think there are two reasons.

First it's because I'm such a firm believer in the Capitalized Common Name == Latin Binomial. It gets awkward when you need to change "Canada Goose" to "Canada Geese", since the latter (as such) is not in the AOU list. Once you decide to leave "Goose" singular, consistency would argue not to add esses on the end of other birds' names.

Secondly, I think there's something grammatical involved here, and I can best explain it using fish instead.

One might well say that a fishing boat caught 3000 cod fish, and 5000 rock and sand fishes. Similarly, one might say one saw 2 White-throated Sparrow and a flock of 30 White-crowned and Golden-crowned Sparrows.

That said, I'm not positive either argument could withstand rigorous debate.

== Michael Hobbs
== Kirkland, WA
== http://www.scn.org/fomp/birding.htm
== birdmarymoor at verizon.net

----- Original Message -----
From: Eugene and Nancy Hunn
To: Michael Hobbs ; Tucker, Trileigh ; Tweeters (E-mail)
Sent: Monday, February 13, 2006 12:05 PM
Subject: Re: [Tweeters] Proper writing of bird common names


Tweets,

Not to change the subject or anything from issues of capital letters, but I've noticed another odd grammatical phenomenon in many birders' postings, that is, the "plural deletion rule," one might call it. Lists are presented as if all the birds were like "deer" [one deer, two deer, three deer...], e.g., three dowitcher, 376 wigeon, etc. This always strikes me as somewhat unconventional. Is there a reason for it?

Gene Hunn.