Many thanks to everyone who wrote to me privately
about the "Willow Goldfinch".

According to Ian Paulsen, during the first part of the
last century, people often used common names for the
_subspecies_ of birds (this was news to me). "Willow
Goldfinch" does indeed refer to a subspecies of the
American Goldfinch. Armed with this knowledge, I
typed in different searches on Google than I had done
before and found:

"Systematics ? American Goldfinch ? Birds of North
America Online
C. t. salicamans (Willow Goldfinch), in winter, both
sexes much browner ... American Goldfinch (Carduelis
tristis), The Birds of North America Online (A...."
bna.birds.cornell.edu/beta/species/080/articles/systematics


It looks like "Birds of North America Online" matches
up the four archaic common names of goldfinch
subspecies with the scientific names of the
subspecies, but I can't view the entry without signing
up/paying money for it, so I continued on...

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

The current "American Goldfinch" entry in Wikipedia
makes no mention of the old common names, but the
Answers.com entry does, and matches them up with the
four subspecies (scroll halfway down the page):

http://www.answers.com/topic/american-goldfinch?cat=technology


So I have my answer!

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

Additionally:
The Wikipedia entry on "State Birds" is amusing. I
thought "Willow Goldfinch" was confusing enough, but
it has nothing on Alabama's state bird--the
"Yellowhammer". (Try guessing what this is called
nowadays before going to):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._state_birds

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

Also:
While googling "archaic bird names", I came across
this site listing additional outdated common names:
http://www.sentex.net/~tntcomm/kwfn/CBCarchaicnames.htm

Have fun!

Andrea Wuenschel
North Seattle





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