With North American birds, we have the AOU, which defines English names for species. This allows the use of an English name without having to clarify with the Latin binomial. But, as such, there needs to be a convention in writing to indicate that one is using the AOU English name. For Latin binomials, the convention is to use italics, with the genus capitalized and the species not capitalized. Birders have generally followed the capitalization rules that the AOU defines. Thus, for example, it is Chestnut-backed Chickadee, not C-B C, nor C-b c, nor c-b c, etc.

Unfortunately, many writers and publishers are not familiar with the naming committee and official list. To my knowledge, there is no such official list of English names for any other class of organisms. So they tend to follow their usual style guides, and do away with the caps. To make things worse, the author may be using the official English name, and therefore may not supply the Latin binomial. But after editing, what?s left is ambiguous. ?I saw a gray flycatcher.? Finally, editors and general-audience writers may not realize how important specificity is to birders. We need to know what species is being talked about. It?s not enough to know that it was a little egret ? we?re only interested if it?s a Little Egret.

Unfortunately, it?s very hard to convince some editors that this matters.

== Michael Hobbs
== Kirkland, WA
== http://www.marymoor.org/birding.htm
== http://www.marymoor.org/BirdBlog.htm
== birdmarymoor at frontier.com

From: Wilson Cady
Sent: Thursday, March 17, 2011 12:05 PM
To: schrimpf at u.washington.edu
Cc: kevinpurcell at pobox.com ; tweeters at u.washington.edu
Subject: Re: [Tweeters] RE: A plea for the correct use of the word "Merlin"

My pet peeve with bird names is not the pronunciation but rather the capitalization. Why do newspaper editors and even the USF&WS refuse to capitalize the second part of a bird's common name? Why is it Sandhill crane instead of Sandhill Crane, isn't it a proper name? Don't they know that every blue jay is not a Blue Jay?


Wilson Cady
Skamania County, WA




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