Subject: [Tweeters] Capitalization of Bird Names
Date: Mar 30 23:50:34 2011
From: Teresa Michelsen - teresa at avocetconsulting.com


I guess the other thing I'd have to say about this is that newspapers do a
lot of weird things with names and capitalizations that no-one else does,
which doesn't make them right just because they're consistent. For example,
they insist on calling all agencies the "XX department" even though the
agencies have official names. It's weird to work for the Department of
Ecology, and always see it in the papers as "the Ecology department." My
guess is, you'll never win an argument with a newspaper editor over one of
these things. In fairness, journals are just as stubborn about their own
strange quirks (e.g., reference formats).



Which doesn't mean that people shouldn't be educated over the proper
capitalization of bird names. I do say it that way because I've edited for
maybe a hundred journals and never noticed a bird name in lower case. People
in the field know the rule. This is also consistent with how we write our
government reports across a number of state and federal agencies. Bird names
are capitalized, except for the part that may follow a dash (e.g., Dark-eyed
Junco). Other species are capitalized following the rule described earlier
(e.g., only the parts that contain a place name, person's name, etc.).



Teresa Michelsen

Olympia, WA