Comments on: Gill and Wright, Birds of the World: Recommended English Names

By: Rick Wright

Rick Wright — Sun, 05 Feb 2012 23:39:32 +0000

I’m afraid I don’t know him. His publications should includes his institutional affiliation and mailing address, though. Good luck!

By: Paulino

Paulino — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 01:01:05 +0000

Hello Dr. Rick Wright:

I am Paulino Balagot. I am student at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. I currently doing my research on bird. These birds are Caroline Island White Eye (Zosterops semperi), and Gray White Eye(Zosterops cinereus), and Long-billed White(Rukia longirostra). Aside from my research, Do you know John Engbring. He is an ornithologist who studied the three species back in Federated States of Micronesia. If you know him, please provide me his email or phone number if he has one. I have been searching his electronic contact infos but cannot find anything free. Please, let me know if you know him. Here is my email add: pbalagot@hawaii.edu.

Thank You,

Paulino

By: Flu-Bird

Flu-Bird — Tue, 06 Apr 2010 06:04:14 +0000

Theres a popular song bird in australia the WILLEY WAGTAIL its black and white and is said fearless of people

By: Rick Wright

Rick Wright — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 17:03:18 +0000

Loleta,
“Tit,” as in “titbit” or “tidbit,” just means any little bird, and they live in the bush. I don’t think it’s any more complicated than that, unfortunately!
rick

By: Loleta Disernia

Loleta Disernia — Sun, 06 Dec 2009 22:47:19 +0000

I’ve been trying to figure out where and how the bushtit birds got their name. Thank You for letting me know where to find this information.

By: Flu-Bird

Flu-Bird — Tue, 19 May 2009 05:48:23 +0000

Birds are a lot more intellegent then we might think i mean i read of how gulls at DISNEYWORLD in ORLANDO are learning how to steal food from the visitors and some birds can learn to count and of corse the learning powers of parrots

By: Rick Wright

Rick Wright — Sat, 22 Nov 2008 22:27:24 +0000

Thanks for the comment, Jerry–or rather the interrogatory! Never having taught at one, I can’t really argue about the use of hyphens by community college students (or would that be community-college students?), but I’ll stand by my impression that more and more Americans pepper their written prose with ‘em; I sometimes think that they save up all their commas, then stretch and straighten them and drop the results onto the page.
Wikipedia is only as reliable as the community college students who write the articles.
I think Budgerigar is an outrage, mainly because I can’t pronounce it consistently (Woolworth’s Parakeet would be fine–remember the noise and the smell on entering one of those stores with a pet department?), and galah is little better. Had I been around at the start, I probably would have argued for more transparently descriptive names for each of the birds or bird groups you adduce, but the last half dozen on your list are now so thoroughly Englished that it would be perverse to take umbrage at any of them. Some transliterated Hawaiian names may well attain that status; but for every name like palila, whose syllable structure and prosody will permit it smooth entry into English, there are half a dozen like o’o and i’iwi, consisting solely of vowels, glides, and glottal stops.
I call Turdus rufopalliatus Rufous-backed Thrush, myself, but don’t think we’ll ever get the AOU to change; similarly doomed is my campaign to change the name of migratorius back to American Fieldfare.
All of this really is much ado about very little indeed, but interesting all the same! Eager to hear more of your thoughts.

By: Jerry Friedman

Jerry Friedman — Sat, 22 Nov 2008 05:23:25 +0000

I particularly enjoyed your comparison of the age of birding and sex.

I find it interesting that your experience of the younger generation’s hyphenation is the opposite of mine. On the Internet and among the students at the community college where I teach, what I see is a near-total absence of hyphens. The tendency is to write all compounds open. For instance, searching Usenet (which is not edited) for “humming bird” gives 1690 hits (only one of the first fifty has a hyphen) and for “hummingbird” gives 3030. The numbers are far from reliable, but I think they suggest that the open form is not too far below the solid form.

It’s by no means clear whether the modern name of the country northwest of Thailand is Burma or Myanmar. The Wikipedia article lists governments and news media that use each name.

If you object to the Polynesian names of Hawaiian birds, do you also object to those of New Zealand birds? How about “budgerigar”, “galah”, “cassowary”, “jabiru”, “jacana”, “toucan”, “aracari”, and “tanager”?

I suspect that rule 5.B.3 has an unwritten proviso that it applies only if there’s another word in front of the compounded bird names. “Crane-Hawk” looks nineteenth-century, but if it were split, I’d want (for example) Pacific-Slope Crane-Hawk and Cordilleran Crane-Hawk.

I too would like to know why “Clay-colored Thrush” but “Rufous-backed Robin”, which the AOU does as well, as you know.