Pileated Woodpeckers

The newly arrived newsletter of the Chenango Bird Club rules authoritatively on the correct pronunciation of the name, to which I can say only fooey. Fortunately, last week in British Columbia we were too busy actually watching Pileated Woodpeckers to worry about whether the length of the vowel in Latin should govern its pronunciation in English.

This female was hanging noisily around the park in Kaslo where we were enjoying a picnic with Mary and Walter, David, and Valerie. Pileated is a common enough bird in southeast British Columbia, but I can’t remember a visit when we saw and heard as many as this time, including a bird that swooped past the living room window one afternoon while I was pondering gulls on the lake.

And the pronunciation? As in all things wordy, there is no “right” way to say the word–just listen to educated native speakers with some expertise in the field in question, then choose one of their pronunciations. No reason to legislate speech, after all. (And no, the Latin vowel is of no help here or in any other English word.)