Feb
11
Buteo Names
ByI’ve just discovered that there are more than 690,000 instances of the obsolete name “Northern Rough-legged Hawk” on the web, most of them recent and nearly all of them from here in the Pacific Northwest. What gives?
With the simplification of the old names “Ferruginous Rough-legged Hawk” and “American Rough-legged Hawk” 50-some years ago, modifiers became unnecessary except when speaking of particular subspecies of lagopus (and that species may in fact be best considered monotypic anyway).
Somebody’s four-flushing it. Why? And who started this? Step forward and confess your shame!
1 Comments
February 12th, 2010 at 10:09 pm
Gail pinned the tail on this donkey with elegance and simplicity:
“Yes, we have lots of ‘northerns’ around: n. flicker, n.
goshawk, n. hawk owl…, but that doesn’t seem to explain this.
Finally it dawned on me – think about Northern Rough-winged Swallow
and Northern Rough-legged Hawk. The two names have exactly the same
cadence. For the brain to short circuit from one to another seems easy
to me.”
She’s right. This whole thing is a sort of innocent hypercorrection, not the relic of a historical naming convention.
Thanks, Gail!