Snow Geese are taken pretty much for granted across most of the continent nowadays, but the dark morph of Lesser Snow Goose remains a Midwestern specialty.
It’s only relatively recently that these handsome white-headed birds were recognized as conspecific with their snowy brethren; my first field guide still listed them as a separate species (which betrays not my age so much as the vintage of my first bird book).
The “lump” came in 1973, and with it one of those delightful onomastic mixups that bird taxonomy is so prone too. Priority required that the scientific name of the newly enlarged species be Chen caerulescens. Thus, all Snow Geese, including those populations that do not have a dark morph, now bear the name originally assigned the dusky birds, a name that means, well, “blue goose.”
It would be no more nonsensical, and even more amusing, had we adopted another of the old common names of the dark morph, “Eagle Goose,” which describes the adult’s bright white head. Maybe I’ll propose it to the AOU….
