Names are really just extreme words. And if the link between “ordinary” words and things is arbitrary, then that between names and the denoted can be downright capricious. Bird names are no exception, as generations of the literal-minded have moaned.
But a few birds enjoy names that are, wonder of wonders, straightforwardly descriptive.
Golden-crowned Sparrow? I’ll buy that. Hard to imagine what else you might call this bird with its, well, golden crown.
Unless, that it is, you happened to be Johann Friedrich Gmelin, who gave the species its scientific name in 1789. Gmelin was working from a not very good painting by John Latham, who labeled the bird “Black-crowned Bunting,” notwithstanding his description and depiction of the “fine yellow” of the crown.
Gmelin followed Latham’s slightly misleading lead in assigning the species the epithet atricapilla, meaning “black hair.”
That too makes sense from some views, I suppose, though I can’t help wondering why Latham and then Gmelin would have zeroed in on those midnight locks rather than the aureate crown. No accounting for taste!
