Let Me Tell You What’s In A Name
ByIn a word: everything.
Birders, of all people, should know how much language shapes experience. There’s a strong argument (and I think I’ve made it here and there over the years) that our hobby is exclusively verbal, that nothing we say or do in the field matters until we’ve actually uttered the name of the bird we’re watching.
But words don’t just capture experience; they also create expectation. And for birders, those expectations shift with each taxonomic revision.
I had plenty of time to think about such things this quiet morning at Mills Reservation. A female Common Yellowthroat lurking in the jewelweed and mugwort along the roadside was my first for the site, and occasion to ponder as I never had before whether it would be possible or not to mistake her for a Mourning Warbler–a thought that would probably not have occurred to me at all before the re-arrangement of the parulids in this past July’s AOU Supplement, which moved Mourning and MacGillivray’s (but not Connecticut) into the long-standing yellowthroat genus Geothlypis.
A few minutes later I was peering into the denser, darker understory of the woods proper, where a Veery and an apparent family of Wood Thrushes (two adults with a still fuzzy-headed young bird, all popping and plicking loudly) were sharing the windfall with Gray Catbirds, Blue Jays, Common Grackles, and a few American Robins. Now Veeries and Wood Thrushes don’t look much alike at all, but the question occurred to me whether I might not think otherwise if their genera (Catharus and Hylocichla, respectively) were (as they have been at times) once again synonymized as a broader Hylocichla (or Turdus, for that matter, as both were originally described). Wouldn’t the verbal suggestion of closer relationship make me focus more closely on the similarities than on what are, for now at least, the manifest differences between those two big-eyed brown birds of dark thickets?
Veery
Names, those most powerful of words, color our expectations–and our observations–more than we sometimes know. Our mornings afield are mediated events, where we come into contact with the world not on its own terms but as it has been captured for us in language; we see similarity, we see difference, where words have prepared us to look for it.
Wood Thrush
