Birdwords

With this forthcoming issue of the WINGS e-newsletter, I’ve decided to change the way that the monthly bird trivia question is handled. Rather than pose a question one month and answer it the next, my answers will be posted immediately to The Wingbeat so that readers can simply “click” across to the blog after pondering [...]

I’m eager to get home and browse through the newly revised IOC Recommended English Names. This was an enormously fascinating–and fascinatingly enormous–project from the very beginning, and over the, what, two years now since the list’s appearance, I’ve found myself using it nearly every day, often in the form of the downloadable concordance of the [...]

Does this look like a robin to you?

Depends on where you live, I guess: “robin,” like “sparrow” and “chat” and “bunting” and so many other English bird names, means different things to different people all around the English-speaking world. But it isn’t the notorious ambiguity of such words that’s bugging me; it’s whether in a [...]