![\"wilson,](\"http:\/\/birdaz.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/01\/Screenshot-2014-01-14-19.32.39.png\")
<\/a><\/p>\nHere is that grossest of calumnies, again, in an otherwise fine book published this past year: the\u00a0Wilson’s Warbler <\/strong>was, I read,<\/p>\n first collected and named (for himself) by Alexander Wilson.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n No. No no no.<\/p>\n It is true that Wilson was the discoverer<\/a> of this warbler, a “neat and active little species … never met with in the works of any European naturalist.” But he did not, not ever, name this or any other bird “for himself.”<\/p>\n Wilson called his bird, deposited in Peale’s Museum under the catalogue number 7785, the “Green Black-capt Flycatcher<\/a>,” and assigned it the latinizing binomial Muscicapa pusilla<\/i>, in recognition of its small size.<\/p>\n Muscicapa,\u00a0<\/em>of course, was one of the catch-all categories of those days, like\u00a0Motacilla\u00a0<\/em>and\u00a0Falco<\/em>. When Charles Bonaparte set out to revise the genera<\/a> of North America’s birds in 1828 — fifteen years after Wilson had shuffled off his mortal coil — the princely ornithologist reassigned the little “flycatcher” to the warbler genus Sylvia<\/em>, and changed its species epithet to\u00a0wilsonii<\/em>, in honor of his great predecessor.<\/p>\n A decade later, Bonaparte further subdivided the warblers, erecting the new genus\u00a0Wilsonia<\/em><\/a> and restoring (as was only proper) Wilson’s original species name\u00a0pusilla<\/em> to the small black-capped bird.<\/p>\n And so it was Charles Bonaparte who named the warbler for Wilson, first by using the (invalid) epithet wilsonii<\/em> and then by creating the genus name\u00a0Wilsonia<\/em>. In his Ornithological Biography,\u00a0<\/em>Audubon<\/a> was still calling the bird the Green Black-capped Flycatcher in English, but by the time he compiled his own Synopsis<\/em> in 1839<\/a> — a much-needed index to the plates of the Birds of America<\/i> — he had come ’round to refer to it as\u00a0Wilson’s Flycatching Warbler<\/strong>, the English name it still bears, with a slight simplification, today.<\/p>\n So why, oh why do people otherwise of normal intelligence insist on accusing Wilson of the supremest of ornithological vanities?<\/p>\n It’s because they’ve never learned to read a scientific name.<\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n