Bird Names and Ornithologistas
The bird renaming movement has the appearance of a Cultural Revolution in miniature, clad in a child’s Patagonia outerwear, but the inner logic of the movement is rather more sinister. The real concern of the movement is neither birds nor human beings but an ideology the logical implications of which are corrosive for science.
McCown's Longspur (Flickr Creative Commons)
The American Ornithological Society (AOS) recently announced its plan to rename approximately one hundred bird species that live in North America. Unlike its regular changes to bird names based upon the latest taxonomic data, the recent AOS decision is part of “an effort to address past wrongs and engage far more people in the enjoyment, protection, and study of birds.” But one suspects that the decision has little to do with science or conservation. As such, it suggests an ongoing politicization of American society that’s also bad for science, because scientific knowledge and enjoyment of all things scientific depends upon keeping politics in its proper lane. Here’s why.
The Enjoyment of McCown’s Longspur
To begin, consider McCown’s Longspur, a bird species that was the first to be renamed for political reasons in the recent movement. The wild prairies of northeastern Wyoming where it lives in summer are beautiful and memorable, even if the cold, incessant wind there hurts your face more or less constantly. In any given spring morning in this wild land, the McCown’s Longspurs are content, and all is right with the world.
When I first saw McCown’s Longspur in Wyoming, I had no idea who McCown was, and I didn’t care. I’m a birder, and I was there to see birds. It was June 5, 2003. I know the date, for I wrote it down in my journal: “6/5/03—Thunder Basin National Grassland, WY—It was extremely windy, 40 degrees, with occasional stinging rain, but the birds were still singing.” Other sightings of the day still come quickly to mind: a colony of noisy Prairie Dogs, a Horned Lark nest, Burrowing Owls, thousands of Prickly Pear spines eating away at my boots. For me, as for thousands of others who take up the hobby, birding provides an opportunity to pursue, howsoever humbly, a bit of scientific discovery, and to feel that very human contentment that comes to the one who begins to label the natural world.
The Bighorn Mountains of Wyoming in June. (photo by the author)
The Movement for Thick-billed Longspur
Following the George Floyd protests in 2020, there emerged a Bird Names for Birds movement that sought to make the birding community a more inclusive place, one not subject to the linguistic accoutrements of an oppressive and colonial past but one where the historically disadvantaged would no longer be afraid to put on a North Face puffy coat and drive their Subaru to the monthly meeting of their local chapter of the National Audubon Society, for which I can only assume a new name is forthcoming. If renaming-movement birders, largely an upper middle-class lot, are well meaning (and I don’t doubt that most are), they are also at times lacking in self-awareness.
This naming movement had a specific trigger: in 2020, a white woman—later dubbed “Central Park Karen”—called the cops on a black birder named Christian Cooper in New York’s Central Park. Cooper, incidentally a Marvel comic book writer, was birding in Central Park when he asked the woman to put her dog on a leash, which was required in that area of the park. When the woman refused, Cooper began to record her, which is when she called the cops. During the call, she referred to him as an “African-American” man, accusing him of assaulting her—something that did not occur. When the police arrived, Cooper was not charged, but the woman was. She later pled guilty to falsely reporting a crime. When Cooper’s video went viral, the woman lost her job, and, per her recent op-ed in Newsweek, she has been in hiding ever since due to the backlash against her alleged racism, which she maintains with some plausibility was not actually part of what happened. Still, the perception that this woman’s call to the police was racially-motivated means that many saw the incident as confirmation of America’s complicity in oppression and systemic racism.
But many birders see a silver lining to the gloomy cloud over Central Park: we can help to end racism by giving birds “bird names.” A simple name change will do the trick. And so, in 2020, McCown’s Longspur became “Thick-billed Longspur,” because (apparently) McCown was a Confederate General who dabbled in ornithology and because (apparently) McCown’s Longspurs have thick bills. Now, I have no interest in defending Confederate statues, but this is different. After what must have been the most serious and open-minded deliberation (or not), the American Ornithological Society recently announced its decision to rename nearly one hundred bird species in North America, because birds, we are told, must have bird names.
A Moderate Response to the Movement
Why, birders might ask, this curmudgeonly reception to a commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusivity in intersectional spaces in the birding community? The reason is that this relabeling movement betrays a Jacobin zealotry for politicizing something inherently unpolitical, in the process demanding the affirmation of the latest Very Important Thing. Maybe that’s why influential birder Kenn Kaufman initially opposed the decision but then, per NPR, “has come around.” It seems clear that what we have here is not something that is going to benefit avian conservation and not something that is going to do much of anything for American race relations or for a single human being; it seems instead to be a trend that, like so many others in times of social tension, amounts to a tribal insistence on political conformity.
Because of this, the movement to make bird names “about birds” is really making them about politics—not about birds—and the politics are not especially well-informed.
Consider even the recently-discovered discomfort with the name “McCown.” The leaders of the renaming movement, in the moment of righteous fervor that was 2020, perhaps googled the name and saw a Confederate Battle Flag, but then could not keep reading long enough to learn that General McCown of the Confederate States of America was court-martialed in 1863, ostensibly for disobeying orders, but most likely for disrespecting the “wrong” people, after which he called the Confederacy “a damned stinking cotton oligarchy” that existed for the benefit of Jefferson Davis and Tennessee Governor Isham Harris and their friends. Of course, maybe they did know about this but went on with the crusade anyhow, lest the bird in question, and birders who would otherwise be disallowed from enjoying it, be in any way stained by association with the Confederacy.
A Twitter/X account dedicated to the movement announces in its bio that “Bird names should be about birds,” which is to say that they should not be about birds. No one thought that eponymous names for birds rendered those names “not about birds” before their names were politicized by making them “about birds.” When for the past twenty-five years I read “Bachman’s Warbler,” those words signified in my mind something like “extinct wood warbler of southeastern North America,” and “McCown’s Longspur” signified to me “beautiful, small sparrow-like thing singing happily in the cold, howling winds of a Wyoming spring for some reason.” There could hardly be anything that better signifies one’s lack of authentic enjoyment of birds and other wildlife than politicizing them in this way.
The philosopher Michael Oakeshott’s observation about fishing applies well here. He argued that some people have a salutary disposition to engage in certain activities “where what is sought is present enjoyment and not a profit, a reward, a prize or a result in addition to the experience itself.” Friendship is one such present enjoyment, as is fishing. He explained that “fishing is an activity that may be engaged in not for the profit of a catch, but for its own sake; and the fisherman may return home in the evening not less content for being empty-handed.” Indeed, “What matters is the enjoyment of exercising skill (or, perhaps, merely passing the time) […] All activities, then, where what is sought is enjoyment springing, not from the success of the enterprise [be it monetary, political, or whatsoever else] but from the familiarity of the engagement, are emblems of the disposition to be conservative.”
A conservative sentiment, yes, but also a human one and one felt by any with the capacity for political moderation, for it is human to enjoy something worth enjoying, but Puritan and revolutionary to politicize some apolitical good. It is human to enjoy scientific discovery, but one signals to the world one’s status as a dour scold by reducing a bird to some political end. Such a one matches H. L. Mencken’s old caricature of a Puritan: a person who fears that someone, somewhere, may be happy. What an unscientific and dull mind is the one that politicizes something as charming as a beautiful bird in beautiful surroundings.
The Movement’s Meaning for Science in General
The bird renaming movement has the appearance of a Cultural Revolution in miniature, clad in a child’s Patagonia outerwear, but the inner logic of the movement is rather more sinister. The fad derives from a supposed moral obligation to eradicate names allegedly connected to colonialism and racism, but just as a Puritan crusader of the right or the left often has scant concern for actually-oppressed, real-life human beings, the presuppositions of the renaming fad leaves little space for human beings, oppressed or otherwise. The real concern of the movement is neither birds nor human beings but an ideology the logical implications of which are corrosive for science.
The tenuous logic of ornithology-qua-decoloniality should, if it were more consistently applied, abolish any names at all, and I think it an open question of whether scientists will realize this in due course. If “McCown” cannot be part of the label of a prairie-dwelling sparrow, why should any bird be subject to any label made by a human being—that most hegemonic oppressor (the justice-minded biology graduate student might say) of things ecological? Should we not go without names in general? The movement, were it left to fester, portends a rejection of the whole scientific enterprise. Names in general, being as they are the artifices of human beings—perhaps in the opinion of the more thoughtful of the movement’s vanguard mere sounds and symbols signifying nothing essential, mere hegemonic labels referring to an arbitrary Euclidean point in evolutionary time—why not just throw them all out? Taxonomy and Linnaean classification? Mere power plays! In this respect, the vogue to rename birds seems a microcosm of the larger trend, emerging now and then throughout modern history, to subject scientific knowledge to political ideology, to the detriment of both politics and science. The Lysenkoism of yesteryear now gives way to other less insidious entrapments of science that we hope will be less inconvenient to human wellbeing.
Gazing toward the plains from atop the eastern slope of the Bighorn Mountains, one can see the vast expanse that is Wyoming’s shortgrass prairie, where small birds, oblivious to their name but content in the cold wind and rain, sing a loud, happy song. I think I’ll go on calling them McCown’s Longspurs—not to make a political point, but because that’s how I memorized it twenty-five years ago when I developed an interest in birds. I enjoy them, and I wouldn’t want politics to mess it up.
