Apologies once again for the rhetorical headline; you almost certainly can guess why bird names have to be renamed.
Just when you thought Social Justice™ had mined society dry of its racism, it discovers oil once more.
The great unrighted wrong of history: racist bird names.
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Via NPR (emphasis added):
Say goodbye to Bachman’s Sparrow, Scott’s Oriole and Townsend’s Warbler. Those three birds are among a half-dozen that will get renamed first under a plan by the American Ornithological Society to do away with common bird names that honor people…
The goal was to rename over a hundred North and South American birds, to purge bird names of links to racism and colonialism without having to engage in contentious and time-consuming debates about the morality of every historical figure that had ever been honored in a bird’s common name.
Blanketly doing away with all bird names to “having to engage in contentious and time-consuming debates” with activists is obviously the lazy way out, but one can hardly blame the folks at the Society; even if they purged all of the “racist” names on one of the list, these people would just add more later on to keep the never-ending crusade going.
The whole Orwellian semantical engineering project is necessary, NPR explains, because a cop used excessive force in Minneapolis and then a junkie overdosed four years ago.
Continuing:
On May 25, 2020, George Floyd was killed on the same day that a white woman called the police on Christian Cooper, a Black man out birding in New York, heightening awareness of social justice issues in society more generally and in birding specifically.
That year, the American Ornithological Society took action on a proposal to rename a bird that had previously been named after a high-ranking Confederate officer. McCown’s Longspur suddenly became the Thick-billed Longspur.
This renaming proposal had been rejected a couple years earlier, but times had changed. Confederate statues and monuments were coming down in cities and towns.
And a group called Bird Names For Birds was urging the society to do more to address problematic bird names, likening eponymous common names to “verbal statues.”
After forming an ad hoc committee to study the issue and make recommendations, the society announced its plan to rename all birds named after people, along with changing any other names deemed offensive.
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We all know how the ominous poem —a stark warning from history that echoes through time — goes:
First they came for the Confederate statues, and I did not speak out because I was not a Confederate statue.
Then they came for the Jewish birds, and I did not speak out because I was not a Jewish bird.
Then they came for the Gentile birds, and I did not speak out because I was not a Gentile bird.
Then they came for me!
