Names are powerful things. In many human cultures, the selection of a name for a new baby is a matter of the utmost seriousness, reflective of a family’s, society’s, or religious group’s past as well as perhaps portentous of that child’s own future. So it is also that what particular groups of people, entire races […]
If you’ve ever spent time perusing field guides from different parts of the world, you’ll no doubt have noticed that even though some of the same birds appear in them, their common names are sometimes different. Northern Harriers in the United States are, for example, Hen Harriers in England. And if you go to an older field guide, this same bird in the U.S. was once the Marsh Hawk.