names

Australian Bird Names

August 29, 2019

According to the second edition of the Australian Department of the Environment and Energy’s “Numbers of Living Species in Australia and the World,” 2nd edition, there are 828 (plus 13 identified as extinct in the wild and another 27 as introduced) species of birds in Australia. And as with so many other things in Oz, a generous portion of these have names, common or scientific alike, reflective of their Australian home, it’s history, and the languages of its first peoples that simply cry out like a flock of White Cockatoos for an explanation of their origin.

What’s in a Name? Plenty!

March 11, 2017

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 […]

Lapwings, Loons, and Lousy Jacks

August 3, 2016

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.

The Naming of the Shrew

December 23, 2014

Of all the books I’ve heard about as forthcoming in 2015, one of the most intriguing thus far has been John Wright’s “The Naming of the Shrew: A Curious History of Latin Names.”