The American Ornithological Society says it will alter all human names of North American birds, starting with up to 80 species.
By Darryl Fears, The Washington PostA Townsend's warbler perches on a branch January 31, 2007, in the backyard of a home in Seattle, Washington.
Sometime next year, the society is expected to appoint a committee to explore up to 80 new names. The move, at an organization known for its reluctance to rename birds, was surprising even to the activists within the group who requested it after a White woman in Central Park falsely accused a Black birder of assault in 2020. In a racial reckoning that shook the field of ornithology, the activists, most of them White, argued that the names of some birds were offensive to people of color.
John Kirk Townsend used skulls stolen from the graves of Native people to promote his theory that they were racially inferior. Black birders who trace the Bachman’s sparrow and Bachman’s warbler to the man they immortalized, John Bachman, might find this passage in one of his speeches: “That the Negro will remain as he is, unless his form is changed by an amalgamation, which . . . is revolting to us. That his intellect . . . is greatly inferior to that of the Caucasian, and that he is, therefore . . . incapable of self-government. That he is thrown to our protection.
At first, the diverse White, Black and Latino members failed to arrive at a consensus. In addition to North American birds, they mulled changing the names of South American birds but eventually decided that it was not their place.
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