busconews.com

by Neil A. Case

A little hawk perched on the power line by the road as I drove past. It looked about the size of a robin though its head was much larger than a robin’s. It was a kestrel, of course. But I didn’t think of that name. I was preoccupied with driving and the road and the weather and I thought of a different name, the name I first knew for a kestrel, sparrow hawk.

Sparrow hawk is not an accurate name for the bird. It rarely catches or even pursues a bird. Its prey is small mammals, mice and voles. But being so small the man who first named it, undoubtedly a collector who shot one or more, not a bird watcher, someone who knew nothing of its habits, assumed from its size it preyed on smaller birds and called it sparrow hawk.

Partly following the same reasoning and partly because one did occasionally kill a chicken the much larger, common red-tailed hawk was called chicken hawk. That name was never the prescribed name, the book name, as sparrow hawk was. But I heard people say chicken hawk much more often when I was a boy than I heard anyone say red-tailed hawk.

Mourning dove was another bird with a prescribe name and a common name, turtle dove, when I was young. The flicker was even more mixed up it seemed. Where I lived in Iowa and in other states north and east and west approximately to the middle of the Dakotas, Nebraska and Kansas there was the yellow-shafted flicker. West of that was the red-shafted flicker while in the south the flicker, yellow-shafted, was commonly called yellowhammer. Now, officially, they are all together and named northern flicker. However Alabamans chose yellowhammer as their state bird and yellowhammer it remains.

A naming committee of the American Ornithologists Union decides and prescribes the official names of North America birds. These are the names of bird books. To be certain you have the right name, though, you need a recent edition of a bird book. Older books still list yellow-shafted and red-shafted flickers, for example.

Another example I find most interesting is the Baltimore oriole. That was the original specified name of this bird of roughly the eastern half of North America. To the west is a similar bird named Bullock’s oriole. The ranges of the two overlap and where they do there is hybridization. Because of this hybridization at one time the two were called one and named the northern oriole. More studies indicated the hybridization was not extensive and the two were once more divided into two species, Baltimore and Bullock’s oriole.

The Baltimore oriole is the state bird of Maryland. The Baltimore oriole remained the state bird of Maryland even when it was officially joined with the Bullock’s oriole and officially named the northern oriole.

There are many common or colloquial names for North American birds. Mallard ducks are called green-heads, shovelers are called spoonbills and pintails are called sprigs. The American wigeon was named baldpate when I was young and is still called that by some hunters, the long-tailed duck was named oldsquaw. The surf scoter, a black colored duck with two white patches on its head, a bird that nests in the far north and winters along the coasts, is frequently called skunk-head.

Nobody I knew when I was young called a coot a coot. It was a mud hen.  The American bittern was a thunder pumper. A spotted sandpiper, a bird that bobs almost continuously when it isn’t flying, was called a teeter-snipe.

Home again after my drive, staying inside and watching birds outside my window, I thought of more alternate names for American birds. Wild canary for goldfinch and yellow warbler, English sparrow for house sparrow, rain crow for a cuckoo and myrtle warbler for the yellow-rumped warbler. And there are more.