In December, the American Ornithological Society (AOS) announced that it would change the English common names of the birds in the U.S. and Canada that are named directly after people (eponyms). These include birds named after enslavers (Audubon’s shearwater) and Native grave robbers (Townsend’s warbler). The movement behind the AOS decision comprises a young, multiracial generation of birders, some of whom are members of The Bird Union, whose union-busting employer, the National Audubon Society, had opposed calls to change its name last year. This movement had doubtlessly been powered by the police execution of George Floyd in 2020 (as well as the racist attack on birder Christian Cooper the same day), which pressured a variety of institutions to reckon with their own racial injustice issues. However, some birders are not having it. A petition created last month calls on the AOS to reverse its decision. The petitioners argue that renaming the birds would distract from more important issues, erase history, and sew division. Their reaction is not really about birds, however; it’s a white backlash against a movement that threatens white dominance over wildlife habitats.
One line of argument goes that the AOS decision is at best a distraction, at worst the culprit for the bird apocalypse to come. Among the initial signers, Chris Goodie writes “just imagine what we might all have been able to achieve if only the amount of time effort and money expended on this redundant exercise could instead have been spent on actually dealing with the urgent challenges that our dwindling bird populations are facing.” Another, Steven N. G. Howell, warns: “So, if you prefer to do nothing, don’t complain of the chaos that may follow, while bird populations continue to plummet even more quickly, helped merrily along by the AOS council’s sanctimonious and divisive diversion of time, energy, and funds away from true conservation measures.” Of course, conservation advocacy continues; there was no good reason to assume that changing bird names and defending habitats would be a zero-sum game. What does take away from conservation work, however, are the efforts by dozens of birders to organize petitions and spill dozens of pages against something as irrelevant to the survival of birds as changing their English names, and to shift blame for wildlife decline away from corporations and policymakers to a multiracial movement of naturalists.
A second line of argument conflates the replacement of bird names with the erasure of history. The petition accuses the AOS of “trying to hide ornithological history.” Howell, in his hyperbolic way, asks “Yet everyone for whom a bird was named is now by default deemed ‘bad’ by AOS and must be extinguished from history?”. Of course, no one cries this way when birds are split into new species (or merged into a single one). When the Chihuahuan meadowlark was split from the Eastern meadowlark, no time travel events changed the past, no one’s memories were erased, no outdated field guides were rounded up and burned on a pyre. The accusation, clearly, gets invoked only in the fury of white panic. The effort to rename birds is an attempt to uncover a history that has been racially distorted by the practice of honoring disgraceful individuals. The decision to drop all eponyms is also a way to acknowledge how problematic it is to source names from institutions that, structurally or deliberately, prioritize white men. Far from “defending” history, the petitioners want to defend only their version of it, the one dismembered by whiteness, in which they should be the ones to choose which parts to show and which parts to hide. This is about defending birding as the white-dominated institution they control.
Finally, the petitioners accuse the AOS of sewing division. Clearly, they’re oblivious to both the consequences of their own actions and the racial tensions that already exist in the birding community. First, the petitioners, who are overwhelmingly white, claim that they are the ones being discriminated against. Turning the tables is quite the tactic against a decision designed to acknowledge white violence toward Black and Native people in ornithology history. Next, in a further demonstration of their ignorance, initial signers such as Paul Lehman write “aren't 95% of birders a pretty welcoming lot?”. Just last year, a white birder put his hand on me and questioned whether I was a participant in the birding group at Fort Tilden, Queens. Ask enough birders of color and they’ll share stories that, when stitched together, tell a tale of widespread harm from white birders. Lastly, these good white liberals offer advice motivated obviously by self-interest. Gary Rosenberg, an initial signer, writes “There are many more effective methods to being more inclusive within the ornithological ranks - and many of the answers lie in socio-economic issues - NOT in what we choose to call our birds.” Of course, this advice lacks sincerity, because the work of challenging socio-economic issues is already happening; you’d have to be uninvolved to suggest otherwise, so this guidance is only meant to obfuscate the eponym issue. In any case, why should we accept advice from petitioners of a white-led group who play the victim and act as experts on racial justice issues for which they, up to now, have been silent?
It matters how we choose to name birds. As much as the petitioners argue that the AOS decision is meaningless, it’s clearly meaningful to them. And of course it is. Humans use symbols—names, art, ritual icons—to express and reaffirm their values. The eponyms issue is a contest among naturalists between the white status quo and those of us who won’t tolerate it.
It’s amazing how these people think they own everything. White supremacy in a nutshell