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The Story Behind Many Bird Names (theverge.com) 101

Some 150 birds named for people tied to slavery and white supremacy could eventually get new monikers as part of an ongoing reckoning with racism within the world of birding. The Verge: That includes Jameson's firefinch, named for a British naturalist who bought a young girl while in Africa "as a joke" and then drew pictures of her being brutally killed. In a new story this week, Washington Post reporter Darryl Fears breaks down the horrific history of ornithology that has managed to be scrubbed clean in many history books.

Fears also writes about the names these birds already had, given to them by Indigenous peoples who understood the animals long before white settlers supposedly "discovered" the creatures. There's a push now to return to some of those names or use new ones in local languages, which continue to be mocked by a cadre of birding elite that is still largely white. Just last year the American Ornithological Society apologized for "inappropriate comments" its members made nearly 10 years ago about a proposal to rename the Maui parrotbill to the Hawaiian name Kiwikiu.

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The Story Behind Many Bird Names

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  • by RightSaidFred99 ( 874576 ) on Friday June 04, 2021 @01:58PM (#61454894)

    I think someone's needle is stuck in a groove (I'm OLD), looking at the wording of the last few stories. Next I suggest "The Controversy behind XYZ" or "The Person behind ABC"...

    • I think someone's needle is stuck in a groove (I'm OLD)

      No, today's kids will get that reference. Vinyl records have made a bit of a comeback as of late, and one of the more ubiquitous record players is a crappy Chinese suitcase model that is prone to skipping.

      Oh right, the topic was supposed to be birds names. Well, I guess since many of them were named by racist incels, that explains the number of birds with "booby" and "tits" in their names.

  • Well then (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Train0987 ( 1059246 ) on Friday June 04, 2021 @02:11PM (#61454952)

    Wait until they discover the horrors of Islam's history. How many Mohammeds will have to be renamed?

    • None. Them they're afraid of.
  • not supposed (Score:5, Insightful)

    by peterww ( 6558522 ) on Friday June 04, 2021 @02:12PM (#61454960)

    > long before white settlers supposedly "discovered" the creatures

    Oh jesus. Look. If I look in my pantry, and say, "I discovered rice!", I am not saying that nobody has ever known about rice before. I am saying that I, personally, have just found the rice. If a white naturalist "discovers" a bird, they're not saying "nobody on earth has ever seen this bird before". They're saying white people from Europe have never seen this bird before. So it's not a "supposed" discovery - it *is* a discovery. Just because you want to make a point that somebody else has known about it before doesn't you should forget how language works.

    • by Anonymous Coward

      Let's demand Asian languages use the western names for all western discoveries.

      Give the woke an inch they will take a mile.

    • 'Discovering' something means that you were the one that put in or at least got the ball rolling to integrate it with the databanks of our current society. It doesn't mean necessarily you are literally the first one to find it. Thats really what matters. Its infeasible to worry about the Ancient Babylonian who invented calculus or the ancient Greek who invented the automobile if we don't know they did. And if their invention left no legacy or impact it really isn't important beyond a historical curiosity an
    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by isomer1 ( 749303 )

      they're not saying "nobody on earth has ever seen this bird before".

      Sorry, but you're wrong on this. They were precisely saying 'nobody on earth of any consequence'. Indigenous people were considered subhuman - their customs and knowledge considered the ramblings of savages. You may not mean that in your conversations, but you are grossly underestimating the racial and cultural ideology present throughout what we call western civilization.

      • Give me a fucking break. As opposed to the complete lack of tribalism in other non-Western civilizations? Fucking please. I'm sure if you gave a group of ancient nomads in Africa some machine guns and tanks 1000 years ago they would have just peacefully co-existed with their neighbors, right?
      • They were precisely saying 'nobody on earth of any consequence'.

        If by that you mean nobody who isn't participating in cataloging life forms, yes.

        you are grossly underestimating

        And you grossly overestimate the minutia of its extent.

        For effect.

        • If by that you mean nobody who isn't participating in cataloging life forms, yes.

          That's not what the people at the time mean. He even explained what he meant. These "discoverers" literally did think these people were subhuman. So it's not what "he" means, but what people at the time actually wrote about.

          And you grossly overestimate the minutia of its extent.

          Because the whole world revolves around you, Captain You-Planet. Because you don't feel affected by it personally, then it must be the same for everyone else.

      • Yes, because if natives living in grass huts knew about them, then they were totally "known to science." Just ask professor Nine Thunders of grass hut university!

      • See, this is my whole point. These are two completely different things that are being jammed into one thought bubble as if one follows the other, and they don't.

        There's A) white people discovering the bird, and B) white people treating indigenous people as subhuman. Sure, I agree with B, no problem! But they are then using B in order to imply that A is not true ("'supposed' discovery" = "white people didn't discover it"). But A *is* true - they did discover a bird, because discovery specifically means to be

    • Re:not supposed (Score:4, Insightful)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 ) on Friday June 04, 2021 @04:06PM (#61455460) Homepage Journal

      It's a reference to the attitude the European academics had back then. Dismissed entirely anything the Africans had to say on the matter. They basically considered them to be primitive and treated the situation as if they were the first ones to have any worthwhile insight.

      • Re:not supposed (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Oligonicella ( 659917 ) on Friday June 04, 2021 @06:52PM (#61455994)
        Here's an interesting linguistic tidbit for you. Most cultures don't have names for individual species (the point of taxonomy and scientific naming).

        If you point to fifteen species of grasshopper and the natives only say "grasshopper" they are worthless contributors to the effort of taxonomy. Hell, most cultures lump all the Caelifera into the Acrididae and most include the Tettigoniidea, which are closer to crickets than grasshoppers. Go look those up so you can see why that's wrong.

        THAT is why they don't use local names in taxonomic naming. As for common names, we use local names a lot - raccoon and okapi (from each side of the pond) for instance.

        But you have your agenda to support, eh?
        • Re: (Score:2, Flamebait)

          by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

          Africans knew a lot about the various species and a great deal about animal lifecycles and habits. It was all dismissed because they were seen as primitive and didn't conform to European scientific norms like the naming of individual species that you describe.

          Just because they didn't do that one thing does not mean that the rest of their knowledge was worthless. It's the standard tactic that Europeans used at the time to prove how superior they were, i.e. set an arbitrary bar that only they can meet and the

    • You're agruing against an SJW pedant. Pedantry is their bread and butter argument style.
    • They're saying white people from Europe have never seen this bird before.

      Cool. So then there's no problem with renaming the birds to what the locals called them.

  • by beepsky ( 6008348 ) on Friday June 04, 2021 @02:12PM (#61454966)
    The Chinese call it zongguo, the Japanese call it chuugoku, the English call it China.
    It's the same thing and nobody is complaining or saying we should change the English pronunciation to the Chinese one.
    So why does it matter that we have European names for birds? Is this some critical race theory bullshit? Different languages are different *wow*
    • It's the same thing and nobody is complaining or saying we should change the English pronunciation to the Chinese one.

      An old Saturday Night Live skit [youtube.com] comes to mind...

    • by Jerrry ( 43027 )

      "The Chinese call it zongguo, the Japanese call it chuugoku, the English call it China.
      It's the same thing and nobody is complaining or saying we should change the English pronunciation to the Chinese one."

      We've done something similar in the past. When I was growing up, the Chinese capital was Peking. Now it's Beijing. Similar English name changes have been made for cities in India (Bombay vs. Mumbai, for example).

      We have not made similar changes for European cities where the names of cities are different i

      • We have not made similar changes for European cities where the names of cities are different in the local language.

        Of course not. It hasn't made sense to. Language follows the written form. Peking wasn't some English version of Beijing, it was a French attempt at romanising a specific dialect which was then translated to English. Guess what turns out the official dialect changed to Mandarin as did the pronunciation, and the Chinese produced an official romanisation of their alphabet called pinyin. In English we just adopted a more correct romanisation when as it turned out all our underlying assumptions about why we cal

    • by isomer1 ( 749303 )
      It matters because as our cultures become interconnected were are working to unify the nomenclature - to have a 1:1 relationship between names and concepts. When that name has a grotesque backstory, it is unacceptable.

      It's the same thing and nobody is complaining or saying we should change the English pronunciation to the Chinese one.

      1. Yes we are unifying towards using single names - it takes time but it is the natural progression of language and human nature. We are lazy by design, and having multiple names for the same concept is inefficient. 2. If the names are benign it is of little consequence, when the names are exp

      • When that name has a grotesque backstory, it is unacceptable.

        Horseshit. You forgot the ending words to your sentence - "to me".

        it is the natural progression of language and human nature.

        You need to bone up on etymology.

      • > When that name has a grotesque backstory, it is unacceptable.

        Why is it unacceptable?
        What will happen when all the statues of terrible people are hidden?
        What will happen when all the terrible people's names are changed to nice people?
        What is the benefit of forgetting the crimes and atrocities of our past?
        Why do you want to forget the tortured and the dead?
        Isn't pretending that all the slave owners never existed diminishing the impact of slavery?

        Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat

        • by Cederic ( 9623 )

          Well, if people don't know he bought a little girl then they won't ask awkward questions like "who sold her", "why did black people kill and eat her" and "how many other children did these people kill and eat and why are we giving all our attention to just one".

          They also won't investigate and find out that he didn't think they'd actually kill her and was shocked when they did.

          But no, the child killing cannibals get a free pass, it was all the evil white man.

    • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      Remember when Peking became Beijing?

      • Remember there are about 1.5 billion Chinese, and probably not one gives a shit what we call their cities in English?

        • Irrelevant. The point is that "English" names have been changed to reflect the local dialect and not some hypothetical situation that the GP assumed it was.
      • I remember when "China" was "Red China". And the Nixon administration's disastrous scheme to court them, because "after they see how we live in the West, they'll quit being Commies!!! (paraphrased, but accurate). Yeah, that worked well.
        • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

          Uh, yeah, it did. China is now a capitalist economy, and reliant on international trade which moderates its behaviour.

        • Look at those timelapse photos of Shanghai and tell me you think they're still commies. Or maybe you're one of those American nitwits who continue to confuse an economic system with "democracy".
    • Is that the African or the European name for a swallow?
    • The Chinese call it zongguo, the Japanese call it chuugoku, the English call it China. It's the same thing

      No. Only Zhong Guo and chuugoku are the same thing, meaning "middle kingdom". China likely derives from the Qin dynasty, and not related to the other words.

      So why does it matter that we have European names for birds? Is this some critical race theory bullshit?

      No, because the only thing that's bullshit is cunts like you banging on about "critical race theory". There's something wrong with tossers like you seeing enemies around every corner - worse than so-called "SJWs" or the "PC police" or "woke" or some other conservative snowflake boogeyman.

    • by idji ( 984038 )
      German has beautiful names for many Australian birds (Wellensittich = wave-parrot = Latin form of Budgerigar, Nymphensittich = nymph-parrot = Cockatiel, Allfarblori = allcolorlorikeet = Rainbow Lorikeet, Rosakakadu = pink-cockatoo = Galah) and many mammals (Schnabeltier = beak-animal = Playtpus). Should they change them?
      Orang-utan is in the Bahasa langauge - Aren't they the colonial power? Shouldn't we use an indigenous word from Borneo as well? Cockatoo itself is a Bahasa word. Is that a problem? It comes
  • How is the "Maui Parrotbill" named after a person tied to slavery or white supremacy?

    I understand the thinking behind this - the bird previously had a name given by the aboriginal inhabitants - but really, we have a long history of renaming things to (ostensibly) make the names more descriptive or to fit newer paradigms. For example, taxonomists renamed certain plant families a couple decades ago - e.g. Umbelliferae became Apiaceae. And it happens with common names - the "Oregon Junco" was rebranded as a Black-Eyed Junco.

    I dunno, perhaps it's time to ditch all the Latin-ish scientific names - after all, a lot of those Romans were horrible bastards.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by guruevi ( 827432 )

      As the summary clearly states: they have "to be scrubbed clean in many history books"

      Basically they want the ancestry of the west and particularly of whites to only show the politically correct versions. They're literally rewriting history in order to hide and avoid all the bad things people did back then.

      It's what we used to call regular racism and what they now call anti-racism.

      You can check the same happening with the link between Democrats and the Slave States, the link between Democrats and the KKK, th

      • None of that is racist, because we can rewrite history to suit us.

        So they're basically following Barney Stinson's philosophy: Suit up!

      • None of that is racist, because we can rewrite history to suit us.

        So what you're saying is it's like people from the South claiming the Civil War wasn't about slavery. Or how Christians will claim they were helping the indigineous people while their contemporaries were writing in their journals how glad they were the "savages" contracted smallpox.

        Nice to see you got all the trigger words in there, including going after the first black vice president. Just like you probably went after the first b
      • by Lordfly ( 590616 )

        You had me in the first half, but then you just went full racist and I lost interest. Almost had me there. Almost.

  • by downfromtherafters ( 7922416 ) on Friday June 04, 2021 @02:18PM (#61455000)
    if you look hard enough. The more things of significance someone has done, especially in the past. The more likely they have controversy to go along with it. Its almost inevitable We've erased colonizers, then leaders with some controversy.(almost any significant leader if you look hard enough and of course only if they are white male) Now we are on to dorks who draw pictures. Eventually they'll remove anyone of consequence. The goal of course isn't against specific people but to replace an entire history/culture with a new one.
    • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      Well, yes, it is. The way history is taught now tends to erase a lot of people who made important contributions, and gloss over or ignore anything that looks bad for us.

      If truth and facts are important then we should care about our history being distorted to make us look good.

      • If truth and facts are important then we should care about our history being distorted to make us look good.

        Should we also care about our history being distorted to make us look bad?

        • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

          Of course. Can you provide examples of that?

          And also, perhaps now you can see why people complain about distorted Western history that makes them look bad.

  • To the out of favour names. With annotations as to the why, in every publication that ever used the offending names.
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • by doug141 ( 863552 ) on Friday June 04, 2021 @02:27PM (#61455044)

    https://firstwefeast.com/drink... [firstwefeast.com]

      Jameson writes that the whole thing started as a joke, and that he wanted to see if cannibalism was a real thing after one of his guides started telling him about cannibal tribes in the area they were traveling in.

    “I sent my boy for six handkerchiefs, thinking it was all a joke, and that they were not in earnest, but presently a man appeared, leading a young girl of about ten years old by the hand, and I then witnessed the most horribly sickening sight I am ever likely to see in my life. He plunged a knife quickly into her breast twice, and she fell on her face, turning over on her side. Three men then ran forward, and began to cut up the body of the girl; finally her head was cut off, and not a particle remained, each man taking his piece away down the river to wash it. The most extraordinary thing was that the girl never uttered a sound, nor struggled, until she fell.

    Until the last moment, I could not believe that they were in earnest. I have heard many stories of this kind since I have been in this country, but never could believe them, and I never would have been such a beast as to witness this, but I could not bring myself to believe that it was anything save a ruse to get money out of me, until the last moment.

    The girl was a slave captured from a village close to this town, and the cannibals were Wacusu slaves, and natives of this place, called Mculusi. When I went home I tried to make some small sketches of the scene while still fresh in my memory, not that it is ever likely to fade from it. No one here seemed to be in the least astonished at it.”

    Full text:
    https://archive.org/stream/sto... [archive.org]

    • Clearly, we need to rename the Jameson Firefinch because he was horribly sickened by the act. I guess the woke ornithologists involved would have much preferred that he expressed approval? She was, after all, a white girl. And CRT is already teaching us how we should feel about those creatures.

    • by Anonymous Coward

      Not surprised at all that the WaPo article misrepresents the situation. Fuck Darryl Fears and his race-baiting.

    • That wasn't the first mention of cannibalism in his journal, and I don't think he thought it was a joke, though he had to see it to believe it. This is the text preceding yours. This is like someone telling you snuff films are real, and giving you a very specific story of how one happened, and you know damn well there are warring factions in the area actually killing and capturing each other, and you says to your traveling companion: "Show me. Shit. Oh wait, I thought you were kidding." The OCR is terr

    • We're going to cancel the Wacusu too, right? Hello? Bueller?

  • by PPH ( 736903 ) on Friday June 04, 2021 @02:49PM (#61455126)

    For a moment there, I thought this story was going to be about renaming the blackbird.

  • by DontBeAMoran ( 4843879 ) on Friday June 04, 2021 @02:55PM (#61455140)

    Well, you have to know these things when you're a king, you know.

  • by spaceyhackerlady ( 462530 ) on Friday June 04, 2021 @03:03PM (#61455174)

    If everything is to expunged from the record based on hysterical 2021 standards we lose our history, because very little (if anything) is going to measure up. Remember it. Learn from it. But don't erase it.

    It's been shown too many times that erasing somebody's history, attempting to reprogram somebody to be something they're not, is the very best way to totally fuck somebody up.

    I live in Kamloops, BTW. I see too many people who lost their culture and are totally fucked up as a result.

    ...laura

    • ... losing history and culture? History isn't changing. You can keep your rose-tinted glasses if you want, but the truth is coming out, and facts don't have feelings right.

      Explain what you mean by losing culture. And be very clear so you don't leave us guessing.

      Who is entitled to having their name immortalized on a library, statue, a street, or even a bird? Nobody. What kind of idol worshipping BS is that. Anyone is fortunate enough to have some good side of them recognized in their own time. Their cu

  • The aboriginal names for these animals probably tell us more about the role of the animal in its environment or its relationship with man, than the name $WesternObserver's $BirdCategory.
  • Does anyone here remember when this used to be a tech blog that wrote about IT stuff? I used to read stories about computers, Linux, IPv6 adoption, the very first bitcoin info. Now it's just another woke social justice warrior blog half the time.

    • by nomadic ( 141991 )

      No. I've been reading slashdot for 20+ years. It was never just about IT stuff. Culture, politics, etc. has always been reported on it.

      • You're right, it was never *just* about IT stuff. It was about IT stuff, culture+IT stuff, politics+IT stuff, ethics+IT stuff, privacy+IT stuff, and so on. Political discussions about net neutrality. Discussions about ethics in technological advancement, such as autonomous weapons. But at the heart of every topic was some technology.

        Nowadays, a significant portion of the posts has zero connection to technology. Like this very post, which almost looks like it could have originated from "the Onion".

        • Well since it's about change for the sake of ignoring uncomfortable things we should have never had stories on RMS since that's not related to technology.

        • by nomadic ( 141991 )

          Nonsense, there were plenty of non-IT-related posts. The most comments tended to show up on politics stories without a tech component.

    • You gotta admit though, racist bird names ... there's humor there. Surely they can't be serious? Here's one they missed, Daffy Duck. Makes fun of people with learning disabilities. And people with speech impediments. Desth-picable!
    • by k2r ( 255754 )

      > when this used to be a tech blog that wrote about IT stuff?

      I‘m not sure, can‘t have been in this millennium, tell me more.

    • Does anyone here remember when this used to be a tech blog that wrote about IT stuff?

      Pepperidge Farm remembers.

    • Does anyone here remember when this used to be a tech blog that wrote about IT stuff? I used to read stories about computers, Linux, IPv6 adoption, the very first bitcoin info. Now it's just another woke social justice warrior blog half the time.

      No, I don't. The history of /. lives on in the DB. Can you point to and link to a particular time period when it was like this?

    • Does anyone ... stuff?

      Still does.

      I used to read stories about....

      Still can.

      Now it's just another woke social justice warrior blog half the time.

      It was always a magnet for flame wars. Those are just the latest wave of flame trollers to come around.

  • by nagora ( 177841 ) on Friday June 04, 2021 @05:38PM (#61455790)

    No one remembered this stuff. Nobody was celebrating whatever happened with Jameson and the rest.

    Somebody dug this up so that they could make a great show of how offended they were and what a saint they are for "fixing" it. Fuck them and the white steed they rode in on.

    It's like the statue of Colston that was pulled down in Bristol - the statue wasn't celebrating a slave owner, it was celebrating a rich bloke who funded the hospital the statue was outside. Slavery wasn't mentioned on the statue base AFAICT.

    This is moronic shit.

  • Piss the fuck off you tender-assed snowflakes.
  • The Blackbird (Turdus merula) is to be renamed the Bird of Color. HTH

  • English is the language of slave-owners. We must ditch English entirely, and speak only Swahili from now on.

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