McCown is hardly the only objectionable name in the bird world. Something much smaller has also elicited debate over its Confederate name: McCown’s longspur, a bird that lives in the Great Plains and looks a bit like a sparrow. “It’s important to make sure that the way we say things and what we call things is inclusive to everybody.”. Regarding stability, McGee said, “the idea that we should do things a certain way because that’s how they’ve always been done isn’t a good enough excuse.”, Sara Lipshutz, a postdoctoral fellow in biology at Indiana University Bloomington, wrote in an email to Undark that she was frustrated with the value placed on stability. “Multiple people in high-up positions in neighboring ornithological groups have spoken out with their thoughts and have given really, really great solutions to this problem. Did the Confederate States of America have a national bird and if so what was it? McKinley was officially restored to its Alaska Native name Denali in 2015. Something much smaller has also elicited debate over its Confederate name: McCown’s longspur, a bird that lives in the Great Plains and looks a bit like a sparrow. An AOS spokesperson said the committee will announce its decision on renaming later this month or in early August. Smithsonian Institution. Others questioned whether renaming birds was the best way to promote inclusion: “While I fully appreciate and promote our need to increase diversity in the sciences, in my view this is not a particularly effective way to do so,” another committee member wrote. He later joined the Confederacy, leading troops in Tennessee, Kentucky and other states. If you are 13 years old when were you born? How long will the footprints on the moon last? “You were never McCown’s to begin with.”. This article is a list of national symbols of the Confederate States enacted through legislation. “It’s very well documented that he robbed the graves of Native American tribes,” says Martinez. A “taxonomic philosophy,” outlined in the preface to the checklist, explains that the NACC will “avoid hasty declarations that risk quick reversal” and follow “the time-honored tradition of previous committees” in being “conservative and cautious” when judging new proposals. Changing one name does not solve the whole problem.”, Other bird experts have questioned the very practice of naming North American birds after the White men who supposedly “discovered” them. “The general awareness this has produced, I’m very happy that this is on people’s minds now.”. Photo: Agami Photo Agency/Alamy. Her work has appeared in Hakai Magazine, OneZero, and NPR. Members of the NACC, the AOS leadership team, and the AOS diversity and inclusion committee did not respond to interview requests from Undark, but, in an emailed statement provided on behalf of the NACC, Christine Schmidt, a spokesperson for AOS, explained that this decision had been “motivated by a change in social perception on racial issues, particularly in recent weeks.”, “Regardless of McCown's ornithological accomplishments and the fact that the bird name predates the Confederacy, to many, McCown is perceived as a symbol of slavery and racism for the simple reason that he resigned his officer's commission in the U.S. Army to fight for the Confederacy,” the NACC explained in their statement. Birders have so many different names for red. In anonymous written responses, several committee members argued that the group should favor “stability in names” as much as possible, reflecting the checklist’s taxonomic philosophy. “It is widely known that judging historical figures by current moral standards is problematic, unfair to some degree, and rarely black-and-white,” one wrote. On June 30, the AOS announced that it was preparing to reevaluate the name of the longspur. I say throw them all out the window and rename all the birds named after old dead White ornithologists.”, Instead, Ward points out that many birds are named after their behaviors, their preferred habitat, or physical features, and these characteristics could be used to rename birds like the longspur as well. Among birders, naming rights have historically gone to the scientist who “discovered” a species — meaning the first person to publish a description in a scientific journal. “It’s just amazing how many of them there are. In 2015, ornithologists in Sweden officially renamed several birds whose original names had racist connotations.

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