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GARDEN OF THE GODS — Linda Hodges has a wish list of birds as she begins circling the Kissing Camel rocks, on a February day so painfully sunny the blue of the sky and the burnt orange of the sandstone would shame a gift shop decal.
Prairie falcon. Juniper titmouse. Woodhouse’s scrub jay. Townsend’s solitaire. Would that any of these winged friends show up this fine morning.
On the back side of the Camels, a gray streak flits into a 12-foot juniper groaning with berries. A Townsend’s solitaire needs up to 50,000 berries a winter to stay alive, and will resort to intraspecies violence to defend the pantry.
Otherwise, the solitaire is a sweet-songed fruit-lover that’s shy around strangers.
It’s complicated.
Just like its name.
A Woodhouse’s scrub jay, seen here sitting on top of a juniper, was among the birds spotted by Linda Hodges at the Garden of the Gods Feb. 12 in Colorado Springs. (Mike Sweeney, Special to The Colorado Sun)
John Kirk Townsend was a pre-Civil War doctor, pharmacist and naturalist, with dozens of new-to-science specimens to his credit, and birds to bats to jackrabbits named for him. His sisters wrote an antislavery alphabet reader.
He also broke open the graves of Indigenous people in the West to conduct experiments on their skulls.
Hodges, a leader of the Pikes Peak area’s Aiken Audubon chapter, loves the gray, often-still bird. But she’s not invested in the current name. She was as astonished as anyone to find she had been chasing a species of thrush that had been named for a grave robber.
“How many birders can tell you who Townsend was?” she asked, checking her iPhone for a song recording of the solitaire.
The modern birder’s journey through the emotion-laden process of names often follows Linda Hodges’ pattern: discovery, revulsion, reconsideration, resignation. And the journey will be repeated dozens of times in the next year as the American Ornithological Society vows to reconsider a flock of North American bird tags that traditionally honored a human namesake.
Bird renaming, and the controversy it’s stirring among scientists and hobbyists, echoes the geographic naming disputes that have led to the transformation of Mount Evans into Mount Blue Sky, or the dozens of locations on the map labeled with a slur against Native women being changed to anything less abysmally misogynist. Sometimes the birds are being renamed because they were linked to slaveholders or Confederate generals. The great father of birding, John James Audubon himself, is now derided as a former slaveholder and fraudster.
Other birds tagged for more innocuous naturalists or family members are also being changed, in an effort to dehumanize names many researchers believe should be more scientific and descriptive than honorific.
So the solitaire, a year-round Colorado resident wherever junipers are found, is in transition. Some have suggested a Navajo word meaning “one who splits wood.” Another bird blogger argues for the simple and accurate “juniper solitaire.” Other bird names are already gone: The oldsquaw duck was an early transformation decades ago, to long-tailed duck. A Colorado-frequenting longspur was called McCown’s, after an Army officer who switched to the Confederacy, and is now simply a thick-billed longspur.
Hodges’ birding group has not been riven by the same bitter debates taking place in other American clubs. Renaming, to her, makes scientific and humanistic sense.
“I don’t see how it harms anyone,” Hodges said. “I don’t want anyone out there feeling disrespected by these names.”
Before white explorers came along, Indigenous people had names for all the birds, she added. The Steller’s eider in Alaska is a gorgeous bird with a zebra’s back, a Venetian party mask and a toasted white breast looking like nothing so much as a well-tended marshmallow. The Alaskan Native word for it — Igniquaqtuq — means, perfectly, “duck that sat in the campfire,” Hodges said.
“So I don’t see that changing the names is something that we haven’t already done.”
When bird names went bad
The push to rename some North American birds gained momentum in recent years as racial justice protests around George Floyd’s death also accelerated a reckoning with monuments and other honors for historic figures reconsidered for harms they caused.
As the movement grew to change birds named for slaveholders, Confederate generals and now-troubled characters once hailed as heroes, a broader scientific purpose emerged, said University of Cincinnati biologist Lucinda Lawson, who supports the renaming trend. Why not at the same time get all human names out of the bird business, since honorifics, she said, “don’t really tell us anything.”
Blue jay is evocative, simple and accurate, she noted. Swainson’s hawk? Not so much.
One such contradiction some Colorado birders have seen out in the wild is the Inca dove. The scaly-feathered seed picker is a common ground bird in the Southwest. But it wasn’t discovered in the historic Inca civilization footprint in South America, Lawson said — it’s more accurately the Aztec dove, a native of what is now Mexico.
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“It’s not only insensitive, perhaps, but also wrong,” Lawson said. The switch to the more scientifically sound Aztec name is on the society’s action list.
The history of the Hammond’s flycatcher, which Hodges has seen near Manitou Lake, is often a surprise to even the most experienced birders. William Hammond was a Civil War-era surgeon general for the Union, a prototypical skeptical scientist, an early researcher on the applications of lithium and the causes of mental illness. He also belittled Blacks, bought slaves and demanded Indigenous corpses for anatomical studies.
Renaming took on greater urgency after the notorious 2020 “Central Park birding incident,” Lawson noted. Christian Cooper, a Black birder looking for finds in NYC, asked a white dog walker to leash her pet; the woman called 911 and said she was being threatened by a Black man. The birder’s many defenders set out to make the science and the hobby more inclusive and welcoming.
There’s some controversy involved in many fields undergoing renaming, some pushback from folks complaining about “cancel culture,” Lawson said. But those people may not realize scientists are used to changing and updating the names of things as part of their commitment to accuracy.
“So I’m excited,” Lawson said. She does think there will be checks and balances on the process. Yes, the public tried to name a British research ship Boaty McBoatface, but others will make sure “we don’t get too crazy,” she said.
“You know, you can come up with really beautiful and informative names. They don’t have to be boring.”
Linda Hodges checks the birding app on her smartphone on a recent outing at the Garden of the Gods, where she spotted an American robin (left) and a pair of red-tailed hawks (top). (Mike Sweeney, Special to The Colorado Sun)
Renaming is never that simple
Rachel Hopper is a northern Colorado birder and photographer who takes gorgeous, razor-sharp pictures of the birds and insects she loves seeking out in nature. Sometimes she even sells them, to galleries or stock photo sites, giving her birding hobby just a little more purpose.
She also loves bird names. Her Wilson’s warbler photo, here, is one of her favorites. “Wilson was an outstanding ornithologist, he made huge contributions to the natural sciences, and was a good person,” Hopper said.
“Once you start looking into why a bird is named the way it is, you open up a world of history that is fascinating. I’ve learned a lot about history in Colorado specifically, but all over the U.S., just by reading about that.”
But she gets it. Hopper is Jewish, and if there was a Hitler’s warbler, she said, she’d want that name changed last century. Hopper said she is all in favor of honoring the desires of underrepresented people by renaming birds first called for slaveholders or other now-discredited villains of history.
What she’s not agreeing to, and has been vocal online about resisting, is wiping out all human honorifics in the bird world. The American Ornithological Society, and the initial salvo-launching group Bird Names for Birds, have themselves bulldozed diversity by not consulting birders who disagree with them, Hopper said.
“This is where the divide is. There are many people in ornithological history that have no skeletons in their closet,” she said.
Those who launched the renaming debate “have changed this from an issue about inclusivity and ‘being the change,’ into an issue basically of colonialism in the United States. And that anyone who is white and male and was making discoveries in the 1700s or 1800s, no matter what they did personally and no matter what they believed personally, because they were in an era that was associated with colonialism, that no bird should be attributed to them,” Hopper said. “I have trouble with that theory. It was a different time. It was a different era.”
Hopper speaks in careful, full paragraphs because she knows that saying it out loud again will only bring her more grief. Online critics have called her a Trumper and a racist with “vile ideology” for trying to make these distinctions, she said. Peoples’ jobs have been threatened for raising any questions about renaming, Hopper added — if she weren’t retired, her own would have been threatened.
“What once was a peaceful activity we could engage in together is now a hotbed of slurs and slander and cancel culture wars,” Hopper has written, in an open letter to the society.
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When your club name is part of the problem
Some leaders of Hopper’s own birding club disagree with her, while saying they regret the way others are flaming her online for defending some birding honorifics.
They disagree so much, in fact, that they are in the process of renaming themselves. The Fort Collins Audubon Society has formally voted to dump the troubled “Audubon” part and come up with something new.
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The parent National Audubon Society went through the same debate and has declined, for now, to change its name, said Fort Collins society president John Shenot. The Fort Collins group spent 2023 on a deliberate discussion and membership vote that ended in 69.2% of voting members seeking a name change, just over the two-thirds threshold required for the change.
Fort Collins has about 300 members who pay local dues, and another 1,000 local birders attributed to the group who pay dues directly to national Audubon.
“It’s not a no-brainer. It’s a challenging decision for any Audubon chapter, especially one like ours that does not have very diverse membership and doesn’t really represent terribly diverse communities,” Shenot said.
Northern Colorado’s discussions went something like this, Shenot said: John James Audubon was an admirable naturalist and artist who introduced bird studies, and nature conservation in general, to much of the world. On the other hand, he didn’t found the national or local societies; they sprang up decades after he was gone and were named to honor his legacy. If that legacy changed …
“And even if I say that my membership and the areas we serve are not very diverse today, they’re certainly trending in that direction,” Shenot said. “And I for one wouldn’t want to associate myself with an organization that honored someone reprehensible.”
If that reasoning still left Shenot or others short of a passion for immediate renaming of individual birds, many birders’ love of the scientific ideal soon kicked in.
The possessive is an irritant, Shenot added, if it implies a human ownership of nature. Audubon’s oriole.
“I’ve always been a little bit uneasy about that as a first principle, irrespective of who the person is that’s being honored,” Shenot said. Animals should be identified and celebrated for themselves.
Like the University of Cincinnati’s Lucinda Lawson, Hodges of Colorado Springs hopes the birding world will grab the opportunity of renaming to make some monikers more “user-friendly.” Use science and observation to create tags that help birders in the field, she says.
From left: A spotted towhee combs the brush for food at the Garden of the Gods on Feb. 12. (Mike Sweeney, Special to The Colorado Sun) An Audubon’s oriole near Laredo, Texas, on Feb. 10. (Kris Hudson, Special to The Colorado Sun)
Of course, as with all dedicated hobbyists, reaching consensus on what exactly that looks like will be another series of arguments. Hodges at Garden of the Gods saw a flash of orange in the underbrush at the base of the Kissing Camels and was reminded of what drives her crazy about the spotted towhee.
“When I first saw one, it was called a rufous-sided towhee,” Hodges said. Scientists and birders have flipped back and forth over whether the Eastern towhee and the spotted towhee are actually separate species deserving of separate names.
“And that was annoying,” Hodges said. “Because it actually is rufous — rusty-colored.”
Committee work vs. on-the-ground work
The American Ornithological Society now has a standing committee reworking the troublesome bird names on a case-by-case basis, claiming plenty more opportunity for public input. They have decided not to argue the historic villains individually, however — members said they saw no point debating the relativism of bad vs. horrific in behavior and thought. All human name honorifics will go, up to 152 in North America.
Not all human constructs will be wiped out. For example, the Baltimore oriole, a “secondary eponym” named after the colors on the coat of arms of a baron, and still associated with the city and the plucky baseball team. Similarly, geographic names won’t be changed: the Canada jay will not be subject to border wars.
Colorado birders say they have other things to worry about for the moment, though they hope the renaming will make one small contribution to their efforts to draw more diverse participation in the pastime.
Hodges and other Pikes Peak area birders have been busy setting up the new visitation regime at their beloved Chico Basin Ranch southeast of Colorado Springs. What was once open borders for all birders at the conservation-friendly State Land Board property now allows visits only during limited windows.
Hodges is contemplating a trip to May Ranch near Lamar, to add the elusive black rail and the threatened lesser prairie chicken to her life list.
She’s a firm believer that change should not be feared.
“The Christmas bird count used to be, ‘How many birds can you kill in one day?’” Hodges said. “So people got together and said, ‘How about if we just count them instead?’”
Northern Colorado’s Shenot said he appreciates the sincerity and thoughtfulness of so many who have lent their voices to the naming debate, but he’s ready to move on. Climate change and the paving over of bird habitat are what keep him awake at night.
“We are in the midst of a bird apocalypse,” Shenot said. “And I need as many allies as I can possibly get to reverse the rapid decline in bird numbers, and the extinction threats. Any allies all around the world in the greatest possible numbers. And we can’t afford to do anything that is turning people away from the cause.”