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  1. Mysticete

    Petition to AOS Leadership on the Recent Decision to Change all Eponymous Bird Names

    I am not going to belabor this point or continue with this specific subthread, but you can absolutely detect tone in written response. Hell, my very first lecture of the semester, I specifically go over email etiquette with my students, where I bring up this very point. Although the fact that...
  2. Mysticete

    Petition to AOS Leadership on the Recent Decision to Change all Eponymous Bird Names

    1000 characters seems to be a reasonable number of characters to get your general point across, especially since at this point its unlikely its a point that will either be unique nor original compared to what others have said.
  3. Mysticete

    Petition to AOS Leadership on the Recent Decision to Change all Eponymous Bird Names

    The most recent comprehensive studies, or at least the studies using birds, mammals, and frogs, generally place South Florida firmly in the Nearctic. I think the earlier referral might be heavily based on plant diversity, rather than vertebrate diversity
  4. Mysticete

    Petition to AOS Leadership on the Recent Decision to Change all Eponymous Bird Names

    Returning to the topic at hand: AOS has put out a general poll, open to everyone, even non-AOS members, asking for general comments on the process. Note they are not asking for specific comments on names for each of the 6 "pilot" species, but rather broader things. So if folks want to make...
  5. Mysticete

    Petition to AOS Leadership on the Recent Decision to Change all Eponymous Bird Names

    I am not sure its as obvious as Wallacea, as the island nature of that transition I think makes things a lot more straightforward. Mexico is pretty much the transitional "region", with the Neotropics extending north into the country roughly along the Gulf, while the deserts and mountains of the...
  6. Mysticete

    Petition to AOS Leadership on the Recent Decision to Change all Eponymous Bird Names

    (Most) people are not going back to scientific names. What people will do is that some will use the new names, and some will use the old names. Which honestly happens all the time, even for name changes that are not controversial. I still refer to things like Gray Jays all the time for instance...
  7. Mysticete

    Petition to AOS Leadership on the Recent Decision to Change all Eponymous Bird Names

    No shortage of retcons with this stuff...
  8. Mysticete

    Petition to AOS Leadership on the Recent Decision to Change all Eponymous Bird Names

    the big thing is the grave-robbing of Native American graves, which were used in Phrenology (sp?) studies
  9. Mysticete

    Petition to AOS Leadership on the Recent Decision to Change all Eponymous Bird Names

    Kind of sounds like there will be no shortage of folks that agree with rahopko present!
  10. Mysticete

    Petition to AOS Leadership on the Recent Decision to Change all Eponymous Bird Names

    An update straight from the AOS, which specifically brings up the petition and some of the related fallout. So it does seem like the AOS is taking the petition and related criticisms seriously, and not just dismissing it out of hand (which, not going to lie, I was kind of expecting)...
  11. Mysticete

    Petition to AOS Leadership on the Recent Decision to Change all Eponymous Bird Names

    You know, looping in another recent discussion, the Mew Gull -> Short-billed Gull name change occurred in 2021. Does this mean that Mew Gull is still the official name of this bird in Utah? :)
  12. Mysticete

    Petition to AOS Leadership on the Recent Decision to Change all Eponymous Bird Names

    I think this page shows that most of the posters here put more thought into the new rule then anyone in the state legislature did. Incidentally, American Goshawk as a name does seem to have existed before, since according to this page: https://darwiniana.org/zoo/AOUb.html It was the name...
  13. Mysticete

    Petition to AOS Leadership on the Recent Decision to Change all Eponymous Bird Names

    Well...yeah. That is the entire point of folks on the left and right taking up culture wars in legislature. When you don't have policies or even a real platform, or the actual fix would annoy your funders/voting base, just find a trivial thing to legislate about that either effects nothing or...
  14. Mysticete

    Petition to AOS Leadership on the Recent Decision to Change all Eponymous Bird Names

    Yes...I am not aware of any sort of similar measure being used in the past. While politics certainly are entangled with wildlife management more often they I would prefer "cough wolf reintroduction cough", I am not aware of a equivalent manner. Of course, who knows...maybe this is now the new...
  15. Mysticete

    Petition to AOS Leadership on the Recent Decision to Change all Eponymous Bird Names

    This was specifically in reply to the comment from kb57 of the financial implications of changing names.
  16. Mysticete

    Petition to AOS Leadership on the Recent Decision to Change all Eponymous Bird Names

    This argument gets used, but I have been to plenty of parks and museums in this country that clearly haven't updated signage in decades. So I am not convinced this is that significant a reason. If it was, it's an argument for stasis overall, because every time you split or lump your signage gets...
  17. Mysticete

    Petition to AOS Leadership on the Recent Decision to Change all Eponymous Bird Names

    There would be a hell of a lot of irony if the law meant that Audubon's Warbler couldn't be used for Yellow-rumped Warbler in their state...
  18. Mysticete

    Petition to AOS Leadership on the Recent Decision to Change all Eponymous Bird Names

    They don't. They may say its about stability, but I doubt they knew the name of a single one of these birds prior to the bill being proposed. This is pure culture war nonsense. This really doesn't help your cause, but it colors the opposition as being just as political as the proponents.
  19. Mysticete

    Petition to AOS Leadership on the Recent Decision to Change all Eponymous Bird Names

    I doubt anyone cares what a group of Utah politicians think, especially given how performative and culture-war oriented politics on the right are at this moment.
  20. Mysticete

    Petition to AOS Leadership on the Recent Decision to Change all Eponymous Bird Names

    That's because at the present they use different taxonomies, with different scientific names and splits recognized (plus no subspecies groups for IOC). Presumably once the WGAC list is published, all of this will be identical...your choice of global checklist will have no impact on taxonomy, but...
  21. Mysticete

    Petition to AOS Leadership on the Recent Decision to Change all Eponymous Bird Names

    Kirk brings up some good stuff. Ebird has signed onto the WGAC initiative which almost certainly means its taxonomy is going to start differing even more so from the AOS baseline. Ebird really is the public face of birding in North America, and has more influence than ABA or AOS. I am very...
  22. Mysticete

    Petition to AOS Leadership on the Recent Decision to Change all Eponymous Bird Names

    Clements is just a part of Cornell (ebird) at this point, right? So you would want to direct the petition to them probably. I can't imagine ABA taking a different road than both Ebird and AOS. I think those would have to be the minds you change.
  23. Mysticete

    Petition to AOS Leadership on the Recent Decision to Change all Eponymous Bird Names

    A good chunk of the "English" words you use/read on a daily basis almost certainly have a foreign origin...it's just that they have been in use so long we don't think about them as "foreign".
  24. Mysticete

    Petition to AOS Leadership on the Recent Decision to Change all Eponymous Bird Names

    I don't really understand this either. If you are looking for scientific articles, I know as a researcher I start by typing in genus and species names, and then backtracking through the references. Or searching through related topics that are likely to discuss my topic of interest. The idea that...
  25. Mysticete

    Petition to AOS Leadership on the Recent Decision to Change all Eponymous Bird Names

    My sense is that the move to change eponyms has more support now than it did back in the initial BN4B (I know I was against at the time, but I am now in favor of it). It was also I think flying under the radar more as far as movements go...certainly there were more things in the nonworld bird to...
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