Clements is still using it. Personally, I think Rock Dove is a terrible name, as basically every English speaker knows this bird as a pigeon.
As Michel Gosselin is a consultant for the AOS, I would like to know his choices, especially for Gygis candida
Not in Australia!
Yes, I can affirm that. A few months ago I was going through some of my old eBird records and to my horror I found "Australian Fairy Tern" on a Hawaiian record from 25 years ago. I have no idea how that got there, maybe I put it there or maybe some of the annual taxonomy updates permuted the right bird into that one. "Australian" would have deterred me from using that name, though, because I knew perfectly well it was a White Tern. So it's a mystery to me.
Good point, but we also have sicklebills that are hummingbirds (Eutoxeres) and birds of paradise (Epimachus), so maybe not a deal-breaker? I'd personally like to see "fairy" retained in some way.
There's also lots of sparrows, warblers and robins globally that we seem to cope with
I believe what usually happens that people know the birds as "fairy terns" only, and since "White Tern" does not contain "fairy", people just look for whatever does. I wouldn't expect calling Gygias "fairy-terns" would remove the problem completely, but I would expect the problem to be drastically reduced.
I mean, is there anywhere where the hummingbird and the tern overlap, outside the rare vagrant tern? I can't imagine it being a point of confusion. that is in contrast with the Fairy-tern versus Fairy tern situation, where I believe there are some areas where both occur.
Purple-crowned Fairy and White Tern can both be seen in Panama and Costa Rica, though "is the bird over open water" is a pretty easy disambiguation point.
Indo-Pacific Fairytern works, or Indo-Pacific White Noddy as per Steve Howell's book
It wouldn't be "Fairy Tern" vs "Fairy-Tern", it would be "Australian Fairy Tern" vs "Indo-Pacific Fairy-Tern". Australian birders already have to deal with "Chestnut-quilled Rock-Pigeon" vs "White-quilled Rock-Pigeon" vs "Rock Pigeon", and these tern names would be much less confusing.
In answer to
It doesn’t matter if people think they’re sister species based on common names or not. As long as they don’t think they are the same species, that is all that matters. Sister species relationships are visible (to some extent) in scientific names.
I don't think the comparison to scrub-jays makes sense here. "Fairy Tern" is cemented as a name for Gygias. It's even what most birders call them - I've heard confusion from many people when I saw "White Tern", but when I switch to "Fairy Tern", people know exactly what I'm talking about. Basically anywhere English-speaking populations encounter this taxon they call it "Fairy Tern". None of those things can be said for the scrub-jays being called "blue jays".
What if its in a tree though?
Not to mention if you are on a beach calling out birds. Like how the hell would Fairy Tern versus Fairy-tern sound different. I'm guessing existing Aussie birders often just go with Fairy Tern not adding the modifier.
I would imagine that, to some degree, they probably already have this problem.
