Why Evolution is True is a blog written by Jerry Coyne, centered on evolution and biology but also dealing with diverse topics like politics, culture, and cats.
To end the week, let’s have a feel-good video of a group of Emperor Penguin chicks, threatened by a hungry petrel, get saved not only by their own defensive behavior, but also by the timely intervention of an Adélie Penguin. Among the smallest of penguins, Adélies are nevertheless fierce. (I’m also impressed by the huddling of the Emperor chicks and the one who holds up its flippers to protect the others.)
Now, you may ask yourself, why would an Adélie trouble itself to save members of another species? It’s only taking a risk with no possible benefit to its genes. There are some answers, but I’ll let you think of them. Put them below in the comments.
Yes, they’re back again, but my supply is limited, so send in your good wildlife photos (submission rules are on the left sidebar).
Today’s submission comes from ecologist Susan Harrison of the University of Californa at Davis. Susan’s IDs and narrative are indented, and you can click on the photos (twice if you want) to make them bigger.
Drake’s Bay
Just north of San Francisco lies the miraculously wild Point Reyes Peninsula. In 1962, its 71,000 acres of coastal terrain and 80 miles of shoreline were set aside as the Point Reyes National Seashore, managed by the National Park Service for wildlife and hiking. The peninsula is bounded on the northeast by Tomales Bay – an arrow-straight segment of the San Andreas Fault — and on the west by open ocean. Its southern edge is Drake’s Bay, lined by a long gleaming arc of cliffs and beaches.
Drake’s Bay looking eastward from the tip of Point Reyes:
Seabirds, shorebirds, and marine mammals use Drake’s Bay’s sheltered waters. So did English pirate Sir Francis Drake, who in 1579 repaired his ship here, reminisced about the white cliffs of Dover, and inscribed a Plate of Brasse — never since found — claiming “Nova Albion” for Her Majesty.
Here is a brief wildlife-oriented tour of Drake’s Bay from west to east, taken in November 2023.
Today we’ll have the last wildlife photos for about ten days, and they come, as always on Sunday, from John Avise. John’s notes are indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them.
Panama Birds, Part 2
Last week’s WEIT post showcased a dozen bird species that I managed to photograph on a seminar trip to Panama in 2008. This week’s post shows another dozen or so avian species that I photographed during that same several-week excursion. As I mentioned before, I found the dark and rainy forest understory to be an extremely difficult environment in which to get good bird photographs.
The American Ornithological Society has issued a Diktat that all common bird names derived from a person’s name, or “eponyms,” are going to be discarded and replaced with descriptive names. The Latin binomials or “scientific names”, however, are not going to be changed. Below is the order from on high; click on headline below to read:
The Diktat:
The AOS commits to changing all English-language names of birds within its geographic jurisdiction that are named directly after people (eponyms), along with other names deemed offensive and exclusionary, focusing first on those species that occur primarily within the U.S. or Canada.
The AOS commits to establishing a new committee to oversee the assignment of all English common names for species within the AOS’s jurisdiction; this committee will broaden participation by including a diverse representation of individuals with expertise in the social sciences, communications, ornithology, and taxonomy.
The AOS commits to actively involving the public in the process of selecting new English bird names.
The AOS argues for these obligatory common-name changes for two reasons. First, a bird named after a person doesn’t describe the bird (“Gambel’s quail“, for instance, might be more descriptively called the “brown-capped quail”, which tells you a bit about its appearance). Second, the real reason can be seen in a fuller statement here:
Until recently, changes to English common names were mainly considered when necessitated by scientific evidence, such as newly described or revised species. In its decision-making, the committee has upheld the principle of stability as the primary criterion to ensure that bird species’ names are meaningful and understood by their users.
Recently the committee revised its Guidelines for English Bird Names (AOS NACC 2020) to allow changes to English bird names that were derogatory or offensive. These guidelines were expanded in response to a proposal (Chesser and Driver 2020) to change the English name of what is now known as the Thick-billed Longspur (Rhynchophanes mccownii), which had formerly been named after an individual with strong ties to the Confederacy and who is perceived today by many as a symbol of slavery and racism. The English name of this species was changed unanimously by the NACC to reflect the bird’s physical description and remove its association with a harmful historical figure (Chesser et al. 2021).
In 2020, reflecting the heightened awareness of systemic racism and the need to address these injustices across society, there was a public petition to the AOS to change all English bird names that were named directly after people (i.e. eponymous names) because several of the honored individuals are identified as symbols of racism and colonialism. The AOS initially approached this difficult issue through efforts led by members of the AOS Diversity and Inclusion Committee. This group engaged with various interest groups through listening sessions and hosting a Community Congress to bring together perspectives from across the ornithological community. There was broad recognition that all English bird names should be evaluated to determine if they align with principles of inclusion and social justice. However, the challenge has been in establishing criteria to determine which names are exclusionary, harmful, or offensive, or recognize historical figures who do not merit honoring and, therefore, should be changed (Winker 2022).
In 2022, the AOS ad hoc English Bird Names Committee was tasked with the considerable challenge of recommending the criteria for determining which bird names should be changed and how best to implement the process of changing them. After more than a year’s work and careful deliberation, the committee has produced a detailed report recommending that the best course of action would be to change all English names within the AOS’s jurisdiction that were named after people.
That saves a lot of work, doesn’t it? You don’t have to pore through all eponyms and make a subjective judgement about which individuals were bad. You just change all names to obviate the problem.
In other words, the main reason is that some birds were named after people who we would now judge as immoral. John James Audubon, for example, had slaves, and that’s enough to deep-six the name “Audubon’s warbler,” which will presumably become the “yellow-rumped warbler.” But why change all names? I don’t buy the “more descriptive” reason. As related above, that’s not how the change happened. If there wasn’t a movement to change names of birds named after bad people, there would be no movement to eliminate eponyms in toto. My guess is simply laziness on top of virtue signaling: if you change all eponyms, you eliminate the peril of having to judge a bird named after a person who could later have been found to do bad stuff, or, if morality changes, what we now consider innocuous will someday be bad. It saves the trouble of arguing which “honoree” was good or bad.
What do I think about the new plan? I’ve written about bird names several times before, and you can see my views at these links. In brief, I’m adamantly opposed to changing the scientific names of birds—their Latin binomials (e.g., no change for Peucaea aestivalis, the scientific name of Bachman’s sparrow, although the common name is already on the execution list because John Bachman was a white supremacist). Changing scientific names would throw the literature into deep confusion. And, in fact, the International Committee for Zoological Nomenclature has refused to change scientific names except in very specific circumstances, like if they discover the species was described earlier under a different name.
What about common names, the subject of this post? I don’t feel nearly so strongly about that, and thus about this new proposal, but I did weigh the upsides and downsides of changing common names.
UPSIDES:
Describes the bird better
Avoids honoring bad people and supposedly creating “harm”. This will make birding more “inclusive”.
DOWNSIDES:
Erases history; even bad people should be remembered, though not honored. We don’t censor history books to eliminate bad people, so why bird names?
Impedes communication; the Northern Cardinal might be changed to the “pointy-headed red bird”, which is more descriptive, but people wouldn’t know what it was.
In countries that don’t have English as the common language, the names will be already be different, and they will not change when the eponyms are changed in the U.S.
The act is performative and accomplishes nothing towards alleviating social injustice. Presumably the idea is that, for example, having birds named after slaveholders is said to be harmful to African-Americans, and eliminating such names would bring into ornithology minorities who were offended by birds named after bigots.
The acceptance of this mass action will justify future performative acts in science (my definition of “wokeness” is, at times, “the creation of purely performative actions or statements in the cause of social justice”).
But I have never heard of a single person who has been harmed by a bird named after a racist, and I doubt that renaming ALL birds with eponyms would increase the diversity of birders. Changing such names makes you feel virtuous and look virtuous to others, but is purely for show. As I said in this morning’s New York Times in an article about the changes (see below; you can find the article archived here):
Mr. Cooper mentioned the Wilson’s warbler, a canary songbird with a characteristic black cap. Changing the name to something “like black-capped warbler,” he said, would give birders a better idea of what to look for.
But to Jerry Coyne, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Chicago who is an avid birder, the need for more descriptive names did not seem pressing. Performative acts like this “are really deeply injurious to science,” he said. “We cannot go back through the history of science and wipe out everybody who was not a perfect human being.” Dr. Coyne added that the effort to update so many names would be better invested in something more impactful to society, such as teaching underprivileged children about birds.
One correction: I’m not really an “avid birder”, and told Ms. Miller that while I love birds and look for interesting ones in new places, I don’t keep a life list or travel to see more birds as true birders do. But I also said that I do love ducks, so I suppose I am an avid “ducker”. Miller told me she got her Ph.D. at Chicago and was well familiar with Botany Pond and its ducks!
At any rate, the downsides seem to outweigh the upsides, and the biggest issue for me is that this act is not only performative and ineffectual, but will make it easier in the future to do other performative stuff, something that is hurting science. (Look at how, for purely ideological reasons, people are starting to deny that there are just two sexes in humans AND in other animals!)
A few quotes from the article against and in favor of the new Diktat:
PRO:
“We’re really doing this to address some historic wrongs,” said Judith Scarl, the executive director of the American Ornithological Society. Dr. Scarl added that the change would help “engage even more people in enjoying and protecting and studying birds.”
I don’t believe that at all!
Carlos Daniel Cadena, an ornithologist at the University of the Andes in Colombia and a leader of the English Bird Names Committee, expects the changes to entail a slight learning curve but also present a new opportunity for the public to bond over birds.
“It’s going to be a level playing field where we all need to learn together,” Dr. Cadena said.
Will this really make people throughout the world bond over birds? I doubt it, because bird names are given NOT in English in non-Anglophone countries like Colombia.
CON: Me, I suppose, and these folks:
“The idea of changing a bunch of names is, to many people — myself included, originally — throwing out a lot of history,” said John Fitzpatrick, an ornithologist at Cornell University. He said that he initially felt bird names should be evaluated on a case-by-case basis but that further discussions convinced him that “there is no formula by which we can figure out which names are good enough.”
That’s a good point. Why change every bird named after a person? The ISZN already recommends not giving animals offensive Latin names, though it doesn’t enforce it as far as I know.
But some birders, while expressing sympathy for the cause, said that they were unsure that this was the right route to take. “I’m not super enthusiastic about it, but neither am I super disappointed about it,” said Jeff Marks, an ornithologist at the Montana Bird Advocacy.
“We’ll lose a little bit of knowledge about some key people in the history of ornithology, and that saddens me,” Dr. Marks said. “But maybe in the scheme of things that’s just not that big of a deal.”
Yes, it’s not that big a deal—except that it promotes the use of performative acts in science.
Today we have photos from biologist Jody Hey. His captions and narrative are indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them.
For many years my family has taken vacations in the town of Tenants Harbor, Maine. This is in the mid-coast region, about 15 minutes south of Rockland. The town sees a lot of lobstering, as well as tourists who come by both land and sea. Geographically the town is a bit unusual among small Maine coastal towns because the mouth of the harbor opens, not into a larger bay, or inlet, or estuary, but into the open ocean. If you sailed due east out of the harbor, and stayed at that latitude, the first land you would hit would be southern France.
Our vacations to Maine are always in late July or early August, and so the wildlife photography is somewhat limited. Every year we see pretty much the same things, and the birds are out of breeding plumage. This post will be limited to photographs of birds who spend most of their time on or near the ocean.
Common terns (Sterna hirundo) are indeed fairly common here. They are speedy, acrobatic fliers and will interact with each other, and with other wildlife:
This picture is included, not because of the bald eagle (Haliaeetus leucocephalus), but because of the common tern dive bombing it from behind:
A variety of shorebirds (i.e. sandpipers and such that feed at the water’s edge) can be seen. Almost all of these breed in the arctic and when seen in summer in the northern US are typically in migration.
I managed to catch these two greater yellowlegs (Tringa melanoleuca) while they were flying:
This shot includes another greater yellowlegs in the foreground, as well as a short-billed dowitcher (Limnodromus griseus), although I’m no expert on telling these apart from their sister species, the long-billed dowitcher (Limnodromus scolopaceus) and I could be wrong:
Another dowitcher (I’m guessing short-billed), on its own:
Here we have sanderlings (Calidris alba) and semipalmated plovers (Charadrius semipalmatus). The sanderlings are the gray ones with black legs. For some reason these two species often flock together. In the first shot they are fidgeting as the tide is coming in, and then a moment later, in the second shot, they have taken flight:
Herring gulls(Larus argentatus) are noisy and often not afraid of people, but their effortless flight was part of the inspiration for the once very popular book Jonathan Livingston Seagull:
Osprey (Pandion haliaetus) commonly breed here, though I can well remember back before the year 2000 when it was very unusual to see them:
And finally some non-birds. Harbor seals (Phoca vitulina) are fairly common in the harbor. Sometimes they pop their heads up to take a look at you, looking like puppy dogs when they do:
Today we have photos from Bill Dickens, taken in Florida. Bill’s narrative and IDs are indented, and you can enlarge the photographs by clicking on them.
My home backs onto the Thousand Island Conservation Area on Florida’s Space Coast. (I’m close enough to the space center that launches shake my house.)
General guide to Florida archipelago naming: Actual # of islands = Name / 10. So the Thousand Island Conservation Area consists of around 100 islands in the brackish waters of the Banana River Lagoon.
It’s teaming with wildlife. The water boils with schools of fish and on most trips I see dolphins hunting. There is the occasional alligator although salt water is not their preferred habitat. There has been a sole crocodile which has moved north with the warmer temperatures (I have not seen this myself.) The main bird species are Pelican, Cormorant, Anhinga, Blue Heron, Osprey, Great Egret, and Wood Stork.
I love going out on the water and I try to get out a couple of times a week. It’s rare to see anyone else out on the 338-acre zone. Like a lot of Florida wildlife, the birds are not particularly disturbed by boats and will allow you to get quite close. The dolphins will often rush over as soon as they see my kayak or dinghy, sometimes swimming under the kayak or riding in the dinghy’s wake. It’s a complete joy interacting with them.
Eastern Brown Pelican [Pelecanus occentalis] – the name doesn’t reflect the colors and feather patterns:
Eastern Brown Pelican – they will sometimes dive down right in front of my boat to catch fish:
Eastern Brown Pelican – I sometime feel like I’m on the Jurassic Coast when they’re flying in a diagonal line down the beach:
Biologist John Avise continues his series on birds he’s photographed outside America. His text and IDs are indented, and you can enlarge his photos by clicking on them.
Panama Birds, Part 1
In 2008, I visited Panama for several weeks, delivering a series of lectures to scientists at the Panama City headquarters and several field stations of the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute (STRI). In-between lectures, I had lots of time for natural history walks and bird photography. This week’s post shows about a dozen Panamanian bird species that I photographed on this trip. This is part 1 of what will be a five-part mini-series on Panamanian birds. In general, as you will see, I found the humid and dark rainforest to be an extremely difficult environment in which to get good photographs. But I tried my best.
Today we have a new contributor, Arthur Shores, who identifies himself as a retired clinical neuropsychologist. And he’s contributed some photos of Aussie birds. His narrative and IDs are indented, and you can click on the photos to enlarge them.
You may be interested in these bird photos of mine of wild birds in my tiny backyard in Sydney, Australia (pop., ~5 million), approximately 4 miles from the city centre. Canon R6 500mm lens.
