The winds of World War III are blowing, not at a gale, but more than a breeze. Like a long-forgotten and unmissed uncle, anti-Semitism is back in town and threatens to stick around for a while. Washington, D.C., is simultaneously adrift and perilously divided as yet another government shutdown looms, 11 days away.

Against this backdrop, the latest pressing national priority is to rechristen birds named after humans with racially troubling résumés. The American Ornithological Society (AOS) leads this hunt.

Ironically, these friends of our fine, feathered friends want today’s birds to fly as far from Jim Crow as possible. While they’re at it, they also should avoid any statues in West Virginia of the late Ku Klux Klan recruiter and Democrat U.S. Sen. Robert Byrd.

AOS is beating the bushes for species to relabel.

The culprits do not bear such clearly disturbing names as, one imagines, the Bull Connor red-breasted boobie, the Jefferson Davis secessionist starling, or the whip-’em-till-they-scream whip-poor-will. It would be easy to argue for burying such names beneath Grant’s Tomb.

But the McCown’s longspur? It was dubbed after novice naturalist John P. McCown, who became a Confederate Army general. No, I had not heard of him, either.

It’s hard to imagine that the McCown’s longspur raised even three eyebrows. Nonetheless, McCown slid down the memory hole. In September 2020, AOS decreed, that adorable little bird henceforth and forever would be called the “thick-billed longspur.”

Hooray! Racist bird canceled!

Feel better?

Townsend’s warbler (Vickie J Anderson/Wikimedia Commons) [This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.]

AOS now will go much further. Last Oct. 3, it declared, “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.”

So, AOS’s intention is not just to pluck from birds any names associated with bigots but to erase all human-based bird names, just because some individuals were prejudiced. AOS is replacing anti-minority bias with broad misanthropy against Homo sapiens. AOS has swapped racism for anti-human speciesism.

This is progress?

Nonetheless, AOS has other bigoted birds in its crosshairs:

• The flesh-footed shearwater, as AOS puts it, could be a name that “is derogatory or conjures ill feelings for people.” Why? “The word flesh may imply that all—or at least ‘normal’—skin resembles that of white people.” Yes, surely people worry about that, around the clock.
• The Eskimo curlew might get Inuits and Yupiks hot under their collars.
• The Inca dove generates “profound confusion of the geographic locations of the historic Inca and Aztec cultures.” Americans do not need birds to propel their geographical cluelessness.

“There is power in a name,” said AOS President Colleen Handel. “[S]ome English bird names have associations with the past that continue to be exclusionary and harmful today.”

Harmful?

Really?

Lewis’s woodpecker (Gerald A. DeBoer/Shutterstock)

Can Handel name even one black American who is losing two seconds of sleep because Lewis’s woodpecker or Townsend’s warbler was named after a slave owner or some long-dead birdwatcher who, by day, ran a segregated ice cream parlor?

Not even once have I heard a fellow black American complain that what really hinders black progress is a flock of birds with bigoted names.

Black kids in Chicago lose sleep because the sounds of gunfire keep them awake. Others sleep permanently because stray bullets ripped through their windows, pierced their skulls, and killed them in bed as they dreamed.

In Baltimore, 23 predominantly black government schools have zero students who are proficient in math. That’s right. Across 10 high schools, three middle schools, and 10 elementary schools surveyed last February, literally not one boy or one girl could compute at grade level.

“This is educational homicide,” local activist Jason Rodriguez told WBFF TV. This is all that local taxpayers get for Baltimore City Public Schools chief Sonja Santelises’ $445,000 annual salary. She should be terminated — with extreme prejudice.

At least Baltimore still measures such basic skills. Oregon decided last week to scrap math, reading, and writing proficiency as high-school graduation requirements. The Oregon State Board of Education voted unanimously to denounce standardized tests as a “harmful hurdle for historically marginalized students.” The 40,000-member Oregon Education Association blasted such exams as “instruments of racism and a biased system.”

Oregonians of color tend not to shine on statewide tests. So, rather than school them better, educrats and teachers union bosses steer into their failure, stipulate that minority kids will botch those tests, and substitute high standards with a policy of Ignorance for All.

How racist!

The Bureau of Labor Statistics announced Friday that the national unemployment rate is 3.9 percent. The black unemployment rate is 5.8 percent. Meanwhile, according to the Federal Reserve Board, 3Q 2022 household net worth averaged $1,322,528 for whites. For blacks? $340,559.

It’s worth beer-bonging Red Bull to stay up late and figure out how to improve these statistics. Encouraging robust growth, entrepreneurship, and retirement savings would narrow these and other racial gaps via economic upliftment.

And yet, amid these migraines, AOS is wasting brain cells on bird names?

Even a bat can see that the birds have jumped the shark.

If AOS wants to do right, why not visit inner-city schools and teach students about birds?

Why not drive ghetto and barrio kids into nearby national parks and show them how to watch birds?

Better yet, why not relegate this endeavor to the bottom of the nearest parrot cage, at least until America has conquered black poverty, urban crime, criminally dysfunctional K–12 government classrooms, and high anxiety about a global military conflagration — even as a $33.7 trillion national debt threatens to clip this country’s wings?

AOS’s racist-bird flap may be the dumbest example yet of “diversity, equity, and inclusion.”

To call this First World problem bird-brained is an insult — to birds.

Deroy Murdock is a Manhattan-based Fox News contributor. He warmly remembers his boyhood pet — a Foghorn Leghorn–like rooster named Chickadee.

Chickadee, circa 1973 (Deroy Murdock)

Image of Inca dove: This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license.