The mania for renaming in the interest of political correctness has come to birds:
Dozens of birds with “harmful and exclusionary” names are to be renamed in the US and Canada to eradicate links with individuals with racist or colonial pasts.
How exactly can a bird species’ name be “exclusionary”?
The move by the American Ornithological Society (AOS) will see all birds named after individuals rebranded following years of controversy over historic associations.
In all, between 70 and 80 birds will be renamed, with their new titles reflecting their habitats and physical features rather than distinguished ornithologists.
Because those distinguished ornithologists didn’t conform to 21st century political norms, and in some cases may actually have been rather despicable.
Birds that will be renamed include those currently called Wilson’s warbler and Wilson’s snipe, both named after the 19th century naturalist Alexander Wilson.
But the big name on the chopping block is John James Audubon:
Audubon’s shearwater, a seabird named for John James Audubon, will also get a new name.
Mr Audubon, arguably America’s most renowned ornithologist, was a slaveowner who opposed abolition.
Audubon was a great naturalist and painter who did more than anyone else to describe and draw attention to North American bird species. The first half of the 19th century was a wild and wooly time, and Audubon was no paragon, to put it mildly. This is from the Audubon Society’s web site (profuse links in original):
It’s fair to describe John James Audubon as a genius, a pioneer, a fabulist, and a man whose actions reflected a dominant white view of the pursuit of scientific knowledge.
What the Hell does that mean?
His contributions to ornithology, art, and culture are enormous, but he was a complex and troubling character who did despicable things even by the standards of his day. He was contemporaneously and posthumously accused of—and most certainly committed—both academic fraud and plagiarism. But far worse, he enslaved Black people and wrote critically about emancipation. He stole human remains and sent the skulls to a colleague who used them to assert that whites were superior to non-whites.
The question is, so what? Neither the bird nor the society was named after Audubon as a tribute to either his general virtue or his political views, but rather because of his stature as an ornithologist and painter. The same is true of countless landmarks, etc., that have been named after notable people for millennia.
Shockingly, people whose achievements have advanced human civilization in ways large and small (like knowledge about birds) are typically not monkish in personality, nor did they, for the most part, anticipate our 21st century sensibilities. So cancellation is pretty much discretionary. And there is an endless supply of mediocrities after whom birds, mountains, towns, etc. might be named.
The always-unanswered question is how the world is a better place if the Wilson’s Warbler gets a new name, given that no one knew anything about Mr. Wilson’s moral status in the first place.