A hand-coloured engraving of a passenger pigeon hangs above the desk in my study.
It’s one of my most prized possessions, bought on a whim when I lived in New York in celebration of a hero of mine at the time, a Scottish artist and poet named Alexander Wilson.
The Scotsman chronicled the great migrations of the now extinct pigeon and gave his name to several bird species, among them Wilson’s warbler which I just happened to see in Central Park on the day I bought the engraving.
Although once hailed as the father of ornithology in the United States, Wilson and his birding cohort of the late 1700s and early 1800s are now being erased from the nomenclature of birds. Put simply, they are being cancelled.
The American Ornithological Society, announcing the move in November, said it wanted to remove bird names linked to people with racist and genocidal histories. It added it would create a more “inclusive environment for people of diverse backgrounds who are interested in bird-watching”.
The AOS also said the issue was not just about names that honour dubious people but that such names also reflected an old vision of science, one dominated by white men.
There is no doubt that some pretty unsavoury characters are included in the list of 80 species to be renamed when suitable replacements referring to either plumage, behaviour or habitat have been decided upon. Some were slave owners and military figures on the pro-slavery Southern side in the American civil war. Another birder studied the sculls of African and Native American people to establish if they were of an inferior race.
Even the most famous of all American bird artists, John James Audubon, owned slaves. Audubon was in fact said to have been influenced to take up the pen and brush after he met Wilson and saw his work.
Wilson, though, does not take his place among this number. He was more controversial in Scotland before he fled to the Americas to escape a lawsuit brought by a laird whom he had labelled in a witty song.
From the time I first discovered birds and started to read about them I have been captivated by stories of the early ornithologists, and have never felt uncomfortable about the mores or otherwise of the people going in search of the feathered world. They are part of the back story of birding, for good or bad.
Australia has only a handful of birds named after people but already one has been changed – that of the Major Mitchel’s cockatoo, named in honour of a military officer who took part in the frontier wars and had some very unpleasant things to say about Aboriginal people. This bird is now the pink cockatoo.
In the US, 80 bird names will be changed, with Wilson’s warbler becoming the black-capped warbler.