What’s in a Name?

On a visit to Crater Lake, one of this continent’s most renowned natural places, I had two experiences – one inspiring and the other, not so much.

When I climbed to the crater’s rim, I photographed a bird that had used its sharp bill to dig a hole and was now burying white bark pine seed. Each of these remarkable birds buries up to 30,000 seeds per year and will remember where most of them are when winter comes and food is scarce. Some of the seeds it doesn’t find will grow into new trees, helping to sustain pine forests threatened by climate change.

But when I went to label my photographs, I learned something not so inspiring: it turned out that these birds are called Clark’s Nutcrackers.

“Why would a bird be named after a person, and who was Clark?” I wondered.

It turned out to be William Clark, best known for leading the Lewis & Clark expedition that helped pave the way for appropriation of land from hundreds of Indigenous communities. After the expedition, Clark served as U.S. Superintendent of Indian Affairs and oversaw the extermination of many Indigenous people who resisted the taking of their land.

“Why is this bird species named after someone like that?” I asked myself.

It seems that in the early 1800s Lewis and Clark claimed to have “discovered” these birds even though they were known to indigenous people for tens of thousands of years and were here on earth long before that.

I wasn’t thrilled by this name – and apparently, I was not alone.

This November, the American Ornithological Society (AOS) announced that it will be changing the names of all birds currently named after people. That includes 152 bird species in the U.S. and Canada. The change comes in response to a coalition called Bird Names for Birds that includes the American Birding Association and many local birding groups.

“It is a questionable premise that species should be named after specific humans at all, as if bird species were possessions or trophies,” said the AOS committee that recommended the new policy.

The AOS said it will involve the public to generate creative new names that reflect a bird species’ looks, calls, or habits. The committee noted that a large number of bird names that honor individual people were coined in the 1800s to pay tribute to “soldier scientists” traveling with the U.S. Army during the appropriation of Indigenous and Mexican lands.

By contrast, Indigenous communities already living in the West named birds, animals, peaks, rivers, or other natural features in order to communicate something about their characteristics – not after individual tribal leaders or members.

Perhaps other agencies and organizations responsible for official names of natural features will now adopt that approach and follow the AOS’s lead.

In my time at Crater Lake, for example, I snow shoed to Applegate Peak, which could have a name reflecting any of its dramatic characteristics but instead is named after a man who was a scout in the U.S. Army’s war against the Modoc people.

In any case, I hope that on a future hike in the West’s public lands I’ll see another nutcracker burying seeds for the winter, and that this time the bird will have a name that reflects its extraordinary brain power.