Restricted The Scott's Oriole named after Winfield Scott is under review for a name change

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Aug 28, 2020
With lemon and black plumage, the Scott’s oriole flashes in the desert like a flame. But the bird’s name holds a violent history that Stephen Hampton can’t forget. He used to see the orioles often, living in California. Now that he lives outside the bird’s range, “I’m kind of relieved,” he says.

Hampton is a birder and registered citizen of the Cherokee Nation. Winfield Scott, a U.S. military commander and the bird’s namesake, drove Hampton’s ancestors and other Native Americans from their land in the 1800s during a series of forced marches now known as the Trail of Tears. The journey killed over 4,000 Cherokee, displacing as many as 100,000 people in the end.

“So much of the Trail of Tears is already erased,” Hampton says. “There’s a few historical sites, but you’d have to be an archaeologist to figure out where the actual stockades were.” Linking Scott’s legacy to a bird “is just adding to the erasure by putting another layer over it.”

The oriole is just one of dozens of species that scientists are considering renaming because of racist or other offensive connotations. In a groundswell of revision, scientists are wrestling with this heritage...

The American Ornithological Society initially rejected Driver’s proposal to revise the name of a brownish-gray bird called McCown’s longspur, named after Confederate general John P. McCown. But after the 2020 murder of George Floyd sparked nationwide reflection on systemic racism and as some Confederate monuments were removed and sports teams with offensive epithets were renamed, the ornithology society changed its policies to consider a namesake’s role in “reprehensible events” as grounds for revision. Now, the bird is known as the thick-billed longspur.

Driver wants Scott’s oriole to be next — but for now, English bird name changes have paused while a committee with the society recommends a new name-changing process. “We are committed to changing these harmful and exclusionary names,” says Mike Webster, an ornithologist at Cornell University and president of the society.

Removing harmful terms offers long-term stability in common names, Ware says. With thoughtful criteria, scientists and others can craft names built to last. “So it might be uncomfortable now,” Ware says. “But hopefully, that only happens once.”

As for Hampton, he doesn’t see Scott’s oriole anymore, now that he lives in Washington State. But he still can’t escape these types of names. Sometimes while birding, he spies Townsend’s solitaire — a bird that favors juniper berries. It’s named after American naturalist John Kirk Townsend, who collected Indigenous people’s skulls in the 1830s for cranial measurements that were used to justify pseudoscientific racial hierarchies. “Every time I see one [of the birds], I’m thinking, ‘That should be juniper solitaire,’” Hampton says. In his mind’s eye, Scott’s oriole is the yucca oriole. “I can’t wait for those to be changed.”

https://www.sciencenews.org/article/racism-common-animal-names
 
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