As a bird lover, I have grown to hate certain sayings that demean birds. “Killing two birds with one stone,” is top on my list “Bird brain,” vies for second place and “Eat like a bird” is annoying for the way it is so inaccurate. Yes,I do tend to eat like a bird, for birds eat a lot and all day long. I would love to rid our language of these, but the best I can do is not use them myself. Language does matter, but my point in this essay is that it does not matter as much as appropriate action.
Recently there is much being made out of changing bird names to rid ourselves of those named after historically tainted characters. Fine, let’s do that, but let’s do that for two reasons. First because it is a correction that is needed because time has given us the gift of ethical perspective and secondly because bird names would just be better if they were descriptive. Proper names tell us nothing about what the bird sounds or looks like.
Birds should never be named after people because their records will never stand the test of time, nor is it helpful to the beginning birdwatcher. Birds aptly named include: the red winged blackbird, the red headed woodpecker and black capped chickadee which has the extra bonus of being named for its call as well as its looks.
What we need to remember is that this is not a self-righteous act but a self-correcting one. Too many are jumping on the bandwagon of changing bird names to reflect their own wokeness and that is what I find so distasteful. Let’s do it because it will make bird watching easier and it will stop honoring those who need to be forgotten. Let’s keep in mind that it won’t help the birds one iota. We cannot lose sight of the fact that their numbers are plummeting in mind-numbing ways. Devoting our energies to stopping the human enterprise from polluting their air and bulldozing their habitat is a much better way to spend our time.
We can’t for a moment allow ourselves to think that any name changes will help them survive our obsession with growth. Our time will be much better spent wrestling with the massive force of 8 billion non-feathered primates who seem to love distraction more than action.
Name changes are fine and needed but they often don’t get at the core of a problem or help it much to any degree.
In my community a lake once named for a slave-owning secretary of the military is now renamed a Dakota name. The indignities suffered by native peoples are many and shameful, but few new the story behind who the lake was originally named for and so erasing that painful history is really not accomplished in any meaningful way especially when there are so many more important ways we could help native peoples regain their land and dignity.
There have been many protests against referring to people streaming across our southern border as “illegal aliens”. So it became more respectful to say, ‘”undocumented worker”. The problem is that this correction never touched on the real issue that the US cannot keep absorbing more people without draining our resources and damaging our remaining open spaces beyond repair. It also gives the impression that we have a blatant disregard for rules of entry to the US which creates all sort of problems from sustainability issues to crime.
Some now want to call “homeless people”, the “unhoused”, but once again this does not deal with the systemic issues behind the over ½ million who must scrounge for shelter and food each day in the US. It makes some feel as if they have done something to bring dignity to people when time would be better spent addressing how homelessness is related to both our tax structure and mass immigration.
George Carlin was fascinated by how we like to hide behind language while never really solving the problem. My favorite reference of his was how we went from “shell-shocked” to “post-traumatic stress disorder.” It’s the same problem, less clear and certainly we haven’t addressed sending young people to war as the reason people keep suffering from it.
Let’s focus on the organic issues behind the desire for all of these name changes and quit pretending that when we change names of our birds or people or syndromes our actions are complete. In a foolish contest to gain meaningless points of self-righteous wokeness we are ignoring the underlying issues of worshiping growth and promulgating war in the US and why that is bringing so much pain to our citizenry and to our birds.