The bird watching community is fighting about whether a bird named after an amateur ornithologist-turned-Confederate army officer needs to be renamed.
McCown's Longspur - named after John P. McCown - is the bird at the center of the debate that focuses on issues of honorific bird names and their ties to colonialism, and racism, according to Audubon.
The bird was named for army officer McCown in 1851, after he shot a group of larks he saw on a Texas prairie while stationed there. McCown fought in the Mexican-American War and the Seminole War.
Among the kills were a pair of pale grey longspurs with a spot of chestnut on their wings and white patches on their tails - markers he'd never seen before in the species, which prompted him to send their remains to an ornithologist friend.
The species was then named for McCown, a not unusual practice at the time when it came to recognizing explorers who 'discovered' animals they'd never seen before.
About 10 years later, in 1861, McCown, a Tennessee native, left the US Army and joined the Confederate Army, where he was eventually prompted to Major General.
At a time when statues of prominent Confederate figures are being taken down and the Confederate imagery is being removed from state flags and banned from use in some military environments, as well as sporting events, there's now renewed pressure to rename the bird in light of McCown's connection to the Confederacy.
In response, the American Ornithological Society has now said that it will consider renaming the McCown Longspur for the second time in just two years.
The renaming of the longspur species first made waves in the ornithography community in 2018, the year after the violent clash between white supremacists and protesters in Charlottesville, Virginia, during the first wave of Confederate monument removals.
In 2018, East Carolina University in Greenville, North Carolina, ornithology graduate student Robert Driver was looking into the backgrounds of the people who birds were named after, when he realized McCown's connection to the Confederacy, as well as having fought in wars against Native American tribes.
Driver then decided to petition the AOS to formally change the bird's name.
'The AOS once again has an opportunity to pioneer inclusion and lead the way by changing this English name,' Driver wrote at the time. 'All races and ethnicities should be able to conduct future research on any bird without feeling excluded, uncomfortable, or shame when they hear or say the name of the bird.'
The AOS' North American Classification Committee declined Driver's proposal in July 2019, stating that McCown's established interest in bird watching, plus the fact that the honorific n... (Read more)
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