A Torrent of Mis-Named Birds

The tannin-stained waters of the Cascade River churned frothily into the cold, blue waters of Lake Superior. Upstream, impressive torrents of spring melt poured through the sculpted canyons as if they were a root beer float fountain belonging to a giant. My partner and I stayed well back from the edges of overlooks. Though unlikely, the thought of falling in and getting swept up in the flood was terrifying. How do the fish and aquatic invertebrates survive? Or maybe some don’t, and that’s why a couple dozen ducks had gathered to feed around the outflow.

The Cascade River floods through the canyon. Photo by Emily Stone. 

This is the outflow of the Temperance River, but it looked very similar to the mouth of the Cascade! Photo by Emily Stone. 

First, we squinted, then we peered through binoculars, and finally I zoomed in with my camera to make sense of the dark shapes. The ducks had a funny conehead and a gracefully swooped patch of gray on their side. The pale ring around their dark beak was the most distinctive character. I’m not good at waterfowl, so I wracked my brain for a likely ID…were they ring-billed ducks? That would be logical. But no, a quick peek through the Merlin app’s helpful photos confirmed that these were ring-necked ducks. Huh?

A very zoomed in shot of the ring-necked ducks. Photo by Emily Stone.

This name is a throwback to the days before binoculars and zoom lenses when ornithologists studied birds by shooting them, stuffing them, and then storing the preserved specimen in a museum drawer. Study skins are usually stored on their backs, so the first thing those early ornithologists would see upon opening the drawer was the belly of the bird, or in the case of the ring-necked duck, a handsome collar of chestnut brown. As valuable as museum specimens are, they can’t replace direct observation of a living being.

In life, ring-necked ducks have a prominent white ring around their bill. This fades quickly after death. Instead, early ornithologists named them for a band of feathers that’s most visible when laying on their back as a study skin. This taxidermy mount is old and looks like a female, so that makes the colors even less prominent.
Photo of the Cable Natural History Museum collections by Emily Stone.

My partner—a beginning birder—was interrupted from his rant about the negative impact of poorly named birds on the ability of people to get into birding by the squawk of a yellow-bellied sapsucker. We spotted the handsome little early returner nosing around an aspen tree. Although they are about the size of a downy woodpecker, and share the black-and-white checkered back feathers, sapsucker males have a matching throat patch to go with their crimson forehead. In contrast, the lemon-colored wash on their belly feathers is only visible in good light. Early ornithologists got their behavior wrong, too. They don’t suck sap; they lap it up with a brush-tipped tongue. This is one character that should have been more visible in a dead specimen than through binoculars, if anyone had been curious enough to look.

Open a drawer of bird study skins in any museum, and you’ll be treated to a look at their belly feathers. This led to birds being named for colors that are often hard to see in real life—like the yellow-bellied sapsucker.
Photo of the Cable Natural History Museum collections by Emily Stone.

Arriving home after the waterfall tour, we were thrilled to find our front yard filled with dark-eyed juncos. Our arrival startled the flock into a reverse cascade of gray and white feathers that whooshed lightly up among the birch twigs. Every grassy lawn and roadside across the Northwoods lately has been witness to these swirling flocks. Juncos winter only as far south as necessary to find bare ground and seeds. Now most of these common forest birds are headed far into Canada, while a few will stay here to nest.

Wetlands aren’t a place you’d expect to see juncos, and yet the word junco refers to Juncus, a genus of wetland plants that includes bulrush. One hypothesis is that juncos reminded those early ornithologists of a European bunting who does actually live among the reeds. In their defense, habitat isn’t so obvious once a bird is in a drawer. On the other hand, maybe they should have done a little more research.

Juncos are a type of sparrow, and joining the flock were two cousins. For once, the white-throated sparrows were aptly named. The American tree sparrows, though, spend most of their time on the ground or in low bushes, and nest on the tundra beyond the reach of true trees. This is likely another case of being named for a European look-alike that turned out to not have much in common with our North American neighbor.

White-throated sparrows are aptly named. Photo by Emily Stone. 

The list of mis-named birds is long, and more will be arriving any day now! Tennessee warblers will pass briefly through that locale before they go to breed mostly in the boreal forests of Canada. Cape May warblers do the same. Palm warblers will keep going—they are the second-most-northern-breeding warbler.

It could be worse. A study by the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County and New York University found that almost 90 percent of birds are named for their appearance, habitat, or other personal characteristics. Only 11 percent are named after people, with no connection to the birds’ natural history at all. So, 90 percent of the time, early ornithologists tried to be helpful and descriptive. It’s just that sometimes they described the wrong thing.

Maybe it’s understandable. In the 1700s and 1800s an entire continent of new species had just become accessible to people whose experience was based an ocean away. Many unfortunate barriers stood in the way of learning from the Indigenous peoples who already had names for and knowledge of these feathered relatives. There were more birds back then, too. Just since 1970, we’ve lost an estimated 29 percent of birds across North America. How many more birds would there have been during those early days of colonization?

Can you imagine the chaos of a spring with more than double our current number of birds feeding, singing, migrating? Amazing! But perhaps to those early ornithologists it felt a bit like an overwhelming torrent. Like the ring-necked ducks feeding on stunned invertebrates, they would have had to wait for birds to be incapacitated to get a better look. It’s no wonder those first birders got a few wrong.

But as we walked into the house, a black-capped chickadee scolded from the neighbor’s trees, reminding us that occasionally those early ornithologists got it just right.

Black-capped chickadees are named after their jaunty hat and scolding call.
Photo by Emily Stone. 

Emily’s third book, Natural Connections3: A Web Endlessly Woven, is available to purchase at www.cablemuseum.org/books and at your local independent bookstore, too.

For more than 50 years, the Cable Natural History Museum has served to connect you to the Northwoods. Our Summer Calendar is open for registration! The Museum is closed until May 12 to allow for construction of our new exhibit, The Wetland Way. Follow us on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and cablemuseum.org to see what we are up to.