Wilson's Warbler
Huckleberry Botanic Regional Preserve, Oakland, California, USA
June 2020
Member of the Wood Warbler Family
§A Confusion of Warblers§
~True Bird Fact~ Most songbirds leave the nest for good once they've fledged. Wilson's Warblers, on the other hand, often return for a night or two. Failure to launch?
Named for and by:
Alexander Wilson
(1766 – 1813)
Called The Father of American Ornithology, and the second only to Audubon in terms of American Ornithology Importance, and that's just in the first sentence of his wikipedia page! Wilson was born in Scotland and his first profession was as a weaver. He took an early interest in poetry and wrote ballads, pastoral pieces, and satirical works about the plight of weavers. These satirical poems were evidently so biting, that he was arrested for a 'libelous and inflammatory' poem about a mill owner. Here's an excerpt, in the original Scots:
Wha cou’d believe a
chiel sae trig
|Wad cheat us o’ a bodle?
Or that sae fair a gowden wig
Contained sae black a noddle?
But Shark beneath a sleekest smile
Conceals his fiercest girning;
And, like his neighbours of the Nile,
Devours wi’ little warning
By night or day.
I guess you had to be there. He was also, it should be noted, that he was a very bad weaver, and eventually quit and moved to America, after languishing in poverty.
His career turned to teaching, and eventually he met the naturalist William Bartram, who awakened his true passion. Birds! He resolved to publish illustrations of every bird in North America. He did pretty good at this task, at least better than his weaving, traveling widely, and eventually publishing a nine volume work, including 268 birds, 26 of which were new to his audience of western naturalists. He died young from, and I quote "dysentery, overwork, and chronic poverty." He seems like he was a pretty cool dude, and has a lot of birds named after him. He also seems to have been a direct inspiration for Audubon himself, both in his style of illustrating and his publication.
Wilson's illustration of Red-bellied, Pileated, and... Ivory-billed Woodpeckers
However, bird fans, I am not content to let this topic rest here. There's been a lot of debate in the bird world lately about eponyms and honorifics, and whether birds should really be named for their 'discoverers'. I try to make a little point of this each time I profile a naturalist- that these birds were not truly "discovered", only given new, western names. There were people here before them, and the birds were plenty discovered already. And some of the people who have birds named after them turn out to be truly heinous. There's a lot of overlap, it turns out, between ideas of discovery and exploration and ideas of colonialism and manifest destiny. This includes some naturalists I've written about here, and frankly, I didn't know how bad they were. This is my bad, but racism doesn't often make it into the wikipedia summary, it turns out.
There's been one major recent success for this movement, the renaming of McCown's Longspur to Thick-billed Longspur. This one was named after a confederate general (yikes emoji). So yes, some bird names might be changing, if they are named after particularly bad people. But you can also make the broader argument that it's much simpler to just keep bird names descriptive and do away with honorifics all together. The naming of species after a western discoverer is inherently a colonialist practice. And while we'll lose some potentially 'good ones' like Wilson here, his contributions to birding will not be erased if he no longer has the birds directly named after him. (Although again, who knows, about Wilson. I'm not about to read a whole biography looking for problematic elements). If you agree with this view point, there's a petition that you can sign. I have. Maybe in the future we'll just call this bird the "green black-capt flycatcher", as Wilson originally called it in 1811. Well. Maybe we won't call it that. But something else. Stay tuned.
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