Nowadays, we usually spell Trindade w/ just one "i" though in the past we spelled it Trinidade. It's Portuguese for Trinity, so maybe we should call it Trinity Petrel instead. Or maybe we should change it to Arminjon's Petrel per Pterodroma arminjoiana.27 Apr 08: Andy Paterson (Torremolinos, España) wrote to say that Baroli's Shearwater has also been suggested as an option for Puffinus baroli. Not everyone in Spain is comfortable with 'Macaronesian Shearwater'.
27 Apr 08: Al Jaramillo (Half Moon Bay, California, USA) advised me that it should be the Desventuradas Islands ("The Unfortunate Islands") rather than the 'Des Venturadas' as I incorrectly copied from other sources. This remote Chilean archipelago (decimal coordinates -26.293°, -80.095°) consists of two significant islands, San Félix and San Ambrosio and hosts a number of breeding seabirds including almost the entire world population of De Filippi's (Masatierra) Petrels. The exact status of this species on the Juan Fernández Islands (-33.771°, -79.876°), some 513 miles to south is unclear but is probably in decline with only a few hundred breeding pairs.
29 Apr 08: Paul Hess (Natrona Heights, Pennsylvania, USA) provided a number of important corrections to names used in the previous blog entry including clarification that the correct Portuguese name is Ilha da Trindade [only one 'i'], not "Trinidade" as I and many others have spelled it. He also informs me that the AOU established an policy on English names in the 32nd Check-list Supplement (1973) and that adoption of Band-rumped Storm-Petrel was published in the 6th Edition of the AOU Checklist, although regrettably without providing an explicit rationale for the change.
29 Apr 08: Anyone interested in the evolution of bird names in general might want to checkout the History of North American Bird Names web page. It compares the names used in American Ornithologists' Union Checklists from 1886 until 2000. To pluck one example at random: European Blue Heron becomes European Heron and ends up as Gray Heron.
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Bill Bourne has had a far-reaching influence on seabird names and has offered these personal comments on the matter.
Seabird English Names
In his discussion of seabird English names on 27 April and in Angus Wilson cites a lot of recent authors who all quote each other but makes little attempt to go back to the origin of the names. In 1993 the Royal Naval Bird-watching Society, who have been collecting seabird observations for over half a century, attempted a reasoned justification for the names they preferred (Sea Swallow 42: 16-27), which seems to have passed unnoticed. The situation is now critical because the "Birds of the World- recommended English names" produced by Frank Gill (a good seabirder) and Minturn Wright for the International Ornithological Congress in 2006 is likely to be adopted by all sorts of editors who know nothing about the subject, and imposed on us, and it seems time those who do know something made their views known.
To go through some debatable cases in Gill & Wright:-
P. 8 and 25. We prefer Storm-petrel for the family Hydrobatidae and Diving-petrel for the Pelecanoididae to distinguish them from other petrels. We do not favour capitals after hyphens.
P. 22. The Little Penguin is no fairy (and not blue either).
P. 23. We do not favour the political reclassification of albatrosses in an unrefereed work of uncertain date, which leads to a lot of vague reports of forms inseparable at sea.
P. 24. Beck's Petrel has now of course been resurrected.
Newell's Shearwater seems osteologically rather distinct, with a projecting keel of the sternum, and may deserve specific status. The Christmas Shearwater is osteologically similar to the Manx group of shearwaters. On the other hand the molecular differences between the small shearwaters seem greater than their physical ones, possibly due to the amount of isolation, and they may now be over-split. Some of the critical ones such as Heinroth's and Bannerman's were not included in the investigations.
P. 28. Current tropicbird names are unsatisfactory. They have traditionally been Red- and Yellow-billed in the Atlantic and Red- and White-tailed in the Indo-Pacific. Both lepturus and aethereus have more or less white tails, so Yellow-billed seems more distinct for the former. Both aethereus and rubricauda also have red bills, but there is no obvious way out of that.
P. 29-30. The shagmorants present a problem. We use cormorant for the more terrestrial and shag for the more marine species.
P. 41. We feel Yellow-billed Sheathbill is more distinctive- they are all snowy.
P. 45. Mew Gull is a tautomer (mew in English, mowe in German, meeuw in Dutch, mage in Danish, make in Norwegian, mas in Swedish, mafur in Icelandic, mews in Polish and mouette in French are general names for gull). We prefer Common Gull.
P. 46. The Yellow-legged Gull is now usually L. michahellis, the Caspian Gull L. cachinnans, Heuglin's Gull L. heuglini (possibly intergrading with armenicus?), which are rather distinct entities. We loathe "Common Black-headed Gull, never used where is common, and are not attached to "Great Black-headed Gull", for which "Pallas's Gull" seems to be coming into use. Is there any need for "Chinese Crested Tern" when "Chines Tern" would do?
P. 47. The names "Sooty Noddy" for the Lesser Noddy and "Angel Tern" for the White Tern seem no improvement. I prefer McCormick's to the South Polar Skua (after all, he found it), but this seems a lost cause. How did jaegers get among the skuas- it is a German word not even used in Germany? Murre like Loon is English while Guillemot is French. It is confusing to have the last alternating between Uria and Cepphus, where the NW European name for the latter is Tystie.
And some names discussed by Angus, who quotes a lot of recent authors who are all quoting each other, but few older ones:-
Personally I do not favour such extensive splitting of the great albatrosses (Gerfaut 79: l05-ll6); if it is accepted, antipodensis is not characteristic of New Zealand.
Steller had a hard time discovering his albatross among other things. He deserves to be remembered, "short-tailed" does not.
When John Warham and I originall separated the giant petrels (Ardea 54: 45- 67) we called them Northern and Southern. We do not consider the alternatives an improvement.
It has always proved an uphill struggle to get people to spell "Trindade" properly. Personally I can see little difference from the Herald Petrel and prefer that earlier name.
There were still hundreds of De Fillippi's petrels on the outliers of Robinson Crusoe, but none on the main island, 25 years ago.
When I first split the Soft-plumaged-type petrels (Bull. Brit. Orn. Cl. l03: 52-58) I followed Bob Murphy in preferring local names (Gon-gon is Portuguese Creole), but other people again knew better. After these I prefer the names of the people who discovered the northern ones, Fea and Zino, to Cape Verde and Madeira, devised in American arm-chairs and liable to lead to confusion with other species.
We have always referred to Great Shearwaters,
Storm-petrel names were fairly stable until about half a century ago other arm-chair Americans (perhaps especially Gene Eisenmann?) decided to replace eponyms often involving English admirals with more descriptive names- we started complaining ineffectually long ago (see below). These merely seem to have caused confusion, as in the Tower of Babel,
It is not clear who originally suggested the name British for what we once called the Storm Petrel (particularly annoying to the Irish, who have more of them)- it may have been W,B. Alexander. European does seem more appropriate.
The trouble with the long-eastablished name White-throated Storm-petrel is that some are dark (Bull. Brit. Orn. Cl. 77: 40-42). Polynesian Storm-petrel is another recent American innovation but also seems appropriate.
"Ringed" does not seem such an appropriate name for O. hornbyi, but as already remarked a protest has had no effect (Condor 70: 283).
It seems time it was accepted that it is not respectable to muck about with nomenclature, and more creditable to conserve it. People who do not know much about it should lay off it.
Bill Bourne,
Dufftown, Scotland.
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