Robert Francis

That's a very elegant solution

As soon as they find a bird with six of something I'll have a killer idea for a kids book

visiting Bird HQ

There's a whole constellation of gr-/kr- roots that mean harsh bird cries (imitative obviously).

They give us, "crow", "raven", "heron", "egret", "crane", etc. (and "cormorant" of course!)

circumvent bsky image compression: www.aidanem.com/images/word_...

In French the ordinary word for "fox" (reynard) comes from the name of a character in a fairy tale about foxes

Like in other European languages the name for robin still translates to redbreast, and the English went "we're just gonna call them Steve"

Never forget what they took from us

I honestly don't think there's a more deeply ingrained human behavior than giving animals names.

This is how localized bird names were in the US before legal/scientific standardization, and they were just as diverse in the UK.

Yoo good to see you too, thanks for saying hi!!

Also worth noting that robins were called redbreast, not orangebreast, because they didn't have a word for that color until oranges reached england a century later

Worth noting that cormorants were the only bird that Audubon refused to eat

How Robins Got Their Name Growing up in eastern South Dakota, winters were harsh, dark, and long, often lasting until deep into April.

This was the subject of my first substack post two years ago!

Incredible how the names live on, right? Or that there are dozens of species of birds called robins which are all unrelated except for a superficial resemblance to the European robin

Actually my favorite bird etymology is that in 1400s England they gave human nicknames to birds (Jenny Wren, Tom Tit) but some of them stuck. Jack Daw became Jackdaw, Maggie Pie became Magpie. With Robin Redbreast they just dropped the original name of the bird entirely.

Cormorant is just bastardized latin for corvus marinus (sea raven)

When she was just 26 Florence Merriam wrote the first guide to birding with binoculars in 1889. And she slipped in this incredible feminist gem:

If we're still looking for new names for the Audubon Society we could take some inspiration from Florence Merriam Bailey, when she founded the Smith College Audubon Society in 1886 she almost called it The Pterodactyl

I've got range 🙃

My love language is when people send me pictures of birds to identify

This is a legal requirement before you enter your 30s

I love when a bird's name accurately describes its grace and beauty

your bird photos are not like his bird photos

We have this idea that modern grocery stores give us access to unprecedented abundance, but when it comes to products from nature I actually think we have it backwards. An 1867 list of grocery items in NYC makes me think they could buy more plants and animals than we can today 🧵

Obviously this doesn't include our incredible abundance of processed foods, I'm pretty grateful for my cinnamon toast crunch.

And this is just me looking through a 150 year old book and jumping to conclusions - if anyone actually knows about this stuff please jump in.

Here's a small sampling of herbs and medicinal plants you could pick up

Some of the 59 kinds of fruits and 21 nuts the book lists, many of which I assume are native plants we've never figured out how to cultivate at industrial scale and consequently forgot they exist

But even when it comes to fruits and veg I think they have us beat. Like I hadn't thought of 1860s New Yorkers eating cauliflower but here it is, listed alongside five kinds of cress, brussels sprouts, and something called "cavish"

A lot of this is because they could buy 120+ kinds of wild birds, as well as dozens of species of fish, not to mention the occasional dolphin, sea turtle, bear, or raccoon, something that we've outlawed for good reason.

We have this idea that modern grocery stores give us access to unprecedented abundance, but when it comes to products from nature I actually think we have it backwards. An 1867 list of grocery items in NYC makes me think they could buy more plants and animals than we can today 🧵

It kicks ass that the guy who made the first bird list in north america (1634) did it as a poem just for fun