Published on 16 May 2025
A couple of years ago, I was reading about differentiating subspecies of swans when I came across a paper that used a term that made me stop and stare. The paper was from Britain in the 1960s, describing how individual Tundra Swans could be differentiated by the pattern of black and yellow on their bills. Some birds were called “Nobbly”, some “Pennywise”, some “Shieldy”… and some “darky”.
I’ll grant that the original author was writing in the 60s, and that they may not have had the same cultural background that I do. But that term is invariably offensive in my own dialect. I kept reading, and I found that the term had unfortunately percolated through the literature since. Their paper had been cited as recently as 2018.
So, I wrote a short abstract and submitted it to AFO, the American Field Ornithologist conference. The conference was in Plymouth, near my uncle’s house and near my father, so I drove down, saw family, presented the poster, and made some connections. I think some of the people at the conference were confused why I was there – I didn’t have an agenda except to have something in the literature that said, “Hey, we shouldn’t use this term, let’s use another one.” After I drove home, I thought about how to make this more permanent. I worried that people wouldn’t find the poster online, hidden in my Google Scholar or my website.
So, I turned it into a short communications piece, and submitted it to Wilson’s Journal of Ornithology. Today, it was published:
Renaming a bill type for Tundra Swan (Cygnus columbianus)
The paper is really short. It’s hopefully easy to read.
Now that it is published, future scholars working on Tundra Swans should see it. Wilson’s demands that users translate papers into other languages; based on one of the papers that cited the original work, I asked some of my Dutch-speaking friends to help translate it. I don’t expect there to be a lot of Dutch authors who can’t read English, but it doesn’t hurt.
One of the considerations I had to think about during this paper was whether doing this would increase my risk of having liberal terminology on my résumé and website. That isn’t necessarily a good thing right now. Part of the reason I published this anyway is the open question: if I don’t publish anyway, why should others? I’m a very small target thanks to my privilege. It’s on me to do more, not less.
This paper is part of a much larger movement to rename bird names, moving away from eponyms. This has also moved over into taxonomy, with the recommendation that scientific names that are offensive should also be changed. I’m in support of those movements - I don’t think stability is as important as people say it is, as all human works ultimately change and we need to think on longer scales of time. Bill typing terms are not even remotely at the same scale as a name change for, say, the Cooper’s Hawk, but it’s all part of the same work.
I added a land acknowledgment to the piece, too, as I presented it in Plymouth. Across the street from the venue and a short walk south, there’s a small statue of my ancestor, William Bradford, a racist, genocidal colonizer. I’ve benefited tremendously from his and the state’s actions since the 1600s. The land acknowledgment is the least, almost literally, I can do. The work will never end, and every little bit helps.