One candidate for best folk name is the Red-bellied Woodpecker, which apparently went by Chad

schnip schnap, they're eating my peas Incredible story from Alexander Wilson, America's first ornithologist, in 1812.

Having names for plants and animals is our starting point for interacting with nature. I think that's discouraging for a lot of people because they don't know the names for things around them (me included!) but instead why don't we just… make them up?

Another excellent piece here, this is the best bird writing in the biz right now

Americans used to know birds by thousands of unique local folk names. Ruddy Ducks alone were called dummy duck, dinky, dipper, dopper, dumb-bird, and god-damn. My latest piece is on the joy of folk names and losing them to the bureaucratic formalization of knowledge about birds.

If you're my enemy, this is how I'm regarding you

While "odd duck" and "silly goose" both began their rise to prominence in the 1990s, it seems like "odd duck" is of truly recent origin, while "silly goose" has enjoyed the periodic resurgence in popularity, most recently in the 1870s.

I wrote about the Reiser brothers and their hilarious, disgusting Listers documentary for Slate: slate.com/culture/2025...

Guano miners on Laysan Island, 1891.

The Pittsburgh/sooty bird one, of course, is real: Bird specimens track 135 years of atmospheric black carbon and environmental policy | PNAS www.pnas.org/doi/full/10....

Some abysmal bird jokes from 1908

The Excitement Of Touching The Eccentric Woodcock On The Back

In other words,

My favorite side quest is eating foods at the place the food is named for. So far I've eaten: -buffalo wings in Buffalo, NY -key lime pie in the Florida keys -Nashville hot chicken in Nashville What else (in the US) am I missing?

As a niche bird history account I gotta share that there was a run on pet canaries after 9/11 because people thought they'd help protect against poison gas, one pet store owner said "I don't want to seem unpatriotic or anything but canary business has been great ever since 9/11"

This isn't how birding is supposed to work!

My 4 y.o. niece's favorite game is saying she wants to hear a bird that sounds "very scary" or "like a howl" or "funny" and then I have to find a bird that meets her demanding requirements on the Merlin app

can anyone confirm if this is true?

At least 25 species of parrots have become naturalized in the US, which are just a fraction of the 1,500+ kinds of wild birds that Americans imported as pets. We've mostly forgotten about the wild bird trade, but the 1950s-80s was an unprecedented shuffling of biodiversity.

People used to catch Cardinals and ship them to England as pets. Here's what they had to say about "Virginia Nightingales" in 1740.

The last passenger pigeon died 111 years ago today and not a day goes by that I don't think about how their flocks numbered in the *billions*, that their roosts covered 100+ square miles, that they collapsed trees with their nests. America is incomplete without them

Inside you there are two birds

“There’s lots of hawks, some FAT turkeys, some that are red blue black and yellow, some that are like the ones in England but different, plus a bunch where I don’t know their names.” -A guy writing down all the birds he saw in Maryland in 1635.

"log god" and "wood god" honestly describe it better than Pileated Woodpecker

One of the few folk names that birders still use is calling woodcocks Timberdoodles. But some of the other options are just as good! A personal favorite is "Labrador Twister."

Old folk names for American birds are just too good. We could have gone with Tweezer, Wheezer, Weaser, or Wooser for this guy but instead settled for Common Merganser. Major missed opportunity.

Robot is Czech for forced labor??

This statistic on US bird imports is insane

I'm confused that the existence of blood pheasants is not a more prominent part of our culture

So this note sent me on a bit of an etymology spiral and I learned some really fun things so it’s time to bring back my favourite trend: the gosh darn etymology thread

I found out that my hometown newspaper just shuttered after more than a hundred years in print. Hold your local journalist extra close tonight for me.

Question - which state reps its state bird best? I don't care which state has the "best" state bird, I want to know which one loves theirs the most.

Insane suggestion from this pet manual in 1888: "In case your pet Paroquet departs this life, it is an easy matter to have him stuffed, and used to good advantage on the headgear of your wife or female friend."

I assumed exotic bird introductions were a relic of the distant past but apparently the government tried introducing dozens of game birds between 1948-70, and basically all of them failed. I wrote about the Foreign Game Introduction Program in my latest post. birdhistory.substack.com/p/welcome-to...

Since odd lots is having a moment I gotta promote my favorite episode

It seems like my main problem is that ornithologists are just really lazy at counting

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.

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

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

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

This is a legal requirement before you enter your 30s