'Confederate' name of a bird is changed

Across the United States, it has been a summer of protests against racial injustice in the wake of George Floyd's death at the hands of Minneapolis police and a questioning of who the country honors and why.

That question has led to a push for the removal of Confederate statues and names from buildings, schools, streets, parks, military installations and even the nation's Capitol building as symbols of past and present racism in the country.

Now the name of a small gray, white and chestnut-colored prairie bird is the latest defeat for the Confederacy.

The McCown's Longspur (Rhynchophanes mccownii) has been renamed the Thick-Billed Longspur because John Porter McCowan was a Confederate general who earlier fought in the Seminole Wars, which forced native tribes out of Florida.

The bird was named after McCown because he was an amateur birder who kept records of the birds he saw in his travels.

The American Ornithological Society (AOS) has been involved in an ongoing debate about honorific bird names, known as eponyms. Ornithologists have been trying to drop the reference to McCown since 2018.

Last year, the AOS' North American Classification Committee passed on a chance to rename McCown's Longspur, citing the importance of maintaining stability in bird names.

But the name change took place Aug 7 by a 7–1 vote and was announced in an AOS email to its 3,000 members.

In new naming guidelines, the AOS committee said it recognizes "there may be English names that cause sufficient offense to warrant change on that basis alone", and said "the active engagement of the eponymic namesake in reprehensible events could serve as grounds for changing even long-established eponyms".

An initiative called Bird Names for Birds hailed the change while saying that 149 other eponymous bird names in North America alone need to be reviewed, and some say all of them should be changed.

"McCown wasn't just a singular anomaly that has now been 'solved', but a single expression of far more deep-rooted issues of colonialism, racism, sexism and other prejudices that have gone unchallenged for too long," said Alex Holt of Bird Names for Birds.

Individuals and organizations in the US have been confronting the meaning a name can carry, whether it's a professional football team (the Washington Redskins), a pancake syrup (Aunt Jemima's) or a celestial body (the Eskimo Nebula and the Siamese Twins Galaxy).

NASA is examining its names for planets, galaxies and other cosmic objects "as part of its commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion". The space agency said in a statement it "will use only the official, International Astronomical Union designations in cases where nicknames are inappropriate".

On July 2, in Asheville, North Carolina, the Elisha Mitchell Audubon Society, a chapter of the National Audubon Society, renamed itself the Blue Ridge Audubon Society.

In June, members discovered that the group's namesake, a pre-Civil War geology professor and Presbyterian minister, was also a slave owner and avowed racist.

"He actually wrote a book where he was a proponent of slavery and thought that black people should be enslaved," chapter president Nancy Casey told a local ABC News affiliate.

"Mitchell believed slavery benefited African Americans, writing that they were a 'race of inferior moral and mental endowments'," she said.

"Our Audubon chapter is not about that. We're about bringing more people into our flock — everybody into our flock."

The Associated Press contributed to this story.