Turtles on a beach

Contributor

other

HANDOUT on 8/17/23

The Washington Post

handout

September global average temperature compared to normal

Color1008

HANDOUT on 5/20/14

U.S. President Joe Biden travels to Arizona

For The Washington Post

An illustration shows a military jet emitting an orange hued substance into the atmosphere.

Main image for climate geoengineering comic

1.5 promo image

Floating Solar Aims to Gain Ground in China's Coal Country

Stringer

Days with dangerous heat by mid-century

How climate change is impacting the world

Coronavirus Pandemic 2021 - Death Valley National Park

staff

FILES-BRAZIL-AMAZON-DEFORESTATION

Getty

TOPSHOT-GREENLAND-ENVIRONMENT-CLIMATE CHANGE-ICEBERGS

Wildfires Break Out Across Boulder County In Colorado

Map showing summer temperature change in the U.S. comparing 2017-2021 vs. 1971-2000

EXTREMESUMMER PROMO

World Heat thumbnail

Respond to prefers-color-scheme dark in app web views

Follow section front redirects in Spectrum

Enable NLP source in PCS for load testing

Switch off the News Alerts Survey Widget when we have enough responses

Poll to determine if new LUF updates are available

Allows the winning A/B test variant to be turned on without Spectrum deployment

Show infinite scrolling sections in Assembler MultiView

Show option for NLP article summaries in Action Bar

Show NLP summaries collection recirc on article pages

A general feature flag for Recipe Features that aren't yet released

Feature flag for media team features that aren't yet released

Use new Orca video player for preroll plugin in Spectrum

Show the snow tracker (instead of the heat tracker) on Spectrum

Ask Amy: Can’t a single woman eat alone without interruption?

Miss Manners: Miss Manners: Gag gift falls flat

Carolyn Hax: Is it weird to ask other people to care about you?

Did Trump’s lawyers catch Michael Cohen in a ‘lie’? Let’s take a look.

Now playing off-Broadway: Trump’s synchronized sycophants

Biden faces pressure to pardon ex-Baltimore prosecutor Marilyn Mosby

With its energy network nearly destroyed, Ukraine already fears the winter

Mexican taquería’s new Michelin star puts street eats on par with gourmet food

IDF recovers bodies of 3 Israelis killed on Oct. 7

Biden continues outreach to Black voters; Trump heading to Minnesota

At campus protests, ‘DO NOT TALK TO THE MEDIA’!

CNN gets a presidential debate — and a much-needed win

In photos: The scene in Houston after severe storms killed at least 7 people

D.C.’s secret garden

Best Places to Work in the Federal Government 2023

Puppy abandoned with heart-rending note is adopted, named Minerva

Man, 91, shocks tiny firehouse with $500K gift: ‘Nobody knew how much I’d saved’

Retired cop meets abandoned baby he helped 23 years ago: ‘What are the odds?’

The world’s coolest hotels want to tell you a story

Cruise ships to return to Baltimore two months after bridge collapse 

Some cruise prices are about to get a little more clear

Joey Gallo returns, but Nats endure another quiet offensive night

A taco will always be a taco — no matter what we call it

Walter Johnson’s jersey from 1920 showdown with Babe Ruth is up for auction

Trump promises tax cuts and fewer rules. CEOs shouldn’t fall for it.

Tariffs against China hamstring the transition to a clean energy future

The Post’s choices in Northern Virginia’s U.S. House primaries

Boeing delays spaceflight again as it continues to struggle with leak

These ISIS news anchors are AI fakes. Their propaganda is real.

Why this company’s biggest fans turned against it

Trump

Reporting on Earth’s changing climate and the search for solutions

See more coverage in your recommendations

Climate & environment

The Climate Coach newsletter

Climate alerts

Hstiver

After two years of discussion and debate, the nation’s premier birding organization has decided that birds should not have human names.

The <a href="https://americanornithology.org/" target=_blank>American Ornithological Society</a> announced Wednesday that it will remove names given to North American birds in honor of people and replace them with monikers that better describe their plumage and other characteristics. The group said it will prioritize birds whose names trace to enslavers, white supremacists and robbers of Indigenous graves. Among them is one of the most famous birders in U.S. history, <a href="https://www.audubon.org/content/john-james-audubon" target=_blank>John James Audubon</a>.

“There is power in a name, and some English bird names have associations with the past that continue to be exclusionary and harmful today,” the society’s president, Colleen Handel, said in a statement. “We need a much more inclusive and engaging scientific process that focuses attention on the unique features and beauty of the birds themselves.”

Sometime next year, the society is expected to appoint a committee to explore up to 80 new names. The move, at an organization known for its reluctance to rename birds, was surprising even to the activists within the group <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/interactive/2021/bird-names-racism-audubon/" target=_blank>who requested it</a> after a White woman in Central Park falsely accused a Black birder of assault in 2020. In a racial reckoning that shook the field of ornithology, the activists, most of them White, argued that the names of some birds were offensive to people of color.

American birders have their own reckoning

“We have seen a lot of changes in our world in the recent past,” Sara Morris, the society’s president-elect, said in reference to racial justice protests that followed George Floyd’s murder by a Minneapolis police officer and the Central Park incident involving birder <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/arts-entertainment/2020/06/23/christian-cooper-central-park-birder-comics/" target=_blank>Christian Cooper</a>.

Maansi Srivastava

Racial insensitivity in the overwhelmingly White field of ornithology and birding should be rejected, Morris said. Recent reports projected that North America has lost 3 billion birds in the last 50 years, and “we need to engage as many people as we can in the enjoyment, study and conservation of birds as we can,” said Morris. “We need to break down as many barriers to participation as we can.”

Not every birder in the 2,700-member society is expected to welcome the news. Some who’ve memorized names established for more than a century are likely to push back. “Are we expecting that people won’t agree with this decision — sure,” Morris said. “But we’re proud of this decision. As we talked to people, many of them changed their minds.”

Jordan Rutter, a birder who organized the petition with her fiancé, Gabriel Foley, said the society’s action left her speechless. “That’s everything we asked,” said Rutter, who co-founded the group <a href="https://birdnamesforbirds.wordpress.com/historical-profiles/profiles-a-z/" target=_blank>Bird Names for Birds</a>, which listed about a dozen men honored with bird names and described their racist pasts. “I never thought this would be happening. ... What an incredible moment for the birding community.”

For the time being, birders of color who spot the Townsend’s warbler and the Townsend’s solitaire might be startled by the history of their namesake, <a href="https://matthewhalley.wordpress.com/2020/06/16/the-literal-skeletons-in-the-closet-of-american-ornithology/" target=_blank>John Kirk Townsend</a>. His journals describe his collection of skulls, stolen from the graves of Native people in the 1800s, to promote his theory that they were racially inferior.

Agami Photo Agency

In North America, where Indigenous tribes in what are now the United States and Canada encountered and named wild birds centuries before the arrival of European settlers, “White people are credited for discovering [the birds]. White people were the ones to name the birds after other White people. And White people are still the folks that are perpetuating these names,” Rutter said <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/interactive/2021/bird-names-racism-audubon/" target=_blank>in a 2021 interview with The Washington Post</a>.

At least two chapters of the National Audubon Society voted to change their names and distance themselves from the enslaver who detested abolitionists and, by his own account, once guided a family of escapees back to their enslaver. The Audubon’s shearwater and Audubon’s oriole were named to honor him.

North America has lost 3 billion birds in 50 years

Black birders who trace the Bachman’s sparrow and Bachman’s warbler to the man they immortalized, <a href="https://birdnamesforbirds.wordpress.com/historical-profiles/profiles-a-z/bachman-john/" target=_blank>John Bachman</a>, might find this passage in one of his speeches: “That the Negro will remain as he is, unless his form is changed by an amalgamation, which ... is revolting to us. That his intellect ... is greatly inferior to that of the Caucasian, and that he is, therefore ... incapable of self-government. That he is thrown to our protection. That our defense of slavery is contained within the Holy scriptures.”

Two members of Bird Names for Birds, Jess McLaughlin and Alex Holt, confirmed this history in library archives and helped bring it to the ornithological society’s attention, Rutter said. “It wasn’t, ‘Take our word for it.’ The evidence was right there.”

The society and its predecessor, the American Ornithologists’ Union, have managed a list of English-language bird names in North America since 1886. They are used by schools, government, conservationists, birders and other groups, the statement said.

Public Domain

Hulton Deutsch

Erica Nol, co-chair of the society’s Ad Hoc Committee on English Bird Names, said members took the issue seriously from the day the committee was formed more than a year ago. Meeting every two weeks via Zoom, they came up with a priority list of names to consider changing.

At first, the diverse White, Black and Latino members failed to arrive at a consensus. In addition to North American birds, they mulled changing the names of South American birds but eventually decided that it was not their place.

Months later, the members came to the realization that all eponymous names were problematic. “They imply possession of a species,” Nol said. “They are overwhelmingly from a particular time and social fabric, they are almost all White men, few women, and women were almost all first names. Our main goal was to increase the birdwatching public."

The committee startled the society’s leadership with its recommendation to change all English bird names and at least two cultural names of birds that did not make sense. “The name should be descriptive of the bird,” Nol said.

Both Morris and Judith Scarl, the chief executive and executive director, agreed with Nol’s observation that the society’s leadership looked at them as though they were crazy. “There were hard questions about how we would justify this,” Nol said.

The largest Audubon group yet is changing its name, rebuking an enslaver

“This is a historic, momentous decision,” said Scarl. “This is the way to go. We are going to work hard to bring people along to that understanding.”

Kenn Kaufman, a society member, started birding at age 6. “I was a little kid in South Bend, Indiana, and got interested in birds because they were there and they were fascinating,” he said. “Some of these bird names I’ve been using for a half-century.”

Overall, Kaufman said, “I thought it was a mess to go in and change all these names.” But he started talking with people such as Rutter and Drew Lanham, a Black ornithologist and professor at Clemson University in South Carolina. “As the conversation went on I realized they were changing my mind. It’s amazing how more information can do that,” he said.

“I’m sure there are going to be objections,” Kaufman said. “I’m sure the term ‘woke’ will be used. I still don’t know what that means. I just hope they can come around to see this from the view of groups of people who may have been marginalized in the past.”

Pulitzer Prize, explanatory journalism 2020, 

Society for Environmental Journalists, explanatory journalism, 2019

Pulitzer Prize finalist, explanatory journalism, 2022

MDDC Press Association, Best of Show, Tampa Bay’s Coming Storm, 2017

Hammett Award, Finalist, Russell Program, Presbyterian College, 1995

Associated Press of Georgia, Second Place, Feature Writing/Major Newspapers, 1994

Howard University, Journalism

St. Petersburg College, Mass Communications

Darryl Fears covers national environmental justice and climate. He joined the Post in 1999 as a reporter on the Metro Desk and moved to the National Desk in 2001 to cover race. He won a Pulitzer Prize in 2020 for explanatory reporting on climate warming and was a Pulitzer finalist in 2022 for national reporting on environmental racism.

Darryl Fears

washpost

Why dozens of bird species are losing human names linked to racists

the-washington-post

Audubon's Shearwater, Puffinus lherminieri flying

Getty Images/iStockphoto

Washington Post illustration; Agami Photo Agency/Shutterstock; iStock

Dozens of bird names honor racists. That's about to change.

Climate

Weather

Climate Solutions

Animals

Climate Lab

Green Living

Environment

prism://prism.query/site,/climate-environment/environment&limit=20

prism://prism.query/site-articles-only,/climate-environment&limit=20

Sign up for the Climate Coach newsletter and get advice for life on our changing planet, in your inbox every Tuesday and Thursday.

Washington Post coverage of climate and environment-related issues.

prism://prism.query/tag,climate202&limit=3

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/the-202-newsletters/the-climate-202/

Sign up for the Climate Coach newsletter and get advice for life on our changing planet, in your inbox every Tuesday.