Heard chatter and potentially published notes from some birding trips:
A hungry hawk ate a welcome swallow. Was it a Welcome Swallow? Actually no, it was a Starling.
A hungry hawk ate a Welcome Swallow. Now I understand.
Is that a Common Blackbird? Yes.
Is that a Common Blackbird? Actually no, it is a common black bird (e.g. a Great Cormorant).
That Singing Honeyeater you just called out is a striped honeyeater. Yes that is certainly true but you identified it wrongly. That singing striped honeyeater is a Varied Honeyeater. You can tick that on your list. Even though there is only one of them and it doesn’t vary much.
It would be really tedious if style guides specified including the scientific names on every mention of a species, supposedly to avoid confusion, as that would require thought each time as to what was confusing. And that varies according to the reader.
Funny, these emails are about “bird-names” rather than “bird names”. I wonder why the odd hyphen has been continued. But I think that is enough from me.
Philip
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A long time ago, the journal Notornis took this a step further. Not only were bird names capitalised, they were typed in BOLD! They stood out spectacularly from the surrounding text, which made it wonderfully easy to comprehend, and to pick out the things of interest. The idea is to communicate, and if you can take steps to improve clarity and understanding, then why not?
Cheers, Chris.
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