birding-aus

Publishing conventions re-bird names

To: Gary Davidson <>
Subject: Publishing conventions re-bird names
From: Carl Clifford <>
Date: Tue, 1 Jan 2008 14:24:53 +1100
The Cornell Lab of Ornithology also sill capitalises bird names as well.

Carl Clifford

On 01/01/2008, at 2:17 PM, Gary Davidson wrote:

I find the recent references to American scientific journals and the use of non-capitalised bird names a bit confusing. I haven't seen any journals or books that use lower case letters for bird names. But I must admit all the journals I've read have been published by birding organisations. If the general scientific community is using lower case, then this is not consistent with the ornithological community. The American Birding Association, the American Ornithologists Union and the Audubon Society use capitals, and all published bird books use capitals. So who's not using capitals?
  Gary Davidson,
  Nakusp, BC
  Canada


Dave Torr <> wrote:
  The reference I quoted earlier (
http://www.worldbirdnames.org/rules-caps.html) specifically makes the point
that they are treating birds as a "special case" and that other animals
normally have lower case names. I am not sufficiently across other
publications to know whether this is true or not, but surely confusing
statements such as the one you have made could be just as easily applied to
some other animals - in which case one wonders how authors overcome the
problem?

On 30/12/2007, Neil Cheshire wrote:

Richard,

The contagion of lower case for bird names has unfortunately spread from
American scientific journals in
recent years. The passage below perhaps illustrates the problem with this
approach.

" When the group arrived at the lake a little egret was seen and a few
minutes later a larger egret flew in.
Later a singing honeyeater was heard but this became inaudible when a
noisy miner appeared."

Somewhat inconsistently they retain capitals for a personal or
geographical element of a bird name.

Neil Cheshire

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