terminology

[Harvey Perkins <>]

> This is NOT
> criticising anyone, it is something that has been annoying me for a
> long time. I nearly brought it up at the member's night in January
> but thankfully sanity prevailed and people opted for Geoffrey Dabb's
> entertaining productions over what would have been a very dry (but
> possibly animated) talk by me.
>
>  I was
> looking through the bird photos in COG's photo gallery and
> noticed?"Black Honeyeater?.Rare vagrant", then came across
> Yellow-tufted Honeyeater?."Rare visitor" so I then had a look at
> the Painted Honeyeater. It is listed as "rare, breeding migrant". 
> What has annoyed me for a long time is the term "Rare vagrant". I
> did actually manage to come across a record of an "uncommon vagrant"
> in a recent COG Annual Bird Report. Can anyone tell me of a "Common
> vagrant"? To me the term should be either "Rare" or
> "Vagrant", the two words to my way of thinking just do not go
> together. By saying "rare" for the three species I have mentioned
> means their status is very similar when plainly it is not, with the
> Yellow-tufted being far more common in the local area that the other
> two species. Generally most of the birds termed as "rare vagrant"
> are not rare in the true sense, they are just vagrants ie birds
> that have for some reason have turned up well out of their normal
> range and only do so on rare occasions.
>
>  We
> need to look at a whole lot of our terms when discussing our birds
> locally. Michael Lenz' note this morning about "DY" is another
> case in point.
> Now that I
> have opened Pandora's Box, let me see/hear your
> views.

I'm heading off to Weddin Mtns in an hour or so, and have lots more to do here before I go, so I don't have time to respond to this more fully until next week; but I will say here, now, that there should be a comma between what is meant to be an abundance descriptor and what is meant to be a residential status descriptor in these examples. Ie, the "rare" is not qualifying the "vagrant" descriptor so there is no full-blown tautology; it is just that in attempting to provide one descriptor for abundance and one for residential status from a necessarily very limited pool of terms (rather than using a fully flexible descriptive prose), the juxtaposition, particularly when the comma is neglectfully omitted, sounds tautological and can obviously cause annoyance.

more later...

Harvey

--

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Dr Harvey D. Perkins
School of Biochemistry & Molecular Biology
The Australian National University
Canberra, ACT 0200, Australia
ph +61 2 6125 2693; fax:+61 2 6125 0313
and:
Pest Animal Control Cooperative Research Centre
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Editor, Canberra Bird Notes
(Journal of the Canberra Ornithologists Group)
42 Summerland Circuit, Kambah, ACT 2902
Ph: (02) 6231 8209  mobile: 043 886 9990
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