This Month in Birding – August 2020
August 27, 2020
It’s the last Thursday of the month and that means it’s time once again for This Month in Birding. This month’s esteemed panel this month has more of a western bent, significantly pulling the mean location of panelists a little bit closer to the Mississippi River at least. We welcome Canada-based bird educator and researcher Jody Allair, ABA Young-birder liaison and Sonoran Joint Venture coordinator Jennie Duberstein, and host of the Fowl Mouths podcast, Sean Milnes. We talk Thick-billed Longspur, Audubon’s reckoning with their namesake, the retirement of Ron Pittaway and his Winter Bird Forecast, and the word bird pronunciation mistakes.
Links to topics discussed:
The American Birding Podcast brings together staff and friends of the American Birding Association as we talk about birds, birding, travel and conservation in North America and beyond.
Join host Nate Swick every other Thursday for news and happenings, recent rarities, guests from around the birding world, and features of interest to every birder.
Dropping the name Audubon would be organizational suicide for NAS. The idea of “historical equity” discussed in the podcast is more important that these [anelists realize. Are we now going to burn all the books with Audubon paintings in them? Take all the Audubon prints off our walls? Stop showing films and TV shows with Audubon prints on the walls? We’ve been through something like this before when NAS decided to drop the egret from its logo (because they wanted a broader conservation focus) and adopted a generic box-like thing that carried no organizational information. They were forced by their… Read more »
It’s odd that there is a discussion of mispronounced bird names when my good friend Nate Swick mangles two (he got the other two right) Hawaiian bird names in the intro. He can be forgiven because they are, after all, Hawaiian, not English. But several English names for Hawaiian birds are loan-words from Hawaiian, which, unlike English, is completely phonetic in spelling and easy to learn to pronounce.