Modern Living: The Busted Birds

To many among the 10 million North American bird watchers, it was almost as if John James Audubon had been exposed as a forger or the American eagle reclassified as a turkey vulture. In fact, the American Ornithologists' Union, the Vatican of bird watching, has come perilously close to such heresy. A pronunciamento in the A.O.U. magazine Auk stripped the Baltimore oriole of its name; henceforth Icterus galbula will be known by the prosaic name "northern oriole." A dozen other busted species include the European teal (to green-winged teal), Audubon's warbler and the myrtle warbler (to yellow-rumped warbler), the red-shafted, yellow-shafted and gilded flicker (to common flicker), the slate-colored junco (to dark-eyed junco) and the black-eared bushtit (to common bushtit).

The reason for the taxonomic purge is that birds tend on occasion to be indiscreet in their mating habits. The Cape Sable sparrow and the dusky seaside sparrow, for example, have interbred; Harlan's hawks have mated with red-tailed hawks. These unions have produced hybrids that do not fit the A.O.U.'s official definition of a distinct species. As a result, the A.O.U. has punished the offending species by dropping them from birddom's social register.

The new ruling has produced a flap among watchers, particularly those who aspire to the elite "600 life list" of birders who have spent lives and fortunes spotting all the original 600 species on the A.O.U. list. As one infuriated enthusiast noted last week, "A lot of us people in the American Birding Association, which is made up of gung-ho list chasers as opposed to sedentary bathrobe birders, are fighting this. We're going to make up our own list based on recognizable field markings, not on with whom the birds happen to mate. The Baltimore oriole lives!"