Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!ncar!mephisto!prism!fsu!loligo!sandee From: sandee@loligo (Daan Sandee) Newsgroups: rec.birds Subject: Re: Birding Magazines Keywords: nomenclature Message-ID: <425@fsu.scri.fsu.edu> Date: 9 Jan 90 20:36:59 GMT References: <2359@leah.Albany.Edu> Sender: news@fsu.scri.fsu.edu Reply-To: sandee@loligo.UUCP (Daan Sandee) Organization: Florida State University Lines: 56 Thanks for your posting, Annika. Lots of good stuff there. About Latin names : you must realize that (a) Birder's World is aimed at the large group of Sunday birdwatchers, rather than the hardcore birders, (they read American Birds and Birding) let alone the professionals (they have The Auk and numerous other scientific journals) ; and (b) that North American birding, the English names are used as a standard - the Latin names are only used by the professionals. (The articles in AB, but not the summary of observations, give Latin names. Given the audience, I approve of that, but do not consider it essential). That being so, there is no need for amateur birders to know the Latin names at all - the English names are established just as authoritatively by the AOU. As a displaced European, I had to get used to the idea, but I can assure you, it works (and is easier for most amateurs). I just get annoyed by the way the AOU misuses the hyphen in a manner contrary to proper English usage ; "Common Black-Hawk" is NOT correct English. It is easy to treat North America as a closed region, ornithologically, and virtually everybody speaks English (I pity the Quebecois who are forced to use a foreign language to get around in birding). In Europe, no country or linguistic region can be regarded as a separate ornitho- logical region, except possibly Britain. So it's not very useful to stick to local-language names, and many countries don't even bother to establish a standard. Arising out of that : I know that in Britain, the BOU does more or less the same job of taxonomy and nomenclature that the AOU does for North America. But does anybody know if there is a European body or organiz- ation trying to establish a standard West Palaearctic taxonomy ? (They'd have to stick to Latin, obviously ; at a rough count, there are about 20 European languages in which birds are discussed.) I am sure the BOU would be happy to see its decisions accepted by the other countries, but some contributions by other countries would be desirable. As to getting a broader public interested in birdwatching : one place to start would be in the conservationist movement. Surely in Finland there must be a body that concerns itself with issues like habitat destruction. I don't mean the people who complain about acid rain or global warming. I mean the people who want to preserve wetlands and forests, and establish nature preserves. (This is the job done by Audubon in the U.S.) Their magazine must reach a fairly wide audience, and these people should be interested in exactly WHAT birds need the wetlands they want to preserve. So if you can manage to get some bird-life articles in a magazine like that, that opens the way to birdwatching. In many countries the birdwatching interest must have come out of the conservation movement. It is only Britain and the US that are way ahead of the rest of the world because birdwatching antedates conservationism. Final question : can anybody explain why the only active European participants on this newsgroup are Finns ? I know from reading other (professional) newsgroups that there are plenty of netters in other European countries. But why is the combination of birding and computing restricted to Finland ? Daan Sandee sandee@sun6.scri.fsu.edu Control Data Corporation Supercomputer Computations Research Institute Florida State University, Tallahassee, FL 32306-4052 (904) 644-7045