Birds of The World: Recommended English Names - Reception

Reception

As the authors acknowledged, "Passions about bird names run high." Reviews of the book were generally favorable. Ted Floyd, editor of Birding magazine, called the book " very valuable resource." S.N.G. Howell called the work a "handy little book" and "a good starting point deserves serious consideration by persons interested in communicating" about birds, although the review mentions the inconsistency between this list and the AOU's names. Rick Wright, while acknowledging that "onsistency is a slippery goal," called the list "a spectacularly useful resource for anyone who writes, reads, or thinks about birds outside of his or her own region" and concluded that "the committee and the editors are to be congratulated for producing a useful and useable work."

However, the American Ornithologists' Union (AOU) castigated the authors for not using the AOU's guidelines and policies, particularly in the treatment of hyphens. The AOU argued that "hyphens in compound group names indicate relationships and separate the members of the groups from less closely related forms," stating as examples that the hyphen in "Whistling-Ducks" distinguishes this bird from other ducks and the hyphen in "Storm-Petrels" separates it from other petrels in the family Procellariidae. The authors felt the need to respond. They pointed out that hyphens are not used in this fashion in fields such as herpetology and suggested that "well-intentioned hyphenation practices misrepresent phylogenetic relationships too often to be helpful." They repeated their recommendation that hyphens should be used "sparingly," and urged their fellow ornithologists to "work together to simplify the use of hyphens as one small step towards improved standardization of English bird names."