Day 46: February 15 – What’s in a Name?

Partly cloudy but clearing, 78 degrees, winds 5-12 mph

       It’s a beautiful morning for a walk on the beach and there are quite a few shore birds taking advantage of the calm seas.  As is so often the case with these birds, there are several mixed flocks.  A group of Royal terns has a laughing gull smack dab in the middle of their gathering as a little Sanderling runs through the entire pack.  Several turnstones are working the shoreline and are oblivious to pedestrian traffic no more than a dozen feet away.  As I watched the hustle and bustle of all this activity,  it dawned on me how many of these birds are appropriately named.  So many of the birds we watch and photograph have names that make little if any sense.  The Ring-necked duck, for example, has a radiant white ring around the base of its bill as well as the tip.  Try to find a ring around its neck and you’ll be hard pressed.  There is one there, in fact, but it is so faint as to be all but indistinguishable.  Red-bellied woodpeckers have none but a whisper of a pink smudge on the belly.  There is rarely any purple seen on a Purple finch.

       These shorebirds, however, have names that actually make sense.  Take the Ruddy turnstone.  I watched and photographed them this morning walking along the shallows where the waves moved back and forth across the beach as they turned stones and shells to see if any little worms or crustaceans were hiding beneath.

  I passed by a large gull with a black back named a Greater black-backed gull

       Another gull is mostly white with a yellow bill.  Around the tip of this gull’s bill is a ring of black.  The gull’s name….the Ring-billed gull.

       Isn’t it great when the name of an animal actually describes the physical characteristics of that animal?  Ah, if it were only the rule and not the exception.