100 Greatest Bird Names of All Time
Key takeaways
- Robert Francis May 20, 20262444145Share I love bird names.
- A few weeks ago, I decided that it would be fun to rank the 100 greatest ones.
- But first, there have been a few fantastic pieces of Bird History by some writers on and off of Substack that deserve a mention.
Robert Francis May 20, 20262444145Share I love bird names. And in a world with more than 11,000 kinds of birds, ornithologists have had to dig deep to come up with unique titles for each one. While literal descriptions have their place (I’m delighted every time someone asks me the name of that black bird with red wings), we’re fortunate that many, many others are surprising, bizarre, never-before-uttered sequences of words or sounds. And each bird’s name carries with it a bit of history. They’re a window into the ways people have made sense of a vast world’s diversity through folk knowledge and science. They show how we relate to the birds with whom we share the world.
A few weeks ago, I decided that it would be fun to rank the 100 greatest ones. My task was made easier by Wikipedia’s List of birds by common name, but narrowing down 11,000 names (this is a genuine curated list, I really did look through all of them) turned out to be way harder than I expected. There are FAR TOO MANY GOOD ONES. My short list alone had more than three hundred, and picking the top hundred nearly ended me. It was also so much fun! I considered myself something of a bird name connoisseur, but many of the top names were new to me and so strange and surprising that they left me speechless.
A few weeks ago, I shared the ranked list on Twitter and on Substack notes. If you’ll forgive a slight departure from the usual essays that make up my Substack posts, I’m going to share this list here as well.