On November 1, 2023, the American Ornithological Society (AOS) announced that it would change every English bird name within its geographic jurisdiction that is named directly after a person. The press release was issued from Chicago, quoted the society’s president and CEO, and set a start date of 2024. It also said the first pass would cover 70–80 species occurring primarily in the U.S. and Canada. AOS announcement, November 1, 2023
That is the headline. The more interesting document is the one underneath it: the final report of the Ad Hoc English Bird Names Committee, which converted a contested moral question into an administrative process. The committee’s central move was to reject case-by-case adjudication of individual honorees and recommend a categorical rule. The report is explicit about why.
What the AOS already had
Since 1886, the AOS and its predecessor, the American Ornithologists’ Union, have maintained a list of official English-language names for birds in North America, and more recently South America. The committee’s report notes that a guiding principle of the committees maintaining that list has been to foster stability for the sake of effective communication. EBN Committee Recommendations report
Stability is a technical virtue in nomenclature. A name is a retrieval key: it is what a field guide indexes, what a checklist sorts, what a records committee files an observation under. Change the key and every downstream record has to be reconciled. This is why taxonomic committees have historically treated name changes as a cost to be justified, not a routine event.
The AOS’s English names were chosen by vote of two independent checklist committees of taxonomic experts: the North American Classification Committee (NACC) and the South American Classification Committee (SACC). The committee report describes this arrangement plainly. The authority was expert, taxonomic, and slow by design.
The precedent that made case-by-case review look untenable
In 2020, the AOS renamed a small prairie songbird to Thick-billed Longspur. The bird’s original name honored John P. McCown, an amateur naturalist who later became a Confederate general, and the AOS announcement describes the old name as perceived as a painful link to slavery and racism. AOS announcement
One case, one decision. The 2023 committee treated that model as the alternative it was rejecting. Its report states the majority conclusion directly: changing all names avoids the value judgments and focus on human morality, both of which are likely to lead to extremely fraught debates, required by a case-by-case approach. EBN Committee Recommendations report
Read that sentence as a knowledge-organization claim rather than a moral one. A case-by-case process requires the committee to rank human beings by culpability, to decide which biographies disqualify an honor and which do not, and to defend those rankings in public. That is a tribunal, not a nomenclature. The categorical rule replaces the tribunal with a test that can be applied without reading anyone’s biography: is the name an eponym? If yes, it changes.
The committee’s other reasons were about what a name is for
The majority did not rest on procedural avoidance alone. The report lists additional reasons for changing all eponyms: eponymous names are poor descriptors; the use of honorifics itself reflects exclusion in scientific participation; there are other, better opportunities to commemorate historical or living figures who have made important contributions to ornithology; and alternative methods of naming nature that do not imply ownership should be used. EBN Committee Recommendations report
The first and last of those are the ones a cataloger will recognize. A name like “Wilson’s Warbler” tells a user nothing about the bird and everything about a nineteenth-century naturalist. It is a pointer to a person, not a description of an organism. The committee’s framing treats the eponym as a defective retrieval key as well as a contested honor — which is why the recommendation can be read as a claim about what a common name is supposed to do.
The architecture: three moving parts
The committee’s recommendations were not a single renaming. They were a governance redesign with three interlocking pieces.
First, the scope rule. Change all English names of birds named after people, plus three additional non-eponymous names the committee judged derogatory or culturally unsuitable: Flesh-footed Shearwater, Eskimo Curlew, and Inca Dove. The report gives reasons for each — a name implying a default skin tone, a dated term for Indigenous peoples of the far north now considered offensive, and a name widely considered to have been given in error through confusion between the geographic locations of the Inca and Aztec civilizations. EBN Committee Recommendations report
Second, a new standing committee. The report recommends establishing a separate naming committee responsible for changing, creating, and approving English common bird names now and in the future. That committee would work with the NACC and SACC on proposed names, oversee the public process, and ultimately choose new names. EBN Committee Recommendations report
This is the institutional core. The old arrangement lodged naming authority in taxonomic expertise. The new arrangement separates the two functions: taxonomy stays with the classification committees, while common names move to a body whose mandate is explicitly social and communicative. The AOS announcement describes the new committee as broadening participation to include expertise in the social sciences, communications, ornithology, and taxonomy. AOS announcement
Third, public input. The report recommends involving the public in selecting replacement names, with the new naming committee soliciting public input before selecting a name. The stated rationale is transparency and a sense of public engagement and investment, while decreasing perceptions of arbitrary or cosmetic changes. EBN Committee Recommendations report
Scale, pilot, and the jurisdictional brake
The committee did not pretend the job was small. Its report identifies 152 English names on the NACC list and 111 on the SACC checklist as within scope, and states that if the South American names were to be changed, it should be done in close consultation with ornithologists from the Neotropics. EBN Committee Recommendations report
It also recommended a pilot run using fewer than 10 species names representing a broad cross-section of considerations and challenges, to build capacity before scaling. The AOS announcement confirms the pilot framing for 2024 in the U.S. and Canada, and states that the society has committed to engaging in broader conversations with ornithologists and organizations in Latin America before proceeding with Latin American name changes. AOS announcement
That last clause is worth pausing on. A naming authority that extends its jurisdiction across two continents has to decide whether its authority is procedural or territorial. The AOS chose to treat the southern half of its range as requiring consultation rather than decree. Whether that is deference or abdication depends on what happens next, and the retrieved record does not settle it.
What did not change
Scientific names were not part of the initiative. The AOS announcement states that scientific names will not be changed as part of the English bird names initiative, though they are regularly reviewed and updated by the classification committees following the rules of the International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature. AOS announcement
This is the typification principle in action. A scientific name is anchored to a type specimen — a physical voucher held in a collection — and its stability is governed by a separate code with its own procedures. The common name is a public label; the scientific name is a legal instrument tied to an object. The AOS decision operates on the label, not the instrument. Anyone who wants to know what bird is meant can still follow the scientific name to the specimen.
The open question
The committee’s own conclusion acknowledges the difficulty: planning, executing, and iterating a set of completely new processes will be neither easy nor fast, and a central need is to develop an approach that ensures the longevity and durability of names. EBN Committee Recommendations report
Here is the tension the report names but does not resolve. The old system bought stability with expert control and slow change. The new system buys legitimacy with public participation and a categorical rule. But public participation is a variable input, and a name chosen by public process is only as durable as the next public process. A field guide publisher deciding whether to print old and new names side by side faces a real cost that the committee acknowledges in principle and leaves to implementation.
The AOS decision is therefore best read not as a verdict on any individual honoree but as a bet that procedural durability — a clear rule, a standing committee, a documented process — will outlast the moral arguments that a case-by-case approach would have required. Whether that bet pays off is an empirical question. The record so far establishes the decision and its architecture, not its results.
FAQ
Did the AOS rename every bird named after a person at once?
No. The November 2023 announcement committed to changing all such names within the AOS’s geographic jurisdiction, with the effort beginning in 2024 and focusing initially on 70–80 species occurring primarily in the U.S. and Canada. The committee recommended a pilot of fewer than 10 species before scaling.
Were scientific names changed?
No. The AOS announcement states that scientific names were not changed as part of the English bird names initiative, though they are regularly reviewed and updated by the classification committees under the International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature.
Why change all eponyms instead of only the problematic ones?
The committee’s majority concluded that a case-by-case approach would require value judgments and a focus on human morality likely to produce extremely fraught debates. The categorical rule avoids adjudicating individual biographies.
Who chooses the new names?
The committee recommended a new standing naming committee, separate from the taxonomic classification committees, which would solicit public input and ultimately select replacement names. The AOS announcement confirms the creation of a new committee with broader disciplinary representation.
Does this affect birds in Latin America?
The committee identified 111 names on the SACC checklist as within scope but stated that changes there should be done in close consultation with Neotropical ornithologists. The AOS announcement commits to broader conversations with Latin American ornithologists and organizations before proceeding.