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On 11/18/2016 1:20 AM, Wayne P. Neily wrote:
> / Perisoreus canadensis/, Mésangeai du Canada, Canada Jay, or
> its Algonkin name of 'wis-akajak' is a great choice for our national
> bird, but let's resist calling it what the AMERICAN Ornithologists'
> Union changed its name to. They not only stole our name of Canada Jay
> and hid it, but to add insult to injury, they used the US mis-spelling
> of "grey"!
* in the fussing about the loss of 'Canada Jay' as a name, no one
mentions that this was a result of the 1953 decision by the AOU not to
have English names for subspecies. 'Canada Jay' was the name of
Perisoreus c. canadansis, which was the subspecies for most of the way
across Canada, but there's swarms of other nominal subspecies -
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gray_jay#Distribution - several in Canada,
so the English name wasn't ever 'Canada Jay' in various corners of
Canada. So the name 'Canada Jay' wasn't stolen, it was sacrificed to the
more-or-less good cause of restricting English names to species (rather
than scrubbing all the nominal subspecies which were just based on
clinal geographic variation rather than taxon-like geographic breaks in
variation).
fred.
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Frederick W. Schueler & Aleta Karstad
Fragile Inheritance Natural History
Daily Paintings - http://karstaddailypaintings.blogspot.com/
Vulnerable Watersheds - http://vulnerablewaters.blogspot.ca/
Mudpuppy Night in Oxford Mills - http://pinicola.ca/mudpup1.htm
4 St-Lawrence Street Bishops Mills, RR#2 Oxford Station, Ontario K0G 1T0
on the Smiths Falls Limestone Plain 44* 52'N 75* 42'W
(613)258-3107 <bckcdb at istar.ca> http://pinicola.ca/
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