“Tradition is not the worship of ashes, but the preservation of fire.”― Gustav Mahler Imagine that it is an autumn day in Manhattan, the year is 1869, and a huge party is taking place. You might learn from others in the crowd ― if you hadn’t been reading the papers ― that similar festivals were … More An Unusual Day of Thanks in September, 1869
This is the third in a series. Hoping to compile a total of 100 original trivia questions related to bird names. Part 1: Numbers Part 2: People Good bird names are descriptive. Yellow-bellied Flycatcher is a wonderful name; it describes a feature, and a behavior. It includes a color, and that is even better; an … More Bird Name Trivia Quiz, Part 3: Colors
We continue looking at the 10,721 species names from the updated Clements taxonomy. Well, not all of them at once, but various interesting subsets. Previously, we looked at the number of words in bird names, comparing their structure with human names and “surnames.” A natural step from here is to look at an even more … More Bird Name Trivia Quiz, Part 2: Honorifics
I find bird names fascinating – almost as much as with the birds themselves. I’m also interested in the statistical distributions of bird names: What percentage of birds are named for a color? What are the shortest and longest names? How many are named after people? Or after specific physical features? Or where they occur? … More Bird Name Trivia Quiz, Part 1: Numbers
