Date: Wed, 3 Mar 2004 13:33:31 -0500 Reply-To: Maryland Birds & Birding Sender: Maryland Birds & Birding From: Walter Ellison Subject: Re: Wigeon -v- Widgeon Redux MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Hi Everybody, This is the very definition of a sidebar debate, but I no longer can resist adding a couple of pence. Insofar as I can recall the change in the States took place about ten-years prior to the 1983 AOU Check-list in a 1973 Committee on Classification and Nomenclature supplement to the 1957 Check-list. It seems to me that widgeon/wigeon was an unstable spelling in English before anybody ever attempted to standardize bird names in the late 19th Century (the same would be true of pidgeon/pigeon - whence actor Walter's name). For some reason different sides of the Atlantic settled on different solutions to standardized spelling. Why we chose "widgeon" when our own member of the genus was usually called baldpate is a mystery, perhaps "American widgeon" was already a name in contention back in the 1890s. At any rate I imagine the main reason for using the British spelling in 1973 can be boiled down to one issue - indexing. International publications such as the Zoological Abstracts must have had a fit with two slightly different spellings for the same birds on opposite sides of the pond. At any rate for the time being (until some other arrogant revisionist comes along) the ornithologically correct spelling is "wigeon". Now everybody get out there and enjoy this weather, this too shall pass. Good Birding, Walter Ellison 23460 Clarissa Road Chestertown, MD 21620 phone: 410-778-9568 e-mail: rossgull@crosslink.net "A person who is looking for something doesn't travel very fast" - E. B. White (in "Stuart Little") ======================================================================= To leave the MDOsprey list, send e-mail to listserv@home.ease.lsoft.com with the following message in line 1: signoff mdosprey ======================================================================= =========================================================================