{"id":166664,"date":"2025-02-06T06:05:43","date_gmt":"2025-02-06T13:05:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.featheredphotography.com\/blog\/?p=166664"},"modified":"2025-02-06T08:08:18","modified_gmt":"2025-02-06T15:08:18","slug":"capitalization-of-bird-names","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/2025\/02\/06\/capitalization-of-bird-names\/","title":{"rendered":"Capitalization Of Bird Names"},"content":{"rendered":"

For many years Feathered Photography’s most popular post, based on number of views, has been A Guide To Aging Bald Eagles<\/a><\/span><\/span>. But based on strong circumstantial evidence (so far I’ve resisted upgrading MonsterInsights for $99 per year in order to get precise numbers), that honor now goes to another post, Capitalization Of Bird Common Names, published almost exactly seven years ago.<\/em><\/p>\n

A quick review of that post revealed that it needed some serious tweaking so today I’m rerunning it after correcting some usage errors, modifying the formatting and changing the title.<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

I try hard to write coherently and correctly but it doesn’t come easily for me and I regularly make mistakes. After all, I taught biology, not English, and I’m really just a semi grown-up farm boy from Montana.<\/p>\n

But when your writing is put out there for the world to see, you want to compose it as well as possible. At least I do. Thankfully, I have a couple of friends who occasionally message me privately immediately after I’ve published a blog post and point out any glaring grammatical or usage errors so I can correct them before they’ve been seen by most of my readers. Thank you, Sue and Shari.<\/p>\n

I’m not anal about it but I do like to get it as close to right as possible.<\/p>\n

One of the issues I struggled with at the beginning of my blogging career was proper capitalization of bird common names. For generations the general rule by convention and in many style guides has been that common names of mammals, birds, insects, fish and other life forms are not capitalized. It was grizzly bear, not Grizzly Bear.<\/p>\n

But with birds I’d often see it both ways so initially I was really confused. Most media outlets don’t capitalize common names of birds and many generally trusted online resources, such as Daily Writing Tips,<\/a><\/span><\/span> say they shouldn’t be capitalized:<\/p>\n