I'm organizing stuff in my study, and it's slow going because I keep running into odd stuff I've saved. One item was a copy of a short piece in American Birds, "An annotated bibliography of the founding of the American Ornithologists' Union," by Peter Cannell (Am Bds 37(4):355-7), which led to some ruminations. The author cites some interesting accounts of the organization of bird studies in America. Most of the 21 birdmen who came to the first AOU meeting in 1883 are well-known to scholars, and many of their names came to be enshrined in the scientific names of birds. All of us benefit from their work in organizing, describing, and ultimately naming birds. Many were physicians, who employed their skills in dissecting and preserving specimens to document and organize North American birds by their characteristics. More than a few served in the military as surgeons, often in remote frontier spots where there were opportunities to find and describe new species. Many others were amateurs, for whom bird study was not a source of livelihood, and their ornithological interests were at times more diverse. Among the physicians was J. M. Wheaton of Ohio, director of the Starling Medical College in Columbus--later to become the Ohio State University Medical School--whose bulky work "Report on the Birds of Ohio" was published just the year before, earning the praise of eminent ornithologists along with an invitation to the meeting founding the AOU. The article features a montage of photographs of 25 AOU founders. Unsurprisingly, they are all male, all white, all with Anglo-Saxon names, and all with carefully-tended but often extravagant facial hair (see Wheaton's chops, for example, at http://beesfirstappearance.wordpress.com/2013/07/03/wheaton/ . You may find their names--Mearns, Ridgway, Allen, Baird, Brewster, Coues, Shufeldt, Merriam, Bendire, Bicknell, etc--enshrined in the scientific names of North American birds. Their names once more often appeared in those even for common birds, but fewer remain today--the greater pewee, for example, was "Coues' Flycatcher" until just a few decades ago. Only a few of the men appear to be in their twenties. Only two wear spectacles, at least for their photos, and as befits birdmen, most maintain a fiercely attentive gaze aimed away from the camera, as if confirming a tough field identification. As for common bird names, I was surprised to find that 39 species on our Ohio list share humans' names, with three for Swainson, four for Wilson, and two for Ross, Townsend, and Baird (Spencer Fullerton Baird [1823-1887] appears in the photo montage from the first AOU meeting). Many names of other people, even such as "Anna," persist in scientific names of Ohio birds as well, recalling the names of humans involved in ornithology, however indirectly, rather than any characteristic of the birds in question. Admittedly, some of the quite descriptive names are nearly as obtuse to mere observers from a distance, such as "sharp-shinned," and "rough-winged." All of this history leaves a lot of room for future changes in the ever-changing nomenclature of birds. Bill Whan Columbus ______________________________________________________________________ Ohio-birds mailing list, a service of the Ohio Ornithological Society. Our thanks to Miami University for hosting this mailing list. Additional discussions can be found in our forums, at www.ohiobirds.org/forum/. You can join or leave the list, or change your options, at: http://listserv.muohio.edu/scripts/wa.exe?LIST=OHIO-BIRDS Send questions or comments about the list to: [log in to unmask]