Thanks. It’s a fascinating study and It would be really interesting to see how it looks if extended to include the other countries.

Hi. Does this cover just England or Wales too?

bsky.app/profile/stev...

Or take “Saturday”. Also a proper noun, because there is only one day of the week called Saturday, but one which there are very many instances of, but we don’t write “I saw a sedge warbler last saturday”. 8/8

So, saying “I saw a Sedge Warbler” is consistent with this approach, and so if you’re arguing that it’s incorrect to say “I saw a Sedge Warbler” then you also need to argue that the correct usage in the newspaper analogy is “today’s guardian” / “a guardian”. 7/8

Take “The Guardian”. There is only one newspaper with this name, so it’s a proper noun. When someone refers to an article in “Today’s Guardian” or goes into a newsagent to buy “a Guardian” they are using “Guardian” as a common noun, but retain the initial capitals. 6/8

Making a case for the use of initial capitals when referring to a lineage (a proper noun), and lower case when referring to an individual organism that’s part of that lineage (a common noun) is not unreasonable. However, that’s not what we do in other situations like this. 5/8

I suspect that the reason people think that English names are common nouns is because they think of sentences like “I saw a sedge warbler”: in this instance they are referring to a member of a class of things, and so they believe that lower case should be used. 4/8

A species is a singular entity: there is only one species called Sedge Warbler on the evolutionary tree. If one writes “the sedge warbler is a migratory bird”, in that sentence, Sedge Warbler is a proper noun and so use of lower case is incorrect. 3/8

The fundamental difference between a proper noun and a common noun is that proper nouns are used to refer to singular entities, whereas common nouns are used to refer to classes of such entities. So: David Bowie, Birmingham vs musician, city. 2/8

Successfully twitched from Norwich in my first term at Uni, and the species I’ve been waiting longest for seconds of.

Hi Max, there’s a photograph of an adult male Siberian Thrush in this October eBird checklist from Taiwan: ebird.org/checklist/S2...

This looks very different from the Shetland bird. What’s your thinking as to why the latter is an adult?

I’ve just found another absurd one: ´Wryneck head twisting’ gave me this:

It got itself completely tangled up in knots when I asked about “phalarope underwing patterns” (try it) and as for “large white-headed gull identification”, well …

Is that doughnut as in the thing I eat more often than I should, or the thing that the youth do in their cars in the Sports Village car park?