Siberian Tit

I'm not proceeding chronologically as I had hoped; the Smews are of order by a couple of days.  Coming back to a couple of birds that I don't want to forget and which deserve recognition.  

Grey Wagtail (Motacilla cinerea)

Wagtails are such great birds; I wish we had them in North America. This bird is somewhat difficult to find in Finland and has shown up here for the past couple of years.  While my photo is poor, it is still easy to see that Grey Wagtail is an attractive bird.  The location it has chosen to occupy, an out of season ski resort, led to a discussion on how good the Finns are at ski-jumping.  Legendary athletes like Matti Nykänen and Toni Nieminen are just two.  Matti Nykänen won five Olympic medals, four of them gold in the 1980s.  He had, however, a sad history.  Apparently, he was an alcoholic from the age of 14 and died at a relatively young age.  Finland continues to have a roster of both men and women who are successful ski jumpers.  The next Olympics will be the Winter games!  The Grey Wagtail was at the Ruka Ski Resort, near Kuusamo in Northern Ostrobothnia on May 27th.   

Above and two below:  Siberian Tit (Poecile cinctus)

I took about twenty images of the Siberian Tit from this perch.  They all look basically the same.  I randomly chose the three above.  Siberian Tit also sparked a little discussion for this is the North American named Gray-headed Chickadee.  Some European tits and North American chickadees have very similar appearances.  Others, like (European) Blue and Great tits, are quite different.  North Americans might be forgiven for referring to the Willow, Marsh or Somber tits as chickadees, only in a different country, for the congruence in their appearances.  Indeed, they occupy the same genus - Poecile.  Siberian Tit and Gray-headed Chickadee fall into this category.

Our tour leader, Nigel Redman, from Norfolk, England has enjoyed a lifetime of bird study, birding and bird guiding and in an earlier career was a book publisher with Helms Field Guides and Bloomsbury Publishers - to say the least, extremely knowledgable with an impressive career.  He was adamant that this bird is properly named Siberian Tit.  It is mostly and widely a Siberian breeder and occupies only a tiny range in Alaska.  "Gray-headed Chickadee" he added, with mock derision.  I half expected him to say that Gray was also spelled incorrectly.  This was, to a lesser degree, discussed with divers vs. loons and Common Merganser vs. Gooseander - of course, all in fun. This appealed to me because it is one of the aspects of birds and birding that I enjoy knowing and reading about.

Later a discussion about how the AOS is changing the names of birds that are named with eponyms. (I used the term honorifics - but honorifics is not exactly correct with a dictionary definition that implies or expresses high status, politeness or respect, such as titles like Sir, Madam, Dr., Lord, Lady, etc.).  After attending Amar Ayyash's Keynote Address titled Man and Gull at the BWIAB conference in Ohio just prior to leaving for this trip, I happened to mention that Bonaparte's Gulls nest almost exclusively in trees, preferring black spruce trees, and that one of the names being considered for renaming it might be Spruce gull.   Using the McCown's Longspur to Thick-billed Longspur name change (PDF in link) as an example, Nigel disagreed with the AOS endeavor to rename birds.  He added that he understood what they were trying to do, but that in doing it, all of the history on how the bird was discovered and described would be lost.  As it happens, Nigel also published The Eponym Dictionary of Birds.  I learned a new word - eponym - in this discussion.  I consider the renaming of birds (and also birding organizations) to be examples of the woke chasm that is impacting American politics and dividing the country - e.g. removing statues from public places, removing paintings, removing books from the library, renaming birds - to be a made-up construct used primarily by one political party to create the furor necessary to win elections.  (I think political journalists might place 'woke' the red meat category.  Woke was originally used with a very different meaning.)  In this way, I agree with Nigel, history will be lost.  On the other hand, what does the name Bonaparte's really tell us about a small, graceful and pretty gull.  Nothing.  It seems that carelessness and inattention to detail would play a greater role in losing bird history.  I editorialized to remember this discussion.  None of the extra parts of what I wrote above occurred in the van.

The Siberian Tit was seen in the late afternoon in an area called Kuusamo — Vasarankangas, Northern Ostrobothnia also on May 27th.  By the late afternoon the clouds had disappeared and, weatherwise, it was one of the most enjoyable afternoons of the whole trip.

Afternote:   Now I can't recall why I happened to mention Bonaparte's Gull in the discussion we had in the van.  All discussions seemed to occur in the van.  It is exclusively a North American gull and there are only a few records in Northern Europe.

From Wikipedia.org I copied the following from the Bonaparte's Gull (Chroicocephalus philadelphia) page:  "The species is named after Charles Lucien Bonaparte, a French ornithologist (and nephew to the former French emperor Napoleon Bonaparte) who spent eight years in America, contributing to the understanding of the taxonomy and nomenclature of birds there and elsewhere. Its genus name, Chroicocephalus, is a combination of the Greek words chroikos, an adjective form of chroa meaning "colour", and kephalē meaning "head". This refers to the dark heads that most gulls in this genus show during the breeding season. The specific epithet philadelphia is a Latinized adjective meaning "from Philadelphia", a reference to the location from which the type specimen was collected."[9] Sandrock, James; Prior, Jean C. (2014). The Scientific Nomenclature of Birds of the Upper Midwest. Iowa City, Iowa, US: University of Iowa Press. p. 42. ISBN 978-1-60938-225-4. Retrieved 15 December 2015.

This supports Nigel's assertion, that with the changing of bird names, the bird's history will be lost.  This said, it doesn't need to be lost.  It's easy to see where adding just a sentence leaves the whole history intact.  The Wikipedia page also shows a photo of a Bonaparte's gull nesting in a black spruce tree.