rufous-sided towhee listed. Uh-oh. I had a sinking feeling that the taxonomists from the American Ornithologists Union, those fiendish lumpers and splitters, had been at it again. Sure enough, inspection of the photos confirmed that the venerable rufous-sided towhee, known by that beautiful, descriptive name since 1957, is now split into two sub-species, the eastern and spotted towhees.

I admit, I’m a little slow. I’m not active in the Audubon Society and thus am slightly out of the mainstream of birding news. Neither do I make a habit of buying new bird books on a regular basis. And so I didn’t learn about the change, which had been made in 1998, until 2008. But a 10-year delay is not that uncommon among amateur bird watchers. I know a lot of people who are still complaining about the name change of the marsh hawk to the northern harrier, an event that occurred in 1983.

As I looked into it, I found recent name changes have hit even closer to home. The lumpers have combined three separate junco subspecies, including the Oregon junco, into a grouping called the dark-eyed juncos. This also took place in 1983. The juncos have a long history of being lumped and split; the Oregon junco was only split out as a separate subspecies in 1931. And I suppose if you live by the split you die by the lump, but it seems to me they could have had more compassion for our state, perhaps changing the name of our state bird, the western meadowlark, to the Oregon meadowlark. I suppose the states of Kansas, Wyoming, Montana and North Dakota, who share the western meadowlark as their state birds, might have a complaint. But heck with them; they

didn’t just lose their own juncos.

The lumpers have no compassion for anyone, as it turns out. A careful look at the history of name changes shows their willingness to eliminate even the greatest names in birddom. The Audubon’s warbler, named for the father of American birders, was unceremoniously lumped into a grouping called the yellow-rumped warbler in 1983. If they’ll eliminate a name like Audubon, no one is safe, and scientists who thought their names would live forever learn that immortality is not all it’s cracked up to be.

But none of those changes caused the bewilderment likely to follow the 2004 split of the Canada goose into two distinct species, the large-bodied Canada geese and the smaller cackling geese. The cackling species now includes four separate subspecies of smaller geese, one of which is the cackling goose, common in the Willamette Valley. So now we write the scientific name of our smallest geese as Cackling cackling geese. Who says science is confusing?

I can’t help wondering what havoc the taxonomists would wreak if they were turned loose on food. Would the Philadelphia Cheese Steak sandwich be lost into a lumping of the long meat sandwich species? Would Swiss cheese become white holey cheese?

And what about dogs? Would they be lumped into two species, big dogs and yappy dogs? We would then have small hairless yappy dogs (Mexican Chihuahuas), black and white bug-eyed yappy dogs (Boston terriers). Even the large dogs would be affected. Labrador retrievers would then be big black water dogs. Newfoundlands would be very big black water dogs. In a perfect world, Irish setters will be known in the new system as rufous-sided setters.