House Finch or Linnet?
House Finch or Linnet?
Carpodacus mexicanus frontalis has long been known in the A. 0. U. Check-List as the House Finch. It is generally known by that name over its whole vast range except in a portion of California. Yet it is rather persistently called Linnet (or, worse still, California Linnet) by a group of Californians of an ornithological turn of mind, who frequently succeed in getting one or the other of those terms into so excellent a magazine as THE CONDOR. Is it impertinent to ask why?
“Linnet” is certainly not distinctive. It means nothing. It is applied to different species in different parts of the world, and by the vast majority of ornithologists of the world would, if standing by itself without the technical name, be taken to mean a very different species which does not occur where the House Finch is found.
Surely no one can defend the term “California Linnet” as applied to this bird. The temporarily successful effort a few years ago to have the latter adopted in the Check-List savored of an attempt to boost California real estate by foisting upon this wide-spread species a geographic name representing only a short, narrow strip along the extreme edge of its range. Some of us who frequently visit that great state and view its wealth and natural resources, enjoying its surf-bathing, climate, scenery and other advantages, admire the loyalty and boosting spirit of its citizens, but feel that it is hardly necessary to thus misrepresent the range of a bird species in ornithological nomenclature, in order to sustain Californias’ splendid material progress. Also we are constrained to believe that the few who are seeking to do so do not really represent the ornithologists of the state. I hope I may not be considered presumptuous in inviting the few seceders to move back into the United States and conform to the custom of the country, in the interests of nomenclatural uniformity.
Junius Henderson
University of Colorado, Boulder, Colorado
