NEW YORK - The American Ornithological Society, the organisation responsible for standardising English bird names across the Americas, announced on Wednesday that it would rename all species honouring people.

Bird names derived from people, the society said in a statement, can be harmful, exclusive and detract from “the focus, appreciation or consideration of the birds themselves”.

That means the Audubon’s shearwater, a bird found off the coast of the south-eastern United States, will no longer have a name acknowledging John James Audubon, a famous bird illustrator and a slave owner who adamantly opposed abolition.

The Scott’s oriole, a black and yellow bird inhabiting the American South-west and Mexico, will also receive a new moniker, which will sever ties to US Civil War general Winfield Scott, who oversaw the forced relocation of indigenous peoples in 1838 that eventually became the Trail of Tears.

The organisation’s decision is a response to pressure from birders to redress the recognition of historical figures with racist or colonial pasts.

The renaming process will aim for more descriptive names about the birds’ habitats or physical features and is part of a broader push in science for more welcoming, inclusive environments.

“We’re really doing this to address some historic wrongs,” said Dr Judith Scarl, the executive director of the American Ornithological Society.

Dr Scarl said the change would help “engage even more people in enjoying and protecting and studying birds”.

Advocates of this change believe that many English common names for birds are “isolating and demeaning reminders of oppression, slavery and genocide”, according to a petition in 2020 that was addressed to the American Ornithological Society.

The petition was written by Bird Names For Birds, an initiative founded by two ornithologists to confront the issue of these names, which it describes as “verbal statues” reflecting the values of their eponyms.

But some birders, while expressing sympathy for the cause, were unsure that this was the right route to take. “I’m not super enthusiastic about it, but nor am I super disappointed about it,” said Dr Jeff Marks, an ornithologist at the Montana Bird Advocacy.

“We’ll lose a little bit of knowledge about some key people in the history of ornithology, and that saddens me,” Dr Marks said. “But maybe in the scheme of things, that’s just not that big of a deal.”

Ms Jordan Rutter, a founder of Bird Names For Birds, said the petition was inspired by what became a momentous encounter in Central Park in 2020, when a white woman falsely reported to police that Mr Christian Cooper, a black birder, was threatening her.

“It wasn’t a wake-up call”, Ms Rutter said, but it brought “long-known but not highlighted issues to the forefront of the bird community”.

The Central Park encounter inspired the creation of Black Birders Week, an annual campaign to celebrate the lives and careers of black birders, which spurred an avalanche of similar initiatives in the sciences against the backdrop of a nationwide racial reckoning.

In 2021, the Entomological Society of America began the Better Common Names Project to change the names of insects considered inappropriate or derogatory.

Astronomers have also advocated for the renaming of major telescopes that they say alienate people from marginalised backgrounds.

In birding communities, pushes to move away from problematic bird names have produced mixed results.

The Bird Union and the Chicago Bird Alliance recently changed their names to avoid an association with Audubon. But the board of directors at the National Audubon Society voted to retain its name in 2023, saying the mission of the organisation transcended the history of one person.

In 2022, the American Ornithological Society announced the formation of an ad hoc committee to determine how to address controversial bird names.

Members of the committee met every two weeks for months, discussing topics such as the importance of name stability and how to determine the criteria for changing a bird’s name.

Wednesday’s announcement is the culmination of that effort.

In its statement, the American Ornithological Society committed to changing all bird names derived from people and assembling a diverse group to oversee the renaming process, which it said would include input from the public.

More than 100 avian species across the Americas will be given new names.

“The idea of changing a bunch of names is, to many people – myself included, originally – throwing out a lot of history,” said Professor John Fitzpatrick, an ornithologist at Cornell University.

He said he initially felt bird names should be evaluated on a case-by-case basis, but that further discussions convinced him that “there is no formula by which we can figure out which names are good enough”.

Notably, only the common English names of birds will change, since scientific names – which are traditionally in Latin – are governed by a rigid, universal set of rules that take into account evolutionary relationships between different species. (Latin designations taken from people’s names exist as well, such as Capito fitzpatricki for the Sira barbet, a Peruvian bird named after Prof Fitzpatrick.)

The American Ornithological Society plans to pilot a renaming programme in 2024, starting with around 10 birds.

Eventually, the programme will expand to address all namesake birds in the US and Canada, and then move on to avian species in Central and South America, which is the extent of the society’s naming jurisdiction.

Professor Carlos Daniel Cadena, an ornithologist at the University of the Andes in Colombia and a leader of the English Bird Names Committee, expects the changes to entail a slight learning curve, but also present a new opportunity for the public to bond over birds.

“It’s going to be a level playing field where we all need to learn together,” Prof Cadena said. NYTIMES