Did Mister Cooper's Hawk Kill Gospodin Steller's Jay? On the Politicization of Bird (and Mountain) Names

Walking up the dirt road in back of the house on December day, I saw these feathers. Obviously a Steller's jay had met a recent and violent end. But whodunnit? A Cooper's hawk? 

Just thinking about that leads to another thought: Who was Steller and how does he "own" these jays? And who was Cooper likewise?

He was Georg Wilhelm Stöller, russianized to "Steller,"  who lived a short (1709–1746) but productive life as a natural scientist including participation in "the Second Kamchatka Expedition [1741]of Captain Vitus Bering, the legendary Russian explorer whose name wound up on the Bering Sea, Bering Strait, and Bering land bridge."

He gathered lots of specimens but was also shipwrecked with others of the crew on what was named Bering Island, for Capt. Bering would die there. In Steller's memory, four birds and the Steller's sea lion, plus the doomed Steller's sea cow, were given his name, because he was the first to publish scientific descriptions.

Cooper's hawk? Named by the French ornithologist Charles Lucien Jules Laurent Bonaparte (Napoleon's nephew) for his friend Wlliam Cooper, another early 19th-century naturalist.

These names might be going away though. In 2023 the American Ornithological Society announced that all English bird names named after people within the geographic jurisdiction it manages will be changed, with the initial effort set to tackle 70 to 80 bird species present in the United States and Canada, starting in 2024.

These names are, allegedly, "racist and misogynist." So this is all bad stuff from the past that we are getting rid of. It's "racist" when an 18th-century German naturalist works for the Russian government in the Bering Sea? Maybe we should get rid of "Bering" too! There is a certain amount of guilt-by-association here. 

In Colorado, we have purified the past, even when it meant favoring one Indian tribe over another. In November 2022 the Colorado  Geographic Naming Advisory Board recommended changing the name of Mount Evans, the state's highest peak, to Mount Blue Sky, "a name supported by the Southern Cheyenne and Arapaho tribes of Oklahoma."

There was history here: John Evans served as territorial governor from 1862–1865. That was a period of renewed conflict between settlers and some Natives. In late 1864 a force of Colorado volunteer cavalry attacked a peaceful Arapaho camp on Sand Creek in eastern Colorado and massacred many people, driving some of the survivors to align with the Cheyenne, who were more hostile. Evans did not "authorize" the attack -- he was not there -- but he did authorize formation of the volunteer unit that committed it, so in that sense he was "linked" to the Sand Creek Massacre.

But when the proposal went up to the US Board of Geographic Names, other Cheyennes objected: 

The vote has been held up for the past six months because of objections from the Northern Cheyenne of Lame Deer, Montana, the only original Colorado tribe, which is vehemently against the Mount Blue Sky name. The phrase "blue sky" is part of the sacred Tribal Arrow Ceremony and, thus, the Northern Cheyenne believe it would be "sacrilegious" for it to be spoken in common language, the tribe argued.  

Northern Cheyenne tribal leaders have, instead, long advocated to rename Colorado's most famous peak to "Mount Cheyenne-Arapaho."

The Northern Cheyenne tribe lost, because the board wanted to settle the issue. It's Mount Blue Sky, signed and delivered.

But let me speculate: Will a generation of young social-media users now think that the mountain was named for Bluesky, a social media platform that is trying to compete with X (formerly Twitter)? Will they look around to see if there is a Mount TikTok or Facebook Peak somewhere too?

As for the birds, in a year or two, will I be saying that a "stripey forest hawk" maybe killed a "Western crested jay"? Or maybe the Cooper's hawk should be the "mall hawk." On a 2020 visit I saw more of them around a California strip mall parking lot than I ever see at one time here at home in the woods.

(In pre-Communist Russia, "Gospodin" was the term of respect equivalent to Monsieur or Herr.)