we were driving through downtown san lucas tolimán, guatemala, when i noticed an immense flock of birds swirling in the distance. we craned our necks trying to identify them as they flew behind the colorful buildings of the town’s main street. soon, the mass appeared through an alleyway: 300 black-headed, pink-bellied gulls were following highway RN-11 northward over the forested pass between the iquitú mountain and the tolimán volcano toward lake atitlán. ten miles south, we found another flock following the same path, this time with double the birds.
the birds were franklin’s gulls, who eschew gulls’ typical coastal breeding habits in exchange for the marshes of north america’s great plains. franklin’s gulls are one of the few north american birds with an indigenous-language word forming part of their name, but it’s not from the languages spoken across the great plains—rather, their formal name is leucophaeus pipixcan, where pipixcan comes from the nahuatl language of the nahua people and the aztec empire. and here i was, seeing the bird in a place where all of the town names were in nahuatl too. so, how does a bird that winters in the south pacific’s humboldt current and spends its summers following tractors in north dakota end up having a nahuatl name? the answer wasn’t as straightforward as i thought it would be.
basically all of north america’s birds carry names bestowed on them by european (or european-descended) people, and that’s no different for the franklin’s gull. john franklin was a british naval officer who organized the infamous coppermine expedition to the canadan arctic from 1819 to 1822 (during which 11 of the 20 party members died, some of whom may have been eaten by the survivors, according to wikipedia). naturalist and surgeon john richardson took a specimen of the gull while accompanying franklin, and saw it again on the second arctic expedition. he gave it the name franklin's rosy gull. richardson published his description of the bird in 1832 with the scientific name larus franklinii—the latinized version of franklin’s gull.
but a year prior in 1831, german naturalist johann georg wagler received specimens from mexico containing the same bird species. and according to a blog post by bird history buff and author rick wright, wagler recognized the bird as matching a description by 16th-century spanish naturalist francisco hernández de toledo, who was sent by spain’s king philip ii to catalog the animals and medicinal plants of the newly conquered-and-colonized mexico.
hernández noted that the bird was not resident to the area, and that it was noisy, voracious, and didn’t very taste good. hernández wrote that the nahua called the bird “pipixcan,” which seems to come from the nahuatl “pīpixca” and “pipixco” meaning “to harvest corn” and “the corn harvest,” respectively. the bird probably got its name from its migration through mexico around the corn harvest time, based on the online nahuatl dictionary.
given all that, wagler named the bird larus pipixcan. older names get precedent when it comes to formal species names, so the bird kept its common name from richardson, but its formal name retains wagler’s name for the bird via hernández.
that’s how the bird’s nahuatl name persists in the scientific lexicon to today—because of the spanish conquest of central america. hernández was visiting the area on behalf of the country that had just seized the land and forced the resident population into worse living conditions and to convert to christianity. that conquest resulted in the nahua population dying en masse from some of history’s worst epidemics, diseases that the europeans either brought over directly or exacerbated through their subjugation of the nahua people.
as an aside, the bird’s name mirrors something i’d noticed about guatemala more generally. guatemala is the historical site of the maya. today, the country’s population is over 40% of mayan descent and several million of its residents speak mayan languages—but many of the cities, and the country itself, carry nahuatl names. this, too, is a result of the spanish conquest of the country. after the spanish conquered the aztec empire in today’s mexico during the 16th century, they moved on to guatemala where they did the same to the mayans. nahua people made up some of the forces the spanish used to take over the area,
and named things for them.
names carry stories beyond the words themselves. pipixcan offers a lot of extra color to the story of the franklin’s gull, while being basically impossible to untangle from the history of colonization, much like the rest of american biology. and ultimately, the reason we use the name in the first place, rather than any other names the bird may have had in other languages, is a combination of scientific formalities and who was in power.
i’ve been thinking for a few days about how to end this blog, and have decided that i don’t have the authority to share any opinions here beyond “isn’t this interesting” and
”it’s important to learn about indigenous knowledge and the legacy of colonization.” i’ll leave the rest for you to mull over, with the note that this was certainly an enlightning excercise, especially in the context of the broader conversation surrounding renaming birds. who picks the names, picking the “right” name, etc, is certainly more fraught than i thought before i dug into the history of the pipixcan.
and finally, i’ll just say that seeing these huge flocks was one of the coolest experiences of my trip to guatemala.
postscript
it’s SPRING MIGRATION!! you know what that means: free bird walks. you can look at birds with me in the following places:
may 8, 5:30-7:00pm, meet at grand army plaza arch of prospect park
may 12th 5:30-7:00pm, meet at 120th st and riverside drive in manhattan
post-postscript
guatemala was a sorta whirlwind trip planned last minute because we found a cheap flight, but it was a blast - 250 species in less than 5 full days of birding, trip report here. we saw lots of amazing birds: horned guans, resplendent quetzals, slender sheartails… but when we asked our guide what the best bird we saw was, he said the blue seedeater, a plain-looking bluish-black relative of the northern cardinal.
indeed, i wrote this bird off as a “definitely not” because of its scarcity. despite ranging across central and south america, there are less than 2,000 records of the bird in ebird, with only a few dozen in guatemala. compare that to the pink-headed warbler which is nearly endemic to guatemala and has more than 3,500 ebird records. accompanying the scarcity is the paucity of knowledge: its birds of the world entry is mostly devoid of text. basically all we really know is that it eats the seeds of the chusquea bamboo native to central and south america and the only nest of the species ever found had a cowbird egg in it.
anyway, ecstatic that i got nice pictures of this enigmatic bird. and then we somehow found a second one along a short trail behind a restaurant on our way to the airport.