Which North American breeding bird has been called “the horseshoe blackbird”?

Eastern Meadowlark, Nebraska. Photo: Rick Wright.

The bird we now know as the Eastern Meadowlark was given the rather unimaginative name Alauda magna–”big lark”–by Linnaeus in 1758. The great Swedish taxonomist based his description on a painting by Mark Catesby, labeled “The Large Lark.”

Almost sixty years later, Louis Jean Pierre Vieillot moved the species to a new genus, Sturnella, thus creating the slightly nonsensical scientific name Sturnella magna, “big little starling.”

Vieillot’s description of the newly erected genus was also based on a painting, this time one in Buffon’s great Natural History. Buffon, abandoning the prosaic nomenclature of Linnaeus and Catesby, had called the bird “Merle à fer-à-cheval,” the horseshoe blackbird, a reference to the black necklace crossing the yellow breast.