Last month, we asked:
What North American breeding bird has an English name that commemorates a site in the southeastern US and a scientific name that commemorates a site in the northwestern US?
Alexander Wilson first encountered the bird we now call Savannah Sparrow near that city in Georgia. The species had been described in 1789 by Gmelin, who named it sandwichensis for Sandwich Bay, Unalaska, Alaska, where the type was collected. I don’t know any species with a greater geographic gap between its English and its scientific names–do you?
Congratulations to our friend Dave Quady for the first correct response. He’ll soon be wearing a new WINGS cap–and you can, too, if you’re the first to answer correctly the next WINGS trivia question, set to appear in the June e-newsletter.
What about Far Eastern Curlew, Numenius madagascariensis? The common name isn’t very specific as to locality, but surely any area considered to be “Far East” is quite distant from the misapplied specific epithet.
Yes, a good one, too!