Common names NABA list--

[Michael Gochfeld]

Ron also called attention by inference to the NABA Checklist of Common
Names in the following sentence. 

Ron Gatrelle wrote:

  And it has certainly not been given to one > organization or
organizational leader to decide for everyone else what
> names they _must_ use. 


I think that unfairly characterizes the NABA effort as well as the
history.  The effort became a NABA effort rather by default, but more
importantly it involves a committee (not a single leader) which includes
some long-time lepidopterists that are hardly newbies. 

Perhaps I am biased because we tried to follow the NABA checklist in our
Butterflies of New Jersey  book, even when it meant calling our Olive
Hairstreak a Juniper Hairstreak.  In each case we mentioned other common
names (though not every one) as well as the usual generic names,
particularly for the Hairstreaks for which Rob Robbins (a NABA Committee
Member) championed a lumping approach that I found hard to understand.

Some of the innovations which may not stick include developing common
names that parallel genera for some tropical species which don't have
widely acdepted common names. 

As I mentioned before, I bridled at Southern Hairstreak and for it we
actually used "Southern or Northern Hairstreak" as the main heading.

We also called L. arthemis  "Red-spotted Purple and White Admiral". 

But by and large the NABA list worked for NJ (although as Barb Beck has
pointed out it may not work equally in every part of the continent).

On the other hand such works have to be viewed as works in progress. 
AOU, for example, is up to the 7th edition of its checklist, each one of
which was a very major revision. 

As for our use of the NABA names, complaints or corrections we have
received about our book have not involved the names we chose to follow. 

Mike Gochfeld

 
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