What’s in a Name?

By Sathya Achia Abraham

You may be wondering about the beautiful and unique names given to each of the whimbrels being tracked through the Center for Conservation Biology, a partnership between Virginia Commonwealth University and the College of William and Mary at the VCU Rice Center.

While biologists do not typically make it practice to give names to the subjects they study, they did so for this initiative to give the public a more personal connection to the birds. These whimbrels are tracked via the Internet by many school groups, scientists and other enthusiasts from at least a dozen countries. The birds names were decided upon using local landmarks for naming of the birds. 

Last fall, when the whimbrels Goshen and Machi were shot by hunters in Guadeloupe it had a significant impact on the global conservation community and helped draw international awareness to the struggles faced by these birds. It is likely that naming the birds helped spark some of the support.

This past summer, the whimbrels were named using the native Inuvialuktun language of the Mackenzie River and for the local landmarks, rivers and marsh areas.

For Fletcher Smith, biologist with the Center for Conservation Biology the birds have taught him some significant lessons in geography, as he found himself going to places he had never heard of until he zoomed in on their location in GoogleEarth.

According to Smith, tracking these birds over large distances shows how very small the earth really is to a whimbrel. These whimbrel utilize very few locations to rest and refuel - some whimbrels use as few as four or five locations spread out over vast distances during the entire year. And researchers have learned from this data that these sites are used over and over again by the same birds year to year.

“Losing any one of those critical connections could have consequences for the survival of the species and of other shorebirds as well,” said Smith.

• Mackenzie is named after the Mackenzie River Delta, one of the most important shorebird breeding locations in the world.
• Taglu is named for an island with a high concentration of shorebirds/whimbrels, and is Inuvialuktun for “snowshoe.”
• Akpik is Inuvialuktun for “cloudberry,” which is a fruit whimbrels eat in late summer.
• Pingo is named for a permafrost-formed geological feature of the arctic.

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