I was looking through old issues of Bird Watcher's Digest, wondering what to do with them (now that's a whole other question - my best solution, so far, is to cut out pictures of birds I have had trouble identifying and keep them next to my bathroom throne for quick review) when I came across an article in the January/February 1990 issue about "Antique Bird Names." "Many of the old names for birds," writes Jack Wennerstrom, "were both colorful and appropriate." How about "hickory heard" for ruddy duck, "lawyer" for double-crested cormorant, "teeter peep" for the spotted sandpiper or, for sheer numinosity, "swamp angel" for hermit thrush? This roused my discontent with brand new inventions like the (highly disrespectful) "yellow rump" for myrtle and (fortunately now discarded) northern oriole, when everyone knows that "Baltimorah Oriolah" is what it says when returning to our yards so faithfully on the same day every year. Then there is the ( highly irritating) "rufous-sided towhee" for the good old chewink I thrilled to discover rooting about the forest floor of long ago New England bird walks, when, at twelve years old, I first set forth to make a life list. Is my predilection for earlier bird names a function of being an antique myself? Wondering about this, I dug out mother's 1904 bird identification book, where the illustrations are restuffed dead bird skins, with glass eyes popping out of their heads, unconvincingly wired to branches. There indigo bunting was "indigo bird," not too far afield, and placing it in the bunting group is usefully definitive; snow bunting was "snowflake," a lot more fun but similarly enhanced by categorization; "cedar bird" for cedar waxwing, the new name more specifically descriptive. Then there was the good old chewink, which I must have learned at mother' s knee, and "social sparrow" for chipping. At that point in my research I got up to go into the kitchen for a cup of coffee . There was a cold April rain dripping down the roof of my bird feeder, where a solitary, miserable chipping sparrow huddled disconsolately. Now, if I had only "social sparrow" to identify it, could I have? It certainly wasn't neither chipping or chipper. A bit of non-homocentric humility is clearly required here: we avid birders need to remember that the nomenclature we smugly toss around is all arbitrary linguistic invention - what was the yellow warbler even before it was the yellow bird, for thousands of years before anybody was around to name it? And where, as God so cogently put it to Job, "were you when I invented the whale?" So if you get a frowl, wamp, fizzy or quink in your scope some day soon, write them down, if you feel like it, instead of "common murre," "common eider," "black scoter" or brant."