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Posted by John Boyd on 12:04:22 02/25/11
In Reply to: Re: Lucky-BCFL and ENP MACU posted by Toe
The technical terms for Brown-crested Flycatcher and Mangrove Cuckoo are Myiarchus tyrannulus and Coccyzus minor, not BCFL and MACU.
If you read the ornithological literature, you'll find that both the English and Latin names are used frequently, but not banding codes.
A little while ago my news aggregator alerted me to some new papers in the Journal of Avian Biology. Several of those concerned mentioned individual species in the title, and most of those gave both the English name and Latin name. Banding codes were nowhere to be found (in fact, my experience is that ad hoc abbreviations for bird names get more use than banding codes).
Moreover, proper academic style is that the full name should be given prior to using an abbreviation, and that the abbreviation should be introduced in conjunction with the full name (see e.g., Turabian, or the Chicago Manual of Style). The only exceptions would be abbreviations that everyone knows, such as US for United States.
The reason for doing it this way is to facilitate communication. If you just give the abbreviation (esp. in the title), it impedes communication.
This is doubly true of banding codes which were not designed to be read and whose design incorporates features that make them difficult to read. Although the bird name to bird code mapping follows some easy rules (except for the 100 or so conflicting names), the bird code to bird name mapping follows no such rules. That makes them relatively easy to write, but hard to read.
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