The North Central Washington Audubon Society has given away hundreds of our popular poster that features common birds in our four-county area. We are always looking for ways to make this poster more useful for people who are interested in birds – especially kids. We are pleased to announce that Version 11 of the poster will be available soon.
Version 11? Holy Crow! Yes, when we make a substantial revision to the poster we issue a new version number. Version 11 contains some wonderful changes. First, there are two new birds on the poster: the Red-breasted Nuthatch and the American Wigeon. To make room for these two birds, we dropped the Rock Pigeon thinking that everyone is familiar with this non-native species. The poster was also rearranged a bit to fit the new birds into the mix.
The biggest change we made in Version 11 is the addition of Spanish names for each of the bird species. It turns out that settling on a Spanish name is really quite challenging. We collected five different sets of Spanish names from reputable sources: Sibley, Audubon, Cornell Labs, Kenn Kaufman’s Spanish field guide, and a few from local, Latino birders. Unfortunately, there is no strong similarity in the different sets of names. We asked for opinions and options from many local birders and finally decided to standardize the Spanish names using the ones provided by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. The Cornell Lab is a well-respected source for bird information. When we learned that many academic birders in Mexico were using a Mexican version of Cornell’s Merlin app to identify birds in Mexico, we made the decision to adopt Cornell as our standard. We expect to hear that there are naming options that make more sense for the local Latino community. We will keep track of suggestions and may incorporate them in a future version of the poster.
While we were adapting the poster to show the Spanish names, we also updated the sizes of the birds based on the lengths provide on the Cornell website www.allaboutbirds.org. We kept the poster size at 11×17 inches since that is easily printed and framed.
We will be distributing a few posters to some of our local bird experts for review and comment. Once we have those comments back and make any needed changes, we will let our supply of Version 10 dwindle down and begin the distribution of Version 11. We hope that you will enjoy the new version of the poster as much as the previous ones. You can always send us comments through our website.