For owls that are superb.
Some propaganda for the biggest owl in the world, written by children's author Roald d'Owl. BFO stands for "Blakiston's Fish Owl", or "Big Friendly Owl", or "Big F'n Owl"... or whatever, I don't even know anymore. Anyway, don't forget to vote in today's matches: Sooty v BFO is very close! Vote for whatever owl you like most, and don't let this piece of propaganda influence your choice!
Cover from The BFG, which was inspired by the cover of The BFO
It made me laugh. ๐
BFO is getting his name changed ~~soon~~ anyway. He's one of the top priority birds for the Audubon Society's renaming project.
Audubon Society News - Bird Names for Birds News
Ironically, even though Audubon voted to change the birds named after some not nice people in animal history, they also voted to NOT change their own name, which was being challenged for the exact same reason.
Baby steps and all that... ๐
You made a post about this a while ago, didn't you? I completely forgot about these renamings! I'm also curious what will happen to the names in other languages. In Dutch, my native language, they translated the name from English: I think they'll rename that too, but I don't know for sure. Also, that Audubon guy doesn't seem to deserve the organization being named after him. Ironic indeed!
Yup, I posted about it when the vote was taken. Most downvotes I've gotten so far! ๐
I try not to dip into the politics much here, but I think Audubon sets the rules for the US, Canada, and Mexico as far as bird names, so as you said, that probably will have an impact on other countries too.
Most of the arguments against have been of the "I don't want to have to relearn things" instead of "what they did wasn't that bad" ones, so I'll consider that progress.
The other politics and news groups can argue the woke/anti-woke rhetoric, I'm just passing along owl news. There's a few owls named after people.
Verreaux of the Verreaux Eagle Owl is another real piece of work if you want to check out his icky profile. He's another one with actions pretty hard to defend.
I must say I expected to read some bad stuff about Verreaux, but digging up a corpse and sending it to another country is on another level of "not okay". I appreciate that you try to keep out politics. I follow politics quite well, but sometimes it's nice to have something apolitical as well.
I follow politics too so I can stay informed, and I have pretty strong opinions, but I generally keep it to myself unless asked, and the owl board is definitely not a place enhanced by politics beyond "don't destroy the environment, please!"
Sometimes I have to bring up something like the Spotted/Barred Owl situation so people can be aware of the urgency of the situation, but even then I try to keep it to a minimum.