The Left Demonizes the Name of a Duck: The Case of the Oldsquaw

 

The Left Demonizes the Name of a Duck
A word becomes a thought crime

 

Part I: Why Birdwatching, Beauty, Words, & History Matter

 

My mother was a foreigner and at the drop of a hat she and my dad would speak with totally different words. The Italians across the street, the Ukrainians across from them, the Spaniards next door to them, the Filipinos down the block – our town was crowded with words and the worlds that came with those words. I understood, young, that words are as diverse as the people who speak them. I felt an overwhelming craving to master all these words, and these various worlds.

 

We ate oskvarky. We visited with tetka. When swimming in the river, we had to resist the hastrman, lest he drag us down and drown us. My mother had words in English, Slovak, Polish, Russian, Hungarian, Yiddish, and German. When neighbors commented on how smart my mother was – and they did and still do so – I feel proud. This immigrant woman who had to work to support her five siblings and therefore could not go to school commanded words and the worlds that came with those words.

 

One day I was five – maybe – maybe four, or even three. The age when you have imaginary friends. When you talk to the family dog and understand his replies. My mom and I were kneeling on a bed and looking out a window facing east and the green hills that were a minute's barefoot walk from our front door. I gazed at pink, purple, and white blobs that I'd recently learned to name, or would soon learn to name: rose-of-Sharon, bridal veil, Oswego tea, peach blossom, mountain laurel. How did my mother fit all those fruits and flowers into our tiny plot? With her strong hands she worked her dreams-deferred of streets-paved-with-gold into dirt crowded with flowers.

 

Brown blobs scattered before us.

 

"Sparrows," my mother said.

 

I knew the word "bird." She knew the word "sparrow." She could take a big general class of things – "birds," – and divide it into a more specific sub-class – "sparrows." I resolved to master magical power like hers.

 

"Sparrow:" the sound fed me. The sibilant "s" sliding sensuously into the earthbound, explosive "p;" "arrow" providing a liquid-vowel soft place to land. "Sparrow:" sensuous and yet authoritative. "Sparrow," according to one online source, comes from a Proto-Germanic word meaning "flutterer." In Slovak, "vrabec" is onomatopoetic, that is, an attempt to imitate the sound sparrows make when they chatter together. Germans saw sparrows. Slavs heard them.

 

I know so little about my Slavic ancestors. Peasants and serfs don't leave much in the way of written records. To know that they named sparrows vrabec in an attempt to recapitulate the bird's sound touches me deeply. I get a hint of how they made sense of their world.

 

That may be the moment when I became a birdwatcher. The ingredients: the wonder at beauty and magic. Magic: these little brown blobs could fly. I used to dream of flying. The funny thing is, I never drained dry flying of its potential. I flew in the backyard. I didn't, say, fly to Hawaii for vacation or East Berlin to observe enemy installations. I just rose above the maple tree, our dog Tramp, and the swing set, had a look at the roofing tiles, and then woke up. Theorists say that such dreams are the fruit of a developing vestibular system. That's a pretty utilitarian explanation for a sublime sensation, but I'm still in awe of flight.

 

The beauty. They say that women master a more meticulous vocabulary for color than do men. Beautiful colors stop me in my tracks; they thrill me physically. Check out the spectacularly plumaged wood duck. In the book Water, Prey, and Game Birds of North America, Sidney Dillon Ripley poetically translated the wood duck's scientific name, Aix sponsa, as "waterfowl in wedding raiment." I read that book over fifty years ago. I've never forgotten Ripley's words. If, like me, you are wowed by color, check out the turquoise-browed motmot, the painted bunting, or the Impeyan pheasant.

 

Plumage doesn't have to be gaudy to earn my awe. The gadwall is known as the "gray duck." Sounds boring, no? The gadwall's plumage is vermiculated. The word "vermiculate" traces back to the Latin, "vermis," meaning "worm." "Verm" "worm:" you can see the shared etymology. Vermiculated plumage is made up of fine, wavy lines squiggling like worms. The vermiculated plumage of the gadwall, in an expert photograph, is as eye-catching as a Caribbean fruit stand shimmering with tropical rainbows.

 

I wanted the magic. I wanted the beauty. I wanted the knowledge. Words convey and facilitate knowledge. Mark Twain said the difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug. The right word as a key to unlock knowledge, was illustrated in a memorable article that appeared in the Boston Globe in 2018. A father reported, "Something attacked my son while he was sledding." The son "emerged from the trees bloody and dazed. He still can't remember what happened." Mark Shanahan embarked on a lengthy quest to discover who attacked his son. Some vocabulary, and attendant knowledge, would have facilitated this father's search.

 

Silent in flight, fearless, and highly aggressive, great horned owls have earned the title, "tiger of the words." The grip strength of their razor-sharp talons is up to five hundred pounds per square inch, several times that of a trained human athlete. Great horned owls sever the spines of their prey, including skunks, racoons, and cats. They can carry victims heavier than their own body weight. I know all this because I know their name: "great horned owl." If I looked up "thing that attacked Mark Shanahan's kid," my lack of words would hamper my search for knowledge. If Shanahan had come to me after his kid was attacked, chances are, given my knowledge of woods and birds, I would have immediately known the identity of his son's assailant.  

 

I want the magic of flight. I want the beauty of plumage. I want the power that words command. I want the history of those words.

 

My obsession with etymologies may seem eccentric; maybe it is. But your ancestral history, too, is expressed in words. When I worked in Nepal, almost 4,000 miles from Poland, I noticed that the Nepali word for "five" sounds a lot like the Polish word for "five." And both sound like the Persian word for "five." Why?

 

Words unveil the mystery. Indo-European languages' native territories range from Icelandic in the West to Tocharian in the east, in northwest China. Through travel and cultural advances, these languages have spread so that now maybe half of the world's population speaks an Indo-European language as a first language. Where did the one language that is the ancestor of all these diverse languages, separated by thousands of miles, emerge?

 

Scholars noted what words most Indo-European languages have in common. They believe that our biological or linguistic ancestors spoke something called Proto-Indo-European, or PIE. These people and their language originated about 6,500 years ago in  the steppes north of the Black and Caspian Seas. The words shared in widely dispersed Indo-European languages include vocabulary for flora, fauna, and technology native to that region. These words include, as mentioned, the word for five, plus wheel, axle, horse, cow, bear, wolf, birch, oak, and apple. They also include goose, crane, thrush, and duck.

 

Every time you count to five, every time you discuss your axle with a mechanic, every time you eat an apple, you are announcing your kinship with people who lived thousands of years ago, and with people living thousands of  miles away from you. You are thinking with them; you are seeing what they saw. In these words, what mattered to them enough to name, speak, and hear, matters to you. Not just the common blood flowing through white, black, and brown veins, the beat of billions of hearts, but also the words we speak testify to our belonging in one human family.

 

Bird names tell me much about the minds of those who named the birds. Some observations are correct; the people who named these birds saw accurately. Flycatchers really do catch flies. Ox peckers really do peck oxen. Butcher birds butcher their prey. Oyster catchers catch oysters. Black skimmers skim. Barn swallows, barn owls, bridge swallows, house martins, house sparrows, house wrens, house finches, and chimney swifts really do frequent all those human structures.

 

Some scientific bird names are similarly accurate. "Mimus polyglottos," means "mimic who speaks many languages." Mockingbirds imitate other birds' songs. Killdeer, those noisy birds wearing two black collars, are "Charadrius vociferus," that is, "vociferous shorebirds." The black-crowned night heron is "Nycticorax nycticorax," or "night raven night raven." The folks who named this mostly white bird didn't look at it – he's not "raven black;" they listened to it, and heard, in its croaking call the raven of the night.

 

Some names reveal our ancestors' mistaken perceptions, and, thus, what was transpiring in our ancestors' minds. Over two thousand years ago, Aristotle wrote inaccurately about a class of birds we still call "goatsuckers." Aristotle believed lies rather than observing and recording the truth he could see.

 

Goatsuckers' plumage is so eerily camouflaged that once, while climbing a steep slope in Africa, and monitoring my every footfall so that I would not skid downhill, I nearly stepped on a pile of leaves that burst into flight. You won't see goatsuckers in the daytime, and you won't hear their wingbeats at dusk. Their feathers are precisely engineered with muffling features, including a velvety down coating that reduces air friction and thus reduces noise. The least nighthawk weighs about half what a toy balsa wood boomerang weighs. Their body exists only in so far as is necessary to inscribe the definition of the word "aerodynamic" into the very air itself.

 

Goatsuckers are dubbed "sky vacuums." As these lightweight, long-winged birds flit erratically through the gloaming, their wide mouths are open and their whiskers – or "rictal bristles" – twitch as they read the air. Goatsuckers can scoop up hundreds of airborne mosquitoes, beetles, termites and moths in a single twilight's hunt.

 

Goatsuckers are crepuscular. "Crepuscular" refers to a creature that is active, not in daytime or at night, but at twilight, that spooky time when borders between day and night blur. Tellingly, the Latin root, "crepusculum" can mean "dark," but it can also mean "uncertain." Dusk is a time of uncertainty. Do the strict rules of daytime apply? Or do we let our hair down and collapse into nighttime rituals? This association, of twilight with uncertainty, may be why our ancestors saw goatsuckers inaccurately. Or maybe it's because they can disappear into fallen leaves.

 

Aristotle reported, "The goatsucker … is slothful in its disposition. It flies against the goats and sucks them, whence its name … when the udder has been sucked … it gives no more milk … the goat becomes blind." Even though we know this belief is wrong, we still name the order "Caprimulgiformes" from the Latin words for "goat" and "to milk."

 

I want magic, beauty, words, history. And I want to transcend.

 

One day, in the middle of running errands, I was walking along Berdan Avenue, a four-lane road bordered by a strip mall, a high school, and the former headquarters of Toys "R" Us. I looked to my left and saw common mergansers amidst the floating ice in the Point View Reservoir. If you require flamboyance to be seduced by a bird, the common merganser will not interest you. They spend most of their lives on water in northern regions of the globe. Their palette is that of drifting snow and glacier-scoured granite.

 

Plumage is in dialogue with sex and death; it is a response to the eyeballs of predators, prey, competitors, and mates. Ethereal and functional, plumage makes use of the survival tools disruptive coloration and countershading. Disruptive coloration creates false edges. Our eyes focus on attention-grabbing features of the plumage, and render almost invisible other features. Disruption tricks us into thinking that we are seeing the outline of some thing, when in fact the bird is alternately blending into and visually breaking out of its background. You focus on brown stripes and conclude you are looking at a clump of grass; you are actually looking right at a bittern.

 

Typically, objects lit from above – that is from sunshine – appear lighter on top and cast dark shadows underneath. Our eyes interpret those shadows as signaling three-dimensionality. Countershaded plumage negates this effect by placing the darker feathers on top and the lighter feathers on the bottom. Thus, the bird appears flat.

 

Common mergansers, a fish-eating duck, sit low; their backs ride the shallow rise and gradual fall of just another wavelet on the surface of the lake. That swoosh of color on their white backs and the uniform dark of the head, from a distance, look black, but if you get up closer in the right light the black iridesces into glittering green. The bill is the shape of a blade for fish-filleting; it is the coral red color of freshly exposed flesh. It pops, as do the coral-red legs and feet.

 

I gazed at the mergansers through the chain-link fence bearing a sign warning me that going any further toward reservoir property would constitute a crime. Cars zipped past me.

 

I reflected: the "merg" in "merganser" is from the Latin mergere, to plunge, as in its opposite, "emerge." "Anser" is from Latin for "goose." My last name  is pronounced, in Polish, as something like "gawnska." My surname shares the common a-n-s root with "merganser." "Goska" means "little goose" – and it sounds a lot like the Proto-Indo-European word for goose spoken over six thousand years ago.

 

I was shivering in my two-sizes-too-large Eddie Bauer down coat, the one I inherited from my big brother. The mergansers were indifferent to the cold. They live three lives: through the sky, on the surface, and in the depths. My body was locked onto the land. Without a ticket, without a passport, without a map or a dime, they would soon be back in Alaska, which I'll never see.

 

I felt my body deliquesce. My cells were cleansed into pure energy. They could have been wind; they could have been the breath of God that created Adam and Eve. There was no barrier between me and creation.  

 

The afternoon, smudging into early twilight, reminded me to return to my body. Banks, post offices, pharmacies, and grocery stores demanded my footsteps. I had almost flown, again, as I used to do in my dreams. I don't take drugs. I don't need drugs. I'm a birdwatcher.

 

Part II: I confess to a thoughtcrime

 

Roger Tory Peterson (1908 – 1996) is a figure of monumental importance. Before Peterson and other pioneers like him, ornithologists identified birds by shooting them dead and inspecting their corpses. In his field guides, Peterson highlighted the exact visual features that distinguish one bird species from any other. Birdwatchers pick out those key features using binoculars rather than shotguns.  

 

Since I began birdwatching in the 1970s, I've lived on four continents, and on both coasts, and in the heartland, of the US. Miraculously, I still cling to my very first field guide. My girlhood birdwatching was limited by time and cash to my local woods. But, in that same room where my mother taught me the word "sparrow," I studied that Peterson guide and learned to identify birds I never saw in real life.

 

One of the birds that I learned appeared on Plate 13: Sea Ducks. There, in black-and-white – color is unnecessary to identify these ducks so Peterson didn't include color – appeared a duck called the old-squaw. I learned that old-squaw are thought to be the deepest diving ducks in the world, traveling down two hundred feet in search of mollusks, crustaceans, and fish. They spend three times as much time underwater as on the surface. I figured that the ducks were named "old-squaw" because their plumage is a mélange of swatches of black, white, taupe, and chestnut. To me, old-squaw plumage was reminiscent of Native American dress.

 

In 1942, poet T.S. Eliot wrote, "We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time." I left my home state, and, true to Eliot's pronouncement, I returned decades later.

 

In 2013, when my sister got sick and needed my help, I finally bought a car. I immediately drove to the Jersey shore, determined to see shorebirds in real life. My Peterson field guide includes pages devoted to the owner's "Life List" – a listing of all the birds one has seen. I finally was able to check off shorebirds, including what my new Peterson guide called "oldsquaw," without the hyphen.

 

Part III. The left uses the name of a duck to demonize people they hate

 

Over ten years ago, Woke shot through birdwatching like a lightning strike through a golf course. Suddenly everyone who was anyone "discovered" – that is they invented – that birdwatching is imperialist, offensive, white supremacist, and transphobic.  

 

Woke grabbed power through the weaponization of offense-taking. Someone said, "I'm offended. You have offended me because you are malicious and corrupt. Your values are those of white people. You must grant me the power publicly to condemn and control you. I command you publicly to self-accuse, as in a Maoist struggle session. You will change behavior, and you will change how you think, and you will announce all this publicly. If you do not, we, the Woke, will punish you."  

 

In May, 2026, I received a prompt, through social media, inviting me to join a private, apparently birdwatching-related group. I checked out the page. The group has two rules. One is not to mock other people in the group. Fair enough. The other rule – and yes this is one of two rules of the group – is "no bigotry, misogyny, sexism, or racism," that is, group members must never use the word "oldsquaw."

 

I'm not kidding. I'm not exaggerating. I'm reporting.

 

I read the rule, said, "Heh," and walked away.

 

A low simmering rage, as well as the curiosity engendered by freak shows and by the fall of civilizations nagged at me, so I joined the group. The group has 13,000 members, it has existed since 2020, and dozens of new posts appear daily. I clicked on a couple dozen profiles of group members. Picture a guy in his young twenties snorkeling in turquoise waters or hiking a Sierran peak or squatting in a tent surrounded by aurora borealis. Picture a gal proudly holding a rare species of bird in her hands. In another profile, a gal dangles a large dead trout by its gills. In his photo, a guy holds a polyphemus moth. Biographies mention college study of environmentalism, or work in a wildlife refuge, a nature store, a science lab, or crystal mine.  

 

What I'm about to say is so weird and so pathetic you might not believe me, but believe me. The entire point of the group is for these mostly youngish people to post as if they are white, Christian, elderly, Trump-supporting, birdwatchers. Every post mocks that demographic. Every one. No other type of post is allowed. It's a social media minstrel show. In minstrel shows, white performers presented exaggerated and racist depictions of black identity. The posters in this group act out ugly fantasy stereotypes of white, Christian, elderly, Trump-supporting birdwatchers.

 

White, Christian, elderly, Trump-supporting birdwatchers are mocked as being incapable of spelling correctly. Rather than typing "their," for example, group members type "they're." In some posts almost every word is misspelled. Many posts mock Christian prayer. Posters make up their own ugly parodies of what Christian prayer sounds like, and post that. Posts mock the infirmities of the aged. A post uses an AI image of a grandmotherly figure. She mentions that she can't see or hear as well as she used to. And then the post ridicules this AI-generated old woman and her ridiculous Christian prayers.

 

Posters, pretending to be elderly birdwatchers, post crude complaints about sexual matters. Lots of talk of being offended by "boobs" or "peckers." The old, white, Christian birdwatchers these young, hip people mock by pretending to be them shop at Walmart; take ivermectin; are anti-vaxxers; don't know how to use computers or other modern technology; try to say "God bless" but type, instead, "Gob less."

 

Posters, pretending to be elderly, Christian, birdwatchers, converse with each other. The conversations are shallow and stupid. Sentences are left unfinished or are otherwise incoherent. Posters depict their target group as borderline senile.

 

Remember: the group's second salient rule is that one must never, ever use the word "oldsquaw." Because to do so would be to violate the group rule: "no bigotry, misogyny, sexism, or racism."

 

I needed more info. What do other birdwatchers have to say about the word "oldsquaw"?

 

A quick internet search lead me to the page of Laura Erickson. Erickson is a multiple-award-winning author, public speaker, and ornithologist. On her oldsquaw-related blog entry, Erickson lambastes white people. White people are "very ignorant about important things" because they don't realize that "oldsquaw" is racist. White people "whine" about the American Ornithological Union's changing the "official" name of the duck to "long-tailed duck" in 2000.

 

Erickson, though white herself, is better than the white people she condemns. She "loves birds and human beings both." We are to applaud her, and to condemn those white people who, by implication, don't love human beings. Erickson positions herself as opposing white people, who make her "angry." White people don't care about "the feelings of millions of people" White people are "snide." White people "dismiss basic human decency and the Golden Rule." White people gripe about "erasing history and being disrespectful of tradition" but they are liars. White people claim that they care about the history of words or the traditions behind them. They are lying. The only reason white people use the word "oldsquaw" is because they are racist, sexist, and evil.

 

Erickson is not talking about birds, or the Golden Rule, or Native Americans – the group putatively harmed by the word "oldsquaw." Erickson doesn't even pretend to try to say something, anything, positive about Native Americans. Erickson is talking about Erickson. She is greedily grabbing at power. She is attempting a cowardly escape from punishment. Erickson lacks the courage, intelligence, or integrity to resist racist stereotyping of white people. She surrenders to it and participate in it. She wants to retain or enhance her power, so she announces, "Yes! White people are ignorant, snide, racist, and whiney! And I am not like them!"

 

Erickson's blog links to her TEDx Talk comparing wolves with chickadees, a small bird. Erickson comes across as a plump, bespectacled grandmother with a Midwestern accent and a slight, charming lisp. You really want to like this person. Actually, maybe a desire to like her was not  what I was feeling. Maybe what I was feeling was the need to believe that people with lisps learn to be tolerant of others' differences, that plump, grandmotherly women are in the best sense of the word, maternal, and that age can mature a person into the quality of niceness.

 

Erickson says we should use chickadees, not wolves, as role models. Chickadees, she says, are socialists, whereas wolves are capitalists. Wolves "go for the jugular" in "dog eat dog" "cutthroat competitiveness." See "The Wolf of Wall Street." A chickadee's "open-mindedness" is much superior to a wolf's "ferocity." Writers like Jack London, Erickson argues, are blameworthy for celebrating the wolf's "thrilling and exalting" in their "lust to kill." We should not "glamorize" "nature red in tooth and claw." Wolves kill each other, but "civilized" chickadees don't engage in physical fights with other chickadees. Chickadees are not racist. They accept "all kinds of birds into their flocks regardless of race, color, sex." Chickadees are like the Statue of Liberty, accepting "tempest tossed" migrant birds.

 

In her talk, which superficially sounds "nice," Erickson exhibits the kind of discomfort in this world as it is, and an urge to Utopian social engineering, that when applied to humans, has lead to mass slaughter in Communist countries. A wolf feeling satisfied by eating its prey contributes to it nourishing itself and its survival. Chickadees do fight other chickadees during competition over resources. Search YouTube for "chickadee fights" and find lots of video, for example this.

 

Erickson quotes nature writer Aldo Leopold, but she never mentions Leopold's magnificent essay, "Thinking Like a Mountain." In that essay, Leopold salutes nature's equilibrium, that requires predators like wolves for ecosystems to thrive.

 

Anyone who spends time in nature and has a heart is troubled by predation. The Judeo-Christian tradition offers a story and a promise. God created the world, and declared it "good." The world is both beautiful and terrible because of the Fall. A messiah will come and set things right, not just for humans, but for all of creation. Meanwhile, God is the God of the least sparrow, and we are to care for the welfare of animals See Genesis 1:31, Proverbs 12:10, Job 38-39, Isaiah 11:6, Matthew 10:29-31, and Romans 8:22.

 

In other social media, the theme repeats. The word "oldsquaw" was suddenly racist and sexist and the only reason birdwatchers use the word "oldsquaw" is to insult Native American women. Award-winning author Carrie Edmund-Laben, who wants to be spoken of with the pronoun "they," devoted a blog post to the word "oldsquaw," but she refused to type it, saying that the word  is a "traditional name I decline to type" and that the erasure of the word "is a small, but real, improvement in the state of civilization as a whole."

 

I turned to the D.A.R.E., Harvard University's Dictionary of American Regional English. My assumption was wrong. "Oldsquaw" might, to me, be a salute to Native American dress. The folks who came up with the name, though, were referring to the duck's sound. Male oldsquaw, when mating, are loud. Human observers were reminded of a group of old women gossiping. Thus, the name "oldsquaw," and also the following names: butterfly coot, callithumpian duck, creamy ass, Florida longtail, granny, ice duck, jack owly, knock Molly, long-tailed duck, lord and lady, mammy duck, mommy, noisy duck, Old Billy, old Injun, old Molly, oldwife, organ duck, pheasant duck, pine knot, pintail, quandy, scoldenore, sea duck, singing duck, south-southerly, squaw duck, squeaking duck, teet, Uncle Huldy, whistler, and winter duck. As extensive as this list is, the D.A.R.E. leaves out the word Thoreau used, "coween," from an Algonquian word.

 

As one can see, four of the above names associate the duck with noisy old women, without reference to Native Americans. I'm an old woman. I am not offended by these names. Not all Native Americans agree that the word "squaw" needs to be expunged from our minds and histories. In 1999, Dr. Margaret M. Bruchac published "Reclaiming the Word 'Squaw' in the Name of the Ancestors." Bruchac wrote,

 

"I write to you as an alnobaskwa, an Abenaki woman, questioning the motion to gut our original language in the name of political correctness … I have met many indigenous speakers and elders who are concerned at the efforts of otherwise well-meaning people to remove the word 'squaw' from the English language … The word has been interpreted by modern activists as a slanderous assault against Native American women. But traditional Algonkian speakers, in both Indian and English, still say words like 'nidobaskwa' =  a female friend, 'manigebeskwa' = woman of the woods, or 'Squaw Sachem' =  female chief. When Abenaki people sing the Birth Song, they address 'nuncksquassis,' 'little woman baby.'"

 

The same people who want to erase the word "oldsquaw" tend to be the type of people who believe that non-white people are genetically programmed to be conservationists, and that white people are genetically programmed to be exploiters. White ornithologists, it is argued, gave us the word "oldsquaw," so, it follows, the word is evil and knowing it or even typing it is a thought crime.

 

In fact, though, neither birdwatching nor nature conservation is "natural." They had to be invented. Years ago, as a teacher in Nepal, I trekked for days and crossed over the Thorong pass, at almost 18,000 feet, into Muktinath. The Kali Gandaki River flows nearby. It is a migration route for common cranes. Nepalis called them "karyang-kurung," which is an onomatopoetic imitation of their call. Local boys fashioned bolas. They went to the river where the cranes were stopping on their migration and tossed their bolas at the cranes' long necks. The riverside was littered with the strangled bodies of dead and dying cranes. These cranes were not even eaten; they were left to rot. The boys were just having fun. Nepal News reports that such predation contributes to the shrinking of crane populations in Nepal. Something to exploit: that's how most people over most of the world have always viewed most wildlife. The mostly white men and women who invented birdwatching and conservation in America taught us, and the wider world, to see nature differently.  

 

Thomas Nuttall (1786 - 1859) wrote the foundational and groundbreaking Manual of the Ornithology of the United States and of Canada. In that two-volume work, he mentions the duck variously known as "old squaw," "south southerly," and "old wife." It is, he says, a "congenial bird" who prefers "the dominion of the sea." Nuttall admires the duck. She is "Familiar with cold, and only driven to migrate for food, in the latter end of August, when already a thin crust of ice is seen forming in the night over the still surface of the Arctic Sea, the female … is observed ingeniously breaking a way with her wings for the egress of her young brood." Nuttall records an extensive life history of the bird, including its population size, food sources, and how it tastes when consumed. Nuttall admires and reports on Native American names for and knowledge of the bird.

 

In Arctic Cruise of the Revenue Steamer Corwin 1881, Notes and Observations, John Muir reports on what he calls the "old squaw" duck. In his early nineteenth century work, The Birds of America, John James Audubon painted what he called "oldsquaw." Pioneering ornithologist Frank Chapman used the word "oldsquaw." Arthur Cleveland Bent (1866 – 1954) published the 21-volume Life Histories of North American Birds. Bent includes a missive from his fellow naturalist, Walter Elmer Ekblaw. I quote a portion, below. Ekblaw is a superb observer. He reveals knowledge of ornithology, geology, botany, and also passion for beauty.

 

"The distinctive resonant call of the  oldsquaw announces the arrival of real spring to the far Arctic shores. The earlier herald, the snow bunting, comes while yet the land is covered with snow, while still the ice lies solid and unbroken throughout the wind-swept fjords, and while yet the midnight sun is new and even the noonday is chill; the  oldsquaw comes when the snow is gone from the valleys and the slopes, and the first saxifrage and willow have burst into blossom, when great dark leads and pools of open water break the white expanse of fjord ice, and when the sun at midsummer height is warm at midnight as at noon. When the challenging clarion of the oldsquaw rings out over the great north, spring has come."

 

Bent himself wrote, "driven like snowflakes ahead of a howling 'norther, flock after flock of these hardy little sea fowl sweep and whirl over the cold, gray waves. High in the air they twist and turn, twinkling like black and white stars against the leaden sky."

 

Rachel Carson used the word "oldsquaw," as does the Rachel Carson National Wildlife Refuge. Florence Merriam Bailey (1863 – 1948) was among the first to publish field guides geared toward amateurs. In her Handbook of Birds of the Western United States : including the Great Plains, Great Basin, Pacific Slope, and lower Rio Grande Valley, Bailey records observations of "old-squaw." Interestingly, Bailey used the words "old squaw" to refer, not just to the duck, but to Native American women she met in 1889. In her article, "A Tugboat Trip to the Northwest Corner," Bailey describes her intimate encounters with Native Americans. Her words do not comply with twenty-first century standards of cultural relativism, but they are not cruel or contemptuous. Bailey recognizes that she shares humanity with the Native American women she meets. She feels for them and with them. "I was attracted by the kindly face of one old squaw … I was again shown the strong human sympathy that had brought the dusky sisters nearer to me."

 

These giants of natural history and conservation wrote in the freezing cold, eating meager rations. They trekked and sweated through mosquito-thick bogs. They risked malaria, frostbite, drowning, avalanches, and death from exposure. Carson inspired the salvation of birds doomed to extinction by DDT. Some of these heroes wrote tens of thousands of field reports in long hand, using quill pens that required dipping with every few words. Words alone created their vivid "photographs," well before photography was invented or widely available. Their action-packed "videos" consisted solely of evocative words. Their words moved, and saved, mountains, rivers, and woodlands. Words communicated to a homebound public the wonders of the natural world, and they made that world sound worth saving. There is no bigotry, no misogyny, no racism in the accounts quoted above. Only science, love, reporting, and awe. The folks banning the word "oldsquaw" are not fit to tie these heroes' hiking boots.

 

I return to my childhood bedroom, and my mother. She finally figured out that I'd never be the feminine girl she expected. One Christmas she stopped giving me scented soaps and sparkly things, and gave me National Geographic's two-volume Song and Garden Birds and Water Prey and Game Birds. The list of contributors reads like a Who's Who of twentieth-century ornithology. The second volume, on page 182, records taboo knowledge that I am not allowed to speak and that you are not allowed to hear. Scholar and conservationist Sidney Dillon Ripley reports that one duck species' "incessant yet melodious chatter gave rise to the name 'oldsquaw' among northern fur traders and Indians" (emphasis added).

 

The common cardinal, the red bishop, the nunbird, the monkbird, and the prothonotary warbler are all named after Catholic orders. There is a Saint Lucia and a Saint Vincent parrot, a Saint Cuthbert duck, and a Saint Helena plover.  Vesper sparrows are named after Catholic prayers. There are a few English words that come from Slavic words for old women: babka, for cake; babushka, for kerchief; matryoshka, for doll. There is a sausage seller who calls himself "Polock Johnny." I will never agitate for these words to be erased or to demonize those who use them. I know that any such attempt would change me in ways I do not wish to change.

 

Danusha V. Goska is the author of God through Binoculars: A Hitchhiker at a Monastery