Bird names shouldn’t honor bigots and enslavers — or anyone Tania Romero, an avian biologist and a graduate student at Cal State L.A., puts a band on a Townsend’s warbler on April 11.

Bird names, both common and scientific, try to help clarify which bird is which. For black-capped chickadees, that means Poecile atricapillus for the Latin name, and any number of regional names.

Scientific names come from a system created by a Swedish scientist, Carl von Linné (1707-1778). He is better and most appropriately known by the Latin form of his name, Linnaeus.

I am always interested in the unsung hero or the rulebreakers of nature. The kind of critter that is common, yet no one seems to pay any attention to them. Or the bird who is so common throughout ...

Passer domesticus is one of the most common animals in the world. It is found throughout Northern Africa, Europe, the Americas and much of Asia and is almost certainly more abundant than humans.