You might be interested to know that this was discussed at length in The
Condor, the journal of the Cooper Ornithological Club (now the Cooper
Ornithological Society), more than a century ago. The first few issues of
Condor followed the American Ornithologists' Union in using the apostrophe-S
construction for possessives, but then several writers questioned this
usage. By 1906, Joseph Grinnell, who was editing the Condor, decided that
it was time to break with the AOU; he wrote an essay about "Better
Vernacular Names" which you can read at this link:
http://elibrary.unm.edu/sora/Condor/files/issues/v008n06/p0154-p0155.pdfThereafter the Cooper Ornithological Society used its own version of names
for several decades. If you look at old issues of the Condor from 1906 at
least into the early 1960s, you'll find references to Lincoln Sparrow,
Brewer Sparrow, Audubon Warbler, etc. And the Condor was not alone in this
usage. Even in the 1970s, some publications on birds of New Mexico were
writing possessives without the S, because John Hubbard, the state
ornithologist at the time, preferred Grinnell's approach.
Of course the question has been discussed more recently than 1906. I don't
have time to run down the reference at the moment, but I seem to recall that
Ken Parkes wrote about this; I do remember seeing mention of "White's
Thrush" as an example of a bird name that would become very misleading with
the removal of the apostrophe-S.
Kenn Kaufman
Oak Harbor, Ohio
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