“Color-coded” Bird Names

We admit it, we have a particular fascination with bird names. Most birders do. For example, we explored the whys and hows of birds that say their names and birds named after what they eat (imagine if this the case in humans!) and how they eat.

So when, at a cookout, a family friend pointed out a Gray Catbird—a bird that he’d seen and identified in his own backyard, thanks to his use of the Merlin bird app—we quickly turned to tallying local birds with a color in their name. Several came quickly to mind: Black-capped Chickadee. White-breasted Nuthatch.  American Goldfinch. All quick-and-easy gets, as they were fluttering about our yard even as we spoke. So was the Red-eyed Vireo, perched as it was in a nearby tree, singing incessantly, as they are known to do. And of course the noisy House Finches reminded us about the Purple Finch and its color-coded name.

This got us wondering: What color appears most commonly in the names of birds from across the world? Several of us guessed “yellow” and “red” based on the idea that brightly colored birds would be more likely to be named after that feature. Others among us thought maybe “brown” since that color is predominant in many birds, including a range of sparrows and ducks. Any guesses before you read on? Maybe blue? There is, after all, the bluebird (Eastern, Western, Mountain), Blue Jay, Blue-winged Teal, Blue Grosbeak.

The answer may surprise you: White and black are the two that rise to the top. Maybe our quick recall of the Black-capped Chickadee and White-breasted Nuthatch was a tip from Mother Nature. When you start thinking globally, these colors gain momentum quickly, given features like white or black “browed,” “throated,” “backed,” “capped,” “crowned,” “faced,” or “tailed.” Right here in Maine, we’ve got the Black-throated Blue Warbler, Black-throated Green Warbler, Great Black-backed Gull, White-throated Sparrow, White-crowned Sparrow, and Black-crowned Night-heron, to name a few.

The colors yellow, red, green, and blue land in the middle of the color name popularity contest, worldwide. Surprisingly, “grey” is next—and yes, that’s “grey” spelled with the “e,” at least in the standard database that we used (there were only three birds listed with the spelling as “gray”). The color “brown” follows, followed by more specialized color uses like purple, orange, cinnamon, and pink. Colors like “scarlet” and “ruby” are rarer.

A 2025 paper explored patterns in the English common names applied to birds worldwide. They found that about half of bird species across the globe sported English names that described something about the physical feature of the bird, including plumage color. The second-most common category of bird name, though, was related to geography—think of how often we use “American” or “northern” in bird names, for example.

Surprisingly (or maybe not?), the authors also found that about 1,000 bird species had a human name reference—a naming convention that has attracted an increasing number of critics. Here in our part of the world, it includes species like Lincoln’s sparrow and Wilson’s warbler.

In addition, there are geographic trends in the anointing of English names to birds, the authors discovered. North American and European birds carry more human names than do birds of South and Central America and Asia. South and Central American birds are more often named after physical features of the birds rather than behavioral or natural history characteristics, perhaps because so many of those species were described based only on specimens identified in a museum far from their native range. We found it interesting that oceanic birds more often had a geographic association than a natural history trait.

We wonder what patterns there may be in how birds are named in other languages? What might such patterns tell us about how humans in different places have interacted with birds over the course of human history?

—by Jeff & Allison Wells