Last month, I wrote about the common names of birds, and the planned changes to some of those names. In the past, I’ve written about the folk names of birds. But there are also the scientific names of ...

Q. I notice you sometimes include scientific names of animals in your columns. One time you identified a timber rattlesnake; another time, two turtles (an Alabama redbelly turtle and a stinkpot).

A black-capped chickadee by any other name is a Poecile atricapillus. That’s the bird’s scientific name, the reference used worldwide to avoid the confusion a list of local names could offer. For ...