We had several migrant Tennessee warblers singing in our backyard last week, their machine-like staccato songs echoing around the neighborhood. Tennessee warblers nest in the North, mostly in the boreal forest region of Canada but with the southern edge of their breeding range just barely making it to northern Maine. They winter in Central America and the northern edge of South America.

So why are they named for the state of Tennessee?    

The first Tennessee warbler collected and formally described by an ornithologist (in 1811) was taken in spring in Tennessee by famed early ornithologist Alexander Wilson. That bird was obviously on migration but since little else was known about the species, Wilson named it for the location where he found it. Tennessee warblers can still be seen in migration in Tennessee for a short time each spring and fall, but there is no doubt that the bird’s name could be said to be highly misleading as to denoting the geographies that are most important to its existence.

The same could be said of the Nashville warbler, which breeds in Canada and the northeastern U.S. and the western U.S.—but nowhere near Nashville. Again, it was Alexander Wilson who named this species as well, apparently after collecting one on the same spring trip through Tennessee when he collected the first Tennessee warbler. This peculiarity of naming the birds after the location of collection is especially surprising because in at least one of Wilson’s letters to a fellow ornithologist of his day he complains about scientific names based on a location or region when the species in question occurs beyond the region for which it is named.

Another northern warbler that could claim to be misnamed is the Cape May warbler. Can you guess who named this one? Yes, the culprit is none other than Alexander Wilson! He named the bird for Cape May, New Jersey, where his collaborator, George Ord, had collected a male of the species in 1809. It is claimed that a Cape May warbler was not reported from Cape May for another 100 years after this. Whether or not that is strictly true, it is true that Cape May warblers only migrate through Cape May in small numbers on their way to and from their Caribbean wintering grounds and their northern boreal forest breeding grounds.

We hate to harp on poor Alexander Wilson, but he also named the Connecticut warbler after a fall specimen collected in that state—where we now know they are only a rare migrant.

Wilson was not the only ornithologist to apply a misleading location name to a newly discovered bird species. John Cassin, then the curator of birds for the Philadelphia Academy of Sciences, shot a vireo that he did not recognize in a Philadelphia park in September of 1842. He prepared it as a specimen but left it in the specimen drawer as an unknown species until eventually describing it and naming it in 1851. He never saw another one in his lifetime, and the bird remains a relatively rare-to-uncommon migrant through the Philadelphia area. Philadelphia vireos nest in Canada’s boreal forest south to northern New England and winter in Central America.

Some location-based or geographic region-based bird names could be argued to be more relevant than these examples. The Kentucky warbler, also named by Alexander Wilson, does breed in Kentucky although it also breeds in at least 20 other states. The Atlantic puffin is found only in the Atlantic Ocean. The Arctic tern nests in the Arctic and sub-Arctic and even south to the coast of Maine, but at least the name gives a true sense of its far northern breeding range. The Canada warbler at least has more than half of its breeding range in Canada, even though it also nests across much of the northeastern U.S. as well.

And here’s a twist for you: Most people assume that the Baltimore oriole is named because the first one was collected at or near the city of Baltimore, Maryland. But in fact the bird was so named because it happened to sport the official colors of the coat of arms of the English Lord Baltimore!

Jeffrey V. Wells, Ph.D., is a Fellow of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. Dr. Wells is one of the nation's leading bird experts and conservation biologists and author of “Birder’s Conservation Handbook”. His grandfather, the late John Chase, was a columnist for the Boothbay Register for many years. Allison Childs Wells, formerly of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, is a senior director at the Natural Resources Council of Maine, a nonprofit membership organization working statewide to protect the nature of Maine. Both are widely published natural history writers and are the authors of the book, “Maine’s Favorite Birds” and the newly published “Birds of Aruba, Bonaire, and Curaçao” from Cornell Press.