On the Wing #82: Rufous-sided What Now?

When you see this color, what would you call it? Simply brown won't do, neither will chocolate, because it's a little redder than that. Reddish brown works, but doesn't quite capture the essence of the color.

No. The color as the title suggests is rufous. As I type this, a red squiggle indicating an incorrectly spelled word has appeared below it, as if it had no concept of this color's existence. This is something I've noticed all my life however. Whenever you spell it in Word or another word-processing program (are there others?) it says it's incorrect.

But why you might ask am I bringing this up on a birding blog? Well, for one, color is an important aspect to describing and enjoying birds. Their myriad shades, pigments, and hues mesmerize us and make us so appreciative for the extreme variety that they possess. Having a vocabulary to describe those colors is very important as well. The guide that seems to do it the best is Frank M. Chapman's Birds of Eastern North America which between pages 38 and 39 has a plate describing the color names used to illuminate the reader on the birds color scheme listed within his book.

The colors above are olive, olive brown, cinnamon brown, rufous brown, rufous, chestnut, umber, ochraceous buff, cream buff, vinaceous, brownish gray, grayish brown, fuscous, brownish ashy, and slate color.

The second page includes ashy, gray, pearl gray, blue gray, grayish blue, blue, dark olive green, light olive green, greenish yellow, sulphur yellow, chrome yellow, orange, scarlet, cardinal, and pink.

As one can see, they are fairly descriptive in their color names, but not as descriptive as some of today's more annoying paint catalogs are. However, back to my original point about the sudden obscurity of the color rufous. Today it's at least still remembered by older birders as the name of the formerly lumped species Rufous-sided Towhee that's now called Eastern (Pipilo erythrophalmus) and Spotted Towhee (P. maculatus) and by avid Southwestern birders as the prized rarity known as the Rufous-capped Warbler (Basileuterus rufifrons).

If you go to the Wikipedia page for it, you'll find even more species that use the word "rufous" as a descriptor for their overall or at least part of their color. I think the reason I cling to the word so strongly is because of its history and use in the older literature. Some of the first books on birds that I got from my local library were books from the early 1900s describing various species of birds. Their descriptions of those species captured my imagination and introduced me to words like "extirpate", "glean", and "copulation". Such books were treasures to me then, and now they are some of my most prized possessions. It's this language that we need to preserve and without it, I fear that we'll lose a little bit of a valuable history that those past bird lovers, naturalists, and scientists so eloquently described all those years ago.