The Human Factor: Ecological Salience in Ornithology and Ethno-Ornithology

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Abstract
At the heart of the interplay between names and knowledge is the relative salience of different taxa. Hunn (1999) described four, semi-overlapping kinds of salience: phenotypic, perceptual, cultural, and ecological. While the first three are well documented, ecological salience remains largely hypothetical in the literature. In this paper, I test Hunn's concept of ecological salience by reference to 3186 recorded English folk-names of British birds. The numbers of names recorded across 57 species represented in this study range from two (Nightingale [Luscinia megarhynchos]) to 180 (Grey Heron [Ardea cinerea]). A significant positive correlation is demonstrated between the number of recorded folk-names for a species and a measure of ubiquity in the nineteenth century. Using original bird census data collected by the author for other purposes in the 1990s in farmland and woodland in Oxfordshire, United Kingdom, I demonstrate an overall correlation across Linnaean species between the number of names, number ...

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