By Any Other Name

“What’s in a name? That which we call a rose
By any other word would smell as sweet.
So Romeo would, were he not Romeo called,
Retain that dear perfection which he owes
Without that title. Romeo, doff thy name,
And, for thy name, which is no part of thee,
Take all myself.” - Romeo & Juliet, Act II Scene II

Today marks 7 years since I announced to the world that I’d rescued a dog. I’d always wanted a big dog, particularly a big German Shepherd, and in the late summer of 2018 Sarah and I went to Phoenix Animal Rescue and adopted the sweetest, most beautiful black and tan in the world. The rescue called her “Tache”, which was French for “spot”, but that wasn’t what she was called at birth. Or after. Or what she called herself. One great tragedy of owning a dog is that there are so many things they’ll never be able to tell you about their inner lives.

We called her Freya. “Frejya” is the name of an old Norse goddess, but by dropping the J, this new four-legged friend would also share a name with one of my favorite video game characters, the Dragoon Knight Freya from Final Fantasy. And every day since we gave her that name, she answered to it. Her new name connected us to her, and her to us. We chose it. She knew when we said it, we wanted her attention. And it became one of the key ways we communicated.

Names are powerful. Don’t believe me? Take a look at the huge undertaking by the American Ornithological Society to remove the names of problematic humans from our bird species. Appreciate the respect given and cultural value gained by returning “Ayer’s Rock” back to its indigenous name: Uluru. And notice how hard our current federal administration is working to make sure the names of our institutions line up with their white nationalist and christo-facist worldview. The words we use to name things matter. How could they not? Just like me and my beloved pooch, names connect us to things. They help us take ownership over them. And they can even reach across time to connect us to our ancestors and the peoples that came before us.

We lost Freya in January of this year. Cancer is a real bitch, and the price of great love is great sorrow. That well sinks long and deep, and I fear I won’t stop drinking from it for a while. I still keep one of her tags on my keys, and her urn sits on a high shelf in a place of honor, adorned with her name. It will be a long time before I can hear that name without a powerful sense of loss.

Which brings me back to the point of this website: wildlife. So, what about naming wild things? It can be a useful shorthand for differentiating between two animals of the same species. Sometimes it remarks on noticeable secondary characteristics like color. Sometimes, it’s a name to honor someone who’d had a relationship to the animal, like Lolong. But often, it’s just an attempt to connect ourselves to an animal. When you see the animal, you can greet it like an old friend, even if it’s just in your mind. It brings us comfort, it fosters empathy, and it makes us feel more at home in the midst of nature. But is that a good thing?

We live in a microwave culture. I grew up with the rise of the internet, and while it’s made everything faster and easier, allow me a brief “old man yells at cloud” moment. Just because something is fast and easy doesn’t make it good. And it certainly doesn’t make it sustainable, a fact we seem to be learning the hard way as Americans. You can fill in and pave over a wetland, but when the rains come, that area is going to flood. You can blast insecticides to keep away mosquitos, but chemical warfare will always strike more than your intended target. And you can remove Grey Wolves from your forests, but Coyotes? They’re here to stay.

When we give an animal a name, we’re placing some ownership over it, but we’re doing more than that. We’re bringing with that name our biases, our wants, and, of course, our personal history. Science is split on whether naming animals you study is good or bad, but from everything I’ve read, the main reasons to do it are that it increases empathy towards the animal subjects and reminds researchers to treat them as individuals.

Can’t you do that anyway?

I’ve long agreed with Sir David Attenborough’s take that people won’t care about what they don’t know about. You have to show people the beauty and value of the natural world before most folks can be awed by it the same way I am. Heck, it’s why I built this whole website. But as someone who wants to teach people how to appreciate the natural world, it’s also important to me to teach them to love it the right way. During the last decade, we’ve been forced to pay closer attention to the dangers of “love our parks to death”, as the influence of social media has led people to trample in and overcrowd our national parks (which were and remain drastically underfunded). What happens when the same kind of thing happens to our wildlife?

My first encounter with a celebrity bird was Barry the Barred Owl, back in 2020. I had been working on “Wild New York” the YouTube series since March, and every day there was something new to learn about or discover. Like many New Yorkers, I’d turned to our parks and the outdoors for some kind of return to normal after the lockdowns earlier that year, and in December of 2020, “Wild New York” released its episode on Barred Owls in New York City. It turned out, Barred Owls weren’t that uncommon. Serious birders will recall another Barred Owl appearing on the Upper West Side at the same time as Barry (this one earned the moniker “Barnard”, perhaps as a nod to nearby Barnard College), and even joined Barry briefly in Central Park before moving on to more hospitable climes.

As you can see above, and in my YouTube catalogue, I will use human-nicknames for animals when it’s convenient. I even tried to name a Red-tailed Hawk in my home park of J. Hood Wright “Jay”, although personally it always felt a bit silly. As I developed myself into a more “serious” naturalist (and I still use air quotes because I’ve never formally studied science), I realized why it didn’t feel as good or important as picking a name of my dog.

These are wild animals.

I may know them, or know about them, but they’re still wild. Which means they can still behave unpredictably, or unexpectedly, and defy convention all together. We don’t have a complete theory of mind for most animals, although we’re getting pretty close with a lot of higher vertebrates, but even humans aren’t always predictable. When we give animals human nicknames, we have a tendency to anthropomorphize them. Worse still, we can prejudice our study of them, expecting human-like behaviors and motivations to emerge from creatures often just running on instinct.

Have you ever considered dr. pepper could be a woman?

It’s a bit of a meme, but there’s some truth in the jest. Barry the Bard Owl turned out to be female. Sexing raptors can be a challenge— beyond size, most don’t have distinguishing secondary characteristics to indicate their sex (think the chest patterns on female Osprey or the feather barring on male Snowy Owls). It wasn’t until someone recorded Barry’s Hoots for analysis that her sex was revealed. I may be yet again showing my personal bias, but I don’t think “Barry” is the name most folks would reach for first to name a female owl.

So what’s the harm, really? Why not christen a Turkey in Manhattan “Astoria”, since, after all, that’s where she flew over from? What’s the harm in an adorable alliterative appellation like Barry the Bard Owl? Inherently, nothing. But it’s what comes next that matters.

Wildlife and Wild Spaces need Our help.

When we give animals human nicknames to make them appealing to the broader public, we’re using a gimmick to achieve a goal: greater public appeal and investment in wild stories. I’m trained as an actor, so I know the value of a well-told story. But I hope we have the courage to admit that that’s what we’re doing. It’s a deception, like a play, designed to dress up a message to make it as appealing as possible to the broadest possible audience. Sometimes the world needs that, just like it needs entertainment and trashy reality TV and sports. But I think our society has spent enough time running away from hard truths. Our planet is in peril, and us right along with it. If we don’t change course in my lifetime, I genuinely don’t know if our species has a future.

But there is still hope.

And it came trotting on four paws. On national dog day, it’s a good time to talk about two incredible canids that have made their home in the heart of Manhattan. I saw my first coyote in Central Park back in March of 2021, and my fascination with them has grown ever since. Back then, as an informal educator, I stopped everyone passing by that I could to let them peek through the viewfinder at this incredible sight. A prairie wolf, in the heart of the Big Apple! Since then, I’ve met dozens of coyotes around the Bronx, and spent countless hours talking with New Yorkers about being Coyote Aware and living safely alongside our Urban ‘Yotes. This past winter, I took it to the next level, volunteering with the Gotham Coyote Project as a field tech to run their trail cameras and help monitor the pair in Central Park. The previous year, cameras had captured the coyotes in a mount, suggesting that they could be a pair hoping to birth Manhattan’s first island-born coyotes. Not long after I first got to check trail cameras in Central Park, Gothamist dropped the news. I had a feeling it wouldn’t be long before the Bird Paparazzi that had become a mainstay around our celebrity owls would descend on the Park’s new Top Dogs.

Central Park seems big, but when you’ve spent as much time in it as I have, you realize it’s surprisingly small, especially when it comes to the park’s “Forever Wild' areas. It wasn’t long before even casual visitors to the park were having coyote encounters, with local news not far behind. To my surprise, even decades after the first coyote sighting in Manhattan, the responses from most people are still fear and confusion. How did these animals get here? Are they dangerous? What are we doing about them? If you’ve read Dan Flores’ book Coyote America (and if you haven’t I highly recommend it), or if you’ve spent any time in the middle and western states, you’ll find the prevailing attitude of most folks is “The Only Good Coyote is a Dead Coyote”. After an unsuccessful near-century long eradication campaign, they have a pretty good claim to the most persecuted animal in the United States.

Coyotes are true survivors. Like the House Sparrow or the Italian Wall Lizard, they may not be from here, but they’re New Yorkers now, too. That’s part of why they give me so much hope— the Urban Landscape is hostile to wild things, almost by design. Our lights change wild behaviors, our buildings murder birds in flight, and our highways cut animals off and keep them where we’ve wanted them for so long: OUT. These coyotes have defied our sanitary divide between humans and natural world. And while we’ve been realizing over the last few decades just how important nature is to our survival, they’ve been nestling their way so deep into the financial center of the universe they can feel its heartbeat. Mother Nature is chomping at the bit to take us back into her bosom.

So, what happens now?

Like so many Central Park rarities before them, the coyotes of Central Park are now famous. A good half-dozen articles have come out in the last month retelling the implausible truth: North America’s junior wolf has made itself right at home alongside the bright lights of Broadway— in fact, they might just start a family here. But despite all the progress that’s been made, it’s hard to say New York is a safe place for them. That famous Barred Owl made it a little over a year before, loaded down with rodenticides, she collided with a conservancy vehicle and bit the dust. Flaco, the Eurasian Eagle Owl vandals set loose from the Central Park Zoo, didn’t even last that long. I’ve personally buried 3 coyotes hit by cars in the Bronx over the last 3 years. Major, the first documented coyote in New York City, drew his moniker from the Major Deegan Highway where he was struck and killed (He now sits taxidermied in the Van Cortlandt Park Nature Center). When the shine wears off our newest celebrity animals, and when the mention of their nicknames solicits an “oh yeah, I wonder how they’re doing” from the average New York, the coyotes will still be here, living on an island in the midst of a hostile world not made for them. What if, instead of the glitz and the glamour, we told the truth? These animals are here not because of us, but in spite of us. They’re wonderful and beautiful and worth preserving, but that will only happen if we’re willing to change, and in some pretty major ways. The hard truth is, their presence here is an act of defiance. When humanity is gone, nature will move in so swiftly to reclaim our fallen empire, the planet will scarcely remember us at all. Instead of treating their presence as a neat gimmick, it should be our call to action. The planet demands better of us. And it’s only going to ask nicely for so long.

Maybe the nicknames aren’t so bad after all. They call to mind a story of romance, young love full of promise and passion. But we would do well to heed the final lines of Shakespeare’s play:

A glooming peace this morning with it brings.
The sun for sorrow will not show his head.
Go hence to have more talk of these sad things.
Some shall be pardoned, and some punishèd.
For never was a story of more woe
Than this of Juliet and her Romeo.