Header image cc Nick Upton

Like many fellow nature conservation organisations and charities have done in recent years, we have become guilty of dumbing down common species names and have intentionally written them in lower case letters, in line with our brand guidelines, for the purpose of style or easy reading. Within the conservation world however, there is growing recognition of the importance of capitalising common species names – our choice not to capitalise can not only create confusion, it can also suggest that we value the natural world less than a lot of things created by people. Habits need to be challenged and that’s exactly what our Director of Nature Recovery, Chloë Edwards, has done, inspired by naturalist and ecologist, Graeme Lyons. Graeme has led a recent campaign for the adoption of a standardised approach to how we write the common names of species. Having heard Chloë and her team’s arguments for change, it wasn’t long before we were all on board and we hope you will be too.

Our given names are capitalised, as are names of places, companies, cars and even dog breeds – all signifying something specific and valued, rather than generic. If we place importance on doing this for these things, how can it be argued that the same importance should not be placed on making clear the inherent and specific detail contained within species common names? Here at the Trust we value the natural world, all of its wonderful complexity and uniqueness and wholeheartedly agree that we should effectively treat common species names as proper nouns too, capitalising and hyphenating them correctly.

There’s also much more information to be determined from common species names than you may at first think, and so there’s huge potential for creating confusion when using lower case letters. Here’s a few examples to consider:

• The common blue butterfly is mostly found in grassland habitats. Are we talking about one of several of the UK’s blue butterfly species that are common, or the species Polyommatus icarus?
• The Common Blue butterfly is mostly found in grassland habitats. Here, we are definitely talking about a specific species of butterfly, Polyommatus icarus.

A herring gull is a common gull but a Herring Gull is not a Common Gull.

Is ‘little ringed plover’ referring to a particularly small Ringed Plover or a Little Ringed Plover?

A key distinction to make is the difference between an adjective and a noun. By writing ‘scarce emerald damselfly’ the word ‘scarce’ is open to interpretation as an adjective, leading the reader clueless as to whether the writer is referring to one of a number of emerald damselfly species, or the Scarce Emerald Damselfly. Write ‘Scarce Emerald Damselfly’ however, and there is no room for doubt that ‘Scarce’ is a noun, and that the writer is referring to a specific species.

Our new approach
At the Trust, we have the ability to change what we do and demonstrate how we value wildlife and science over style and trends. As such, we are choosing from here on in to move forward with a scientifically informative and unambiguous approach to how we write common species names.

Here is the updated approach we are now using across our communications:

• The first letter of each word in the common species name will now be capitalised. Where part of the name follows a hyphen, it will be written in lower case. For example, Red-headed Cardinal Beetle.
• We will reserve the use of lower case for generic names only, for example “some common gulls were seen on one of our nature reserves, these included Herring Gull, Black-headed Gull and Common Gull”.

We’re in good company, and are delighted to join an ever-increasing number of organisations that are getting it right, including Sussex Wildlife Trust, Buglife, Butterfly Conservation and the British Trust for Ornithology.

You won’t see this change reflected everywhere overnight though - we have a lot of historic digital content and materials, as well as on-site interpretation, some of which will only be updated when it is prudent to do so. So please bear with us, we hope you are on board with our decision on this one and may even choose to follow our example too.

For more information on this subject, please read Graeme Lyons’ blog on this subject.