According to the second edition of the Australian Department of the Environment and Energy’s Numbers of Living Species in Australia and the World, 2nd edition, there are 828 (plus 13 identified as extinct in the wild and another 27 as introduced) species of birds in Australia. And as with so many other things in Oz, a generous portion of these have names, common or scientific alike, reflective of their Australian home, it’s history, and the languages of its first peoples that simply cry out like a flock of White Cockatoos for an explanation of their origin.
Which is why since 2013 so many amateur and professional naturalists alike have turned to Australian Bird Names by Ian Fraser and Jeannie Gray for enlightenment into the stories behind the names of that continent-spanning country’s avifauna. However as taxonomies are ever-changing with new scientific discoveries, and research uncovers new information about the biological history of the area, a update became needed. Thus Australian Bird Names; Origins and Meanings (second edition) by Fraser and Gray has recently been published by CSIRO Publishing.
So now, from the Struthionidae, represented by the Ostrich (“introduced breeding resident, though possibly only one small population survives”) to the Emberizidae, represented by the Yellowhammer (“vagrant to Lord Howe Island from introduced New Zealand populations”), the names and etymological histories of all of Australia’s birdlife are up-to-date and just waiting to be discovered by curious readers.
