What’s in a name? Quite a lot when it comes to birds.

This month’s theme for Draw-a-Bird Day is collective nouns for bird groups. It sounded like an innocent-enough theme when we started out. But it’s complicated.

First, as we learned from this website on collective nouns for birds, some birds do not even have their own collective noun. Also, various bird websites offer different lists collective nouns; there seems to be no global standard and, thank goodness, no bird police enforcing correct usage.

Second, birds groups that do have collective nouns often have many collective nouns.

Nothing daunted, we determined that the theme for December 2023 DAB-Day would be collective nouns for birds. The artists chose the collective term he or she preferred.

I told the artists that they could choose to present just one bird as a representative of the group, but that if they did submit a group of birds they would get EXTRA CREDIT and HIGHEST ACCOLADES. As it turned out, everyone but me submitted multiple birds! A shout out to Anne Shields, Jim Eichenberger, Tara Hamilton, Carolyn Rondthaler, Susan Burdick, Judith Davis, and Tom Eichenberger. And I am in the doghouse with the booby prize for being a slacker.

Here are the birds for December: