The Debunker: Ken Jennings vs. Bird Myths, Part 4

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November, when you think about it, is one of the bird-iest months. Birds are constantly overhead, flying south for the winter. Itâ??s the month when Robert Stroud, the â??Birdman of Alcatraz,â?? died in 1963 (the day before the Kennedy assassination, by the way) as well as the month when Sesame Streetâ??s Big Bird made his TV debut. And of course, itâ??s the month when families gather around the dinner table to enjoy a big roasted bird with all the trimmings â?? except in Canada, where Thanksgiving is observed in October. (Damn Canadians, they get all the good stuff before us. New DeGrassi episodes, Thanksgiving, universal health careâ?¦) This is all by way of explaining why we asked Jeopardy!â??s Ken Jennings to debunk a flock of bird-related myths for us this month.

Bird Myth #4: The Canary Islands Were Named for the Canaries There.

The Atlantic canary is indeed native to the Canary Islands, an archipelago of Spain lying fifty miles off the Moroccan coast. But the islands werenâ??t named after Tweety Bird and his comradesâ??they were named for another animal altogether.



A few weeks ago, I gave the Roman author Pliny the Elder a hard time for misleading us about ostrich danger-avoidance mechanisms, but in this case, Pliny got his facts right. In his book Natural History, he recounts that a North African king around the time of Christ, Juba II, had sent an expedition to the Canaries. The explorers found â??vast multitudes of dogs of very large size,â?? two of which they even brought back to their king. As a result, the archipelago, which had previously been called the â??Fortunate Islands,â?? gained a new name: â??Insularia Canaria,â?? from the Latin â??canis,â?? meaning dog. Wild dogs still thrive on the the Islands of the Dogs, and even flank the shield on the islandsâ?? official crest. Fifteen centuries later, the islandsâ?? name came to refer to the little yellow birds found there.

Oh, and Turkey wasnâ??t named after the turkey, either. It was the other way around. Have a great Thanksgiving weekend, everybody.

Quick Quiz: What capital of the Canary Islands is named for the trees that early visitors noticed there?

Ken Jennings is the author of Brainiac, Ken Jennings's Trivia Almanac, and Maphead, out now. He's also the proud owner of an underwhelming Bag o' Crap. Follow him at ken-jennings.com or on Twitter as @KenJennings.

Photo by Flickr user Kaleomokuokanalu. Used under a Creative Commons License.

 



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