Animal and bird names are entertaining

Animal and bird names have always been fun and entertaining to me. Of more importance, you, the reader, seem to enjoy the names, also.

We will cover a series of outdoor facts during the next four days. Today we take a look at animal and bird names and baby names. Some will cover Washington state animals and some will be animals of the world.

A deer has a baby fawn, with the adult female called a doe and the male a buck. Yes, we are starting off easy. A baby dove is called a squab, but is sometimes referred to as a chick.

A baby duck is called a duckling. An elk has a calf, with the adult female called a cow and male called a bull.

The baby house fly is called a maggot. Oh, could have gone all day without identifying a maggot, yet all or most of us have seen baby flies.

An adult frog lays eggs and each hatch as a tadpole, polliwog or froglet.

My readers might begin to realize my love for the different names for the same animal. It becomes boring to use the same name to identify the same critter time and again.

Instead, different words can be used, which makes the story more interesting. Example: On my Wednesday afternoon hike, a pond was found full of tadpoles.

Their shape and size would be changing soon, as the common tadpoles become frogs in six to nine weeks. A weekly check, during the hike, found the polliwogs larger and larger. Finally, on week eight, each was developing small legs, so their name was changed to a froglet.

An adult male goat is a billy and an adult female is a nanny. A baby goat is a kid. In sympathy for Australia, due to all the fires, an adult male kangaroo is called a buck, but sometimes boomers, jacks and old men.

The females are called does, flyers or jills. A baby kangaroo is called a joey. A group of kangaroos are called a mob, a troop or a court.

Although we commonly call all genders of peacocks, peacocks actually only the males are peacocks, with the females called peahens. The young are sometimes called peachicks. As a group, they are called peafowl. In this case, a writer could refer these young as peachicks or young peafowl.

A young partridge is called a cheeper. A red-leg partridge is known in Eastern Washington as a chukar. A gray partridge is also known as a Hungarian partridge or, simply, a Hun.