Place Name Blunders

An entry for the Ecotone Wiki topic on place names.

An ongoing project in many of the world’s natural history museums is to digitize their collections. In this modern era, typewritten herbarium specimen labels, handwritten field notes, and labels dangling from the feet of taxidermied mice are much more useful to people if they’re captured in a database, and, ideally, placed online.

One attribute that is very important to record digitally is the locality of the specimen, needed to make any sort of map of the critter’s distribution. Nowadays we all run around with GPS units which means that it’s easy to record the exact latitude and longitude of a specimen, but the naturalists of yore didn’t have such luck. Usually they would record localities in a telegraphic description such as “Sonoma Mt. Road, 4.2 miles E Adobe Rd., Sonoma Co., Calif.” It is possible, with a large supply of undergraduate laborers and a good map collection, to convert these text localities into lat-long coordinates, and many museums are now diving into this tedious process.

Alas, some of these localities are a bit more cryptic than one would prefer. Lake of Boys???