Would a specific type of animal be capitalized? [closed]

Solution 1:

There's a pretty big debate about that, actually. I know that Audubon Magazine, for one, recently decided to capitalize every word of a bird's name (Spotted Owl, Roseate Spoonbill, Northern Cardinal, etc.), but in the editor's note announcing the decision, Mark Jannot described how people argued strongly for not capitalizing the names, too. Here's a link to that editor's note, which reads in part:

I have to be honest: I approached the whole thing as something of a lark. But I quickly realized that everyone else was dead serious. The passionate lowercasers were agog that anyone could argue against standard English usage. The passionate Capitalizers made appeals grounded in the rectitude of the bird-science authorities. Things got heated. Snide remarks were made. Ultimately, I found myself swayed by a simple argument around the observation that an abundance of bird species names include common descriptive adjectives. There are, after all, any number of birds that can be described as a yellow warbler, but a Yellow Warbler is a particular taxonomic species. Capitalizing clears up confusion.

So, to summarize, you probably wouldn't be considered "wrong" either way, but like Jannot points out, capitalization does allow you to avoid any confusion. And as the National Audubon Society could be considered an expert authority on bird terminology, it makes sense to trust its judgment.

Solution 2:

"spotted owls" would be correct, but their scientific name would be written, "Strix occidentalis"