Talk:Sacred kingfisher

Sacred Kingfishers lay about five eggs, but not many of them make it to adulthood as often parents are killed.
What does this mean? "often parents are killed"? By what? Where does this information come from? 13:50, 22 January 2011 (UTC) — Preceding unsigned comment added by Djapa84 (talk • contribs)

File:Sacred kingfisher nov08.jpg to appear as POTD soon
Hello! This is a note to let the editors of this article know that File:Sacred kingfisher nov08.jpg will be appearing as picture of the day on April 23, 2011. You can view and edit the POTD blurb at Template:POTD/2011-04-23. If this article needs any attention or maintenance, it would be preferable if that could be done before its appearance on the Main Page so Wikipedia doesn't look bad. :) Thanks!  howcheng  {chat} 23:18, 22 April 2011 (UTC)

Macrons & kōtare
The IP who removed my revision (unfortunately I can't respond without a user talk page); I mean the kōtare itself doesn't occur much in recent articles — it's not a common subject. Articles that ARE recent tend to use this term (that is, it's in common use), in addition to several government and educational websites.

The change towards macrons has occurred over time throughout Wikipedia for New Zealand subjects and this is a known project (e.g. In place names this has become convention theguardian.com/world/2020/jan/27/wikipedia-maori-placenames-accents-macrons-te-reo-new-zealand and Naming conventions (New Zealand)). It's an interest of mine, but not something I necessarily seek out (Ecology major = I look at a lot of local species, independent of an 'agenda').

I'm too new to confidently undo these revisions, so I will leave it as is & ask advice in case the other user is correct to remove it (albeit it's frustrating that adding the macron has resulted in the loss of the name being included at all — other articles for Australasian natives such as pūkeko and swamp harriers recognise the NZ names in the main section). I largely wanted to explain that 'although it doesn't feature in recent articles' referred to the kōtare itself, not the name with the macron (I recognise I didn't make that edit summary very clear).

Ah, that guardian link doesn't work. My phone's out of battery, so I'll have to fix it later. Pseudomugil (talk) 22:57, 26 February 2022 (UTC)

(and I didn't sign off — sorry! Wiki was giving me errors and I totally forgot) Pseudomugil (talk) 22:58, 26 February 2022 (UTC)


 * I think it's totally appropriate to include the Māori name of the sacred kingfisher, not just the English one, and the name in other languages in its range too. The name is "kōtare" is increasingly common in New Zealand English, where it's these days spelled with a macron. I suggest a section on Names which gives the etymology of "sacred kingfisher" as well. After that we could look at what gets included in the summary lead paragraph. But there's lots that needs improving and expanding in the whole article, so we shouldn't be removing well-referenced information yet! —Giantflightlessbirds (talk) 01:14, 27 February 2022 (UTC)
 * Hmm, not sure I agree that the British English name gets to have its own Etymology section, but the orginal name, and the one used in New Zealand English, is relegated to an "In Cuture" section. Especially Latham first listed both names (including the English one he made up) in the same reference. What's wrong with a section on names? —Giantflightlessbirds (talk) 22:28, 28 February 2022 (UTC)
 * Names in other languages appear in the Languages section to the left, and the Maori name is listed there. A section on *Etymology* is common in many pages on species in the English WP, where both the English and scientific names are explained. – BhagyaMani (talk) 06:17, 1 March 2022 (UTC)