COBirders,
After following the recent thread, I thought maybe my understanding that the word “feral” is used to indicate one or more wild individuals of a normally domesticated species was wrong. So I checked our Random House College Dictionary and found out that I was not wrong. It would be nice if specialists (in any field) would create new words rather than use ones that already have a widely accepted, but different, meaning. By the same token, why invent a word (i.e. “juvenal”) when the adjective “juvenile” is a perfectly adequate descriptor for plumage? Ah, the vagaries of the English language, sayeth the old Spanish professor.
Leon Bright, Pueblo
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