Audubon’s illustration of a sandhill crane (Antigone canadensis), from The Birds of America, adapted here from a print in the collections of HistoryMiami Museum.

Etymology note: The genus name Antigone does not refer to the Antigone who was Oedipus’s daughter/sister who was executed by Creon for trying to bury her brother Polynices, but the Antigone who was the daughter of Laomedon, king of Troy, who had her hair turned into snakes by the goddess Hera when she got upset for some minor transgression like Antigone comparing her beauty to Hera’s beauty, but then some other deities decided to turn Antigone into a stork instead, which is almost a kind of crane, so maybe it makes sense that Linnaeus used her name to describe a crane, even though it was actually some other girl that pissed off Hera that got turned into a crane, but then the taxonomists stopped using the genus Antigone and instead used the genus Grus for sandhill cranes until 2010 when DNA analysis proved that Grus was polyphyletic, so they rearranged things to create a monophyletic genus for sandhill cranes and a few other birds, and they resurrected the unused genus Antigone, which to me shows that taxonomic naming is about as logical as a Greek play. 

The specific epithet canadensis is the New Latin word for “Canadian.”

Audubon’s illustration of a sandhill crane (Antigone canadensis), from The Birds of America, adapted here from a print in the collections of HistoryMiami Museum.

Etymology note: The genus name Antigone does not refer to the Antigone who was Oedipus’s daughter/sister who was executed by Creon for trying to bury her brother Polynices, but the Antigone who was the daughter of Laomedon, king of Troy, who had her hair turned into snakes by the goddess Hera when she got upset for some minor transgression like Antigone comparing her beauty to Hera’s beauty, but then some other deities decided to turn Antigone into a stork instead, which is almost a kind of crane, so maybe it makes sense that Linnaeus used her name to describe a crane, even though it was actually some other girl that pissed off Hera that got turned into a crane, but then the taxonomists stopped using the genus Antigone and instead used the genus Grus for sandhill cranes until 2010 when DNA analysis proved that Grus was polyphyletic, so they rearranged things to create a monophyletic genus for sandhill cranes and a few other birds, and they resurrected the unused genus Antigone, which to me shows that taxonomic naming is about as logical as a Greek play. 

The specific epithet canadensis is the New Latin word for “Canadian.”