IMO the practice of naming animals after people is... kind of dumb. Rant incoming.
For starters, naming animals after people is not how we remember naturalists or acknowledge their scientific contributions. Books are; research texts and citations are; documentaries are; museum exhibits, artifacts, journals and sketches are - in other words, recorded history and science is how we remember naturalists. Eponyms are how we
memorialize historical figures - hence discussions about whether Audubon or Jameson
deserved to have birds named after them or not. By the same token, people like Humboldt would not be "eliminated from public conscience" by renaming Humboldt penguins; you can argue whether or not he was a good enough person to celebrate - but naming a penguin after him is
celebrating him,
not recording him in the annals of history. Nobody is eliminated from the public conscience because thousands of people don't say their name aloud daily with no context.
It would also be one thing if birds were always named after people for a
clear reason, but this is often not the case. Anna's Hummingbird - a New World bird native to California and Mexico - is named after the wife of a 19th century ornithologist, and not even the one who described the bird. Thousands of people every day mention a bird by the name of a person who had nothing to do with it. And even claiming that we should name animals after what European first discovered or described them doesn't really make sense: it would be like if I (an American) traveled to New Guinea and stayed with a local tribe, drew a sketch of a bird they see every day, took it back to the States and a few years later the whole world calls it the "Coelacanth Bird" because I posted a photo of my sketch online.
Species named after people also fail to utilize the common name as something to
describe the animal. One can guess at a Gray Jay, because it looks like a gray jay. What does "Anna's Hummingbird" tell you about the bird itself? It describes nothing of its dazzling appearance, its amazing adaptations, its fascinating behaviors, not even what coast it can be found on (the best one...
). A species with unique attributes that could lend it a name is instead named after a member of the 1800's French royal court...
TL;DR - even setting aside arguments about whether renaming birds is inclusive or not, naming birds after people was always dumb and I have no problem moving on to a new system - so long as it is done carefully, comprehensively, and democratically.
In ornithology right now, binomials are maintained only as a formality. The standardized English common names have essentially replaced the scientific names, largely because of the high number of amateurs interested in birds.
Birds are the only taxonomic group in which common names are mostly universal
In birds, common names are generally more important than scientific names. Changing them would honestly cause less disruption.
This whole "bird common names are as or more universal than Latin names" line that some of you keep stating is (at best) way overstated. For one thing, people who speak languages other than English use different names. For another, lots of birds have multiple common names
in English - sometimes based on location/country, sometimes within a single location. The fact that eBird, iNaturalist or field guides have standardized names does not mean other names don't exist or aren't used. Latin names are the "universal names" for birds just as they are for all other animals.
This whole situation is also deeply unpopular with birders themselves, as evidenced here:
https://osf.io/tnzya/.
People who write angry comments on Washington Post articles are not representative of the entire population
And instead of changing names, why not just give each bird a second name? That way those pushing for the changes get different names to call birds and older birders don't have to learn new names.
In practice that is essentially what's going to happen: many people will use the new names, many people will use the old names, sometimes they will confuse or argue with each other about it, everybody will go home and have lunch. It's not going to be against the law to say "Anna's Hummingbird", and many people will continue calling it by that name (either intentionally or by habit) for decades at minimum.
