MOST people write ‘Houbara bustard’ with small “h” and small “b” (houbara bustard). This is incorrect. The scientific name of an animal, plant or microorganism consists of two parts.

The first part refers to the genus and the second part to the species to which the organism belongs. A genus is comparable to the large branch of a tree, and the species to one of its small terminal twigs.

Man is known as Homo sapiens. Homo is the genus and sapiens one of the many species belonging to the genus Homo. A genus always begins with a capital letter and the species always with a small (lower case) letter.

Other examples are “Plasmodium vivax, Plasmodium falciparum, Staphylococcus aureus, Helicobacter pylori, etc.

The name of this bird must always be written as ‘Houbara bustard’, even if it occurs in the middle of a sentence.

Alaf Khan

Peshawar

Published in Dawn December 25th, 2016