Animal Placenames World Tournament

So the whole thing started on the freeway, as I drove through Troutdale, Oregon. It struck me as weird, on my hundredth time there, that the town is named for a type of fish. Then I realized, not far up the road, I’d be passing White Salmon, WA, and that got me wondering.

How many places are named for fish? What’s the biggest place named for a fish? For that matter, what’s the biggest place named for any animal? If the animal kingdom were to battle it out, who could claim the most prestigious place? Not the trout, surely, but—who? The chicken? The tiger? (It might be the tiger, I figured.)

Prestige is subjective, but population is measurable, so the question became this: What animal has the most populous place named for it, and thereby the biggest cult of devotees? It was time for me to hit Wikipedia, and I hit it hard.

To find a fair winner, I‘d need some rules, so I settled on these:

1. An eligible place must have a countable population listed on the internet. For cities, the metropolitan area is counted when applicable.
2. An animal gets credit for its single most populous place. Nobody’s adding up all the folks from all the Deer Creeks, Deer Lakes and Deer Parks. 
3. Maybe obvious, but I can only count places I know of. I’ve done earnest research, but I don’t speak all the world's languages, and I haven’t found an atlas of animal placenames. The list will be skewed toward English names and US places. (If you find a bigger place, let me know! I’ll be pleased to correct the record.)
4. The place must take its name from the animal. Indirectness is allowed, but the attribution arrow must point from the animal to the place.
5. The link between name and animal must be certain. Placenames with obscure or debatable etymology are disqualified.

("But, surely, Tom, you mean 'place name' or 'place-name.'" No, I say! Begone with your groupthink and your doublespeak.)

With our rules in place, we can list the major disqualifications:

Türkiye is disqualified by Rule 4. Turkeys are named for the Turks, from whom olde English traders obtained their guinea fowl.

Sardinia also fails by Rule 4. If there’s a link between Sardinia and sardines, it seems to be a common root, not a reference to the fish.

Italy is disqualified by Rule 5. Italia may derive its name from the Italói people, who may once have been the Vitulói, which would suggest a devotion to the vitulus—the calf, but that’s too many maybes.

Spain's claim is more likely. España comes from Hispania, in Latin, which may derive from the Phoenician i-shphan-im, which could translate as ‘land of rabbits.’ Ancient coins depict a woman with a rabbit at her feet, and the Greek geographer Strabo did call Spain the land of rabbits. I’ll mark it plausible, but the most I’ll give the bunnies of Spain is Honorable Mention.

Now, to the competition!

Animal Placenames World Tournament

Results in order of elimination.

Amphibians take the field first, and are the first to bounce. Their town of Frogville, Oklahoma has no official population, but seems to have a resident or two. The newts make a flimsy play for Newton, Mass., but the refs promptly overrule them.

Next up are the insects, with bees doing all the heavy lifting. Fly, Ohio can’t prove a single resident, but Bee Branch, Arkansas has 293, topped by Beetown, Wisconsin, pop. 723. And that's all they can muster. If there’s some bigger bug burg, the insects are out of time to find it.

Charging down the ramp, here come the reptiles, who surely have the best placename in Lizard Lick, North Carolina. Their entries are sorted, and they claim our first governmental city, Anaconda, Montana, pop. 9,421.

Out of left field come the Anthozoa, holding fast to Coral Gables, Florida, pop. 49,250. The reptiles lodge a Rule 4 challenge, since The Gables is named for a coral-colored house, but the anthos argue that the house's pink limestone gets its hue from coral fossils. The umpire consults his rule book and gives two thumbs up! COUNT IT for the coral!

Fifth to be eliminated are the fish, with a trio of heavy hitters. They claim Kenosha, Wisconsin’s metro reach of 169,200, its name adapted from a Chippewa word for pike, which edges out Pompano Beach, Florida, but swims behind our first geographical region, Cape Cod, Massachusetts, with a year-round population of 220,000.

If you thought the molluscs were out of contention, you'd be forgiven, given Bivalve, Maryland’s meager 201, the slim 547 in Clam Falls, Wisconsin, and Mollusk, Virginia’s dubious thousand, but here comes Oyster Bay, New York, pop. 301,300 to vault the shellys past the swimmys.

And now the elite competitors flex their muscles, striking out onto the world stage, and claiming devotees in the millions. Special honors go to Hartford, Connecticut (as in 'deer crossing') whose metro pop. of 1,150,000 leaps Buffalo, New York to reign as America’s largest animal city—SAVE ONE!

Phoenix, Arizona, pop. 4,846,000, clears the bar for the mythical beasts.

Across the globe, Abu Dhabi, pop. 2,190,000, makes a play for the mammals with a name meaning ‘father of gazelles,’ then the nation of Uruguay, pop. 3,499,000, scores a strike for the birds, its name derived from ‘waterfowl river.’

Hold that! There’s a flag on the play, a challenge from Kosovo!

The ‘field of blackbirds,’ pop. 1,586,000, is claiming that Uruguay actually takes its name from a river snail, the uruguá. Should the refs agree, it would change the game for the scoreless gastropods. Officials are huddled, talking it over. And they’re waving the challenge! Uruguay goes for the birds! The snails are livid!

Now Singapore makes its play for the mammals, carrying a population of 6 million and a name translating to ‘lion town.’ As a true city/state, it's the second country on the board, and it stands unrivaled the world’s largest animal city.

But Singapore isn’t the biggest lion out here! Team Mammal trots out the ‘lion mountains’ of Sierra Leone, pop. 8,461,000. This could win the game, so the refs take their time reviewing the tape. Here they are with the final call — IT’S GOOD! Sierra Leone is in the books as the biggest place named for a mammal! Long live the king of…wait, what’s this?

How did he get on the field? He can’t possibly compete! He’s such a—

—shrimp! In Portuguese a camarão, as in Cameroon, pop. 30,988,000, named for the Wouri River, the Rio dos Camarões.

CRUSTACEANS WIN!! CRUSTACEANS WIN!! DECAPODS RUSH THE FIELD!!Mammals take their worst loss since the paleogene extinction!

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Of course, if we let plants compete—don’t worry, we won’t—but if we did, things would end much differently. Shall I leave you to guess a country of 213 million, that’s named for a tree?

I would, but, come on, the story’s too interesting. It's a place called Pindorama in the Guarani language, the 'land of the palm trees', but its national name honors another tree, the pau-brasil, meaning ‘ember wood.’ I thought brazilwood was named for the country, but I was wrong.

Sea captain Pedro Cabral gave Brazil its first Portuguese name, Ilha de Vera Cruz, the ‘island of the true cross,’ but his courier knew better, and encouraged the folks in Lisbon to nix the ‘is’ in ‘island.’ The territory was recorded as Terra de Santa Cruz, swapping ‘true cross’ for ‘holy cross.’ (Lawyers, amiright?)

Italian merchants recorded their own name a few months later. The Terra dos Papagaios, or ‘land of parrots,’ would have been a huge win for Team Avian.

Then the capitalists got involved, as Fernão de Loronha's consortium set up shop to make dye from harvested wood. Possessing a Bezosian imagination, Loronha referred to his land holdings only by the stuff he extracted there. His ships sailed to the Land of Brazil, just as I'm on my way to Toilet Paper Store, and the US is bombing...sorry, didn't mean to go there. With Santa Cruzes popping up all over the New World, sailors, who like to know which continent they're sailing to, preferred Brazil, and pretty soon that's what all the folks were calling it.

Except for the church, which was displeased. "This name (Brazil) became stuck in the mouth of the people," wrote João di Barros in 1552, "and the name Santa Cruz was lost, as if some wood which tinctured cloths was more important than that wood which has tinctured all the Sacraments by the blood of Jesus Christ, which was spilled upon it." But this ignored the fact that merchants couldn't sell the wood of cross. (They couldn't find it, and cable TV hadn't been invented.) They kept on calling it Brazil, and here we are today.