just learned that the canary islands are not named after the bird; in fact the bird is named after the islands, where they are indigenous; the islands were instead known to antiquity as insulae canariae, or isles of dogs, probably because of the seals that gathered there in large numbers; so to sum up, there were some seals on a bunch of islands that people mistook for dogs and and now there’s a bird named after them; also in another shocking twist i’m now learning there was not a single coal mine in the whole archipelago; is nothing sacred