#bark-

Traditional meanings: A brown, grey, chocolate smoke, grey smoke, chocolate silver tabby, grey silver tabby, chocolate tortoiseshell, or dilute tortoiseshell cat

Cats who use it:

Barkface

Many people operate successfully off of the general assumptions that trees are brown, leaves are green, and feathers are sort of gray. Most people don’t work closely with plants or animals and therefore don’t need any further detail than this to go about their day. I, a forestry/ecology major, need a lot more information to do my work, and so too do the Clans, who live in much closer relation to their environment than the majority of humans do.

Even with limited color vision, I expect fully-trained warriors would have no difficulty differentiating between species of trees via bark patterns, leaf shape, and flower and fruit appearance, and incorporating these details into their navigation of their world. As such, they would be able to name different species (or at least genus) of plants and use those as prefixes implying specific appearances.

For this reason (which is complicated, thanks for hearing me out) generalized prefixes such as Leaf-, Tree-, Log-, Twig-, Branch-, Bark-, and Feather- are not used in this system. Additionally, -leaf and -feather are medicine cat-specific suffixes which should not be co-opted for warrior use and could also lead to unfortunate MC names such as Featherfeather.