Mrs Moreau's Warbler Read online

  MRS MOREAU’S WARBLER

  How Birds Got their Names

  STEPHEN MOSS

  For Suzanne: after whom, one day,

  I hope to name a new species of warbler.

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Dedication

  List of Illustrations

  Introduction

  Prologue

  1. SOUND AND ECHOES

  The Origins 0f Bird Names

  1: The Cuckoo’s Calling

  2: Trade Routes and Translations

  3: Invasions and Conquests

  4: The Nature of Birdsong

  5: The Sound Approach

  2. INVASION AND CHANGE

  The Beginnings of English

  1: The Ravens’ Lament

  2: Red Tails and White Arses

  3: Sex, Chaucer and Blackbirds

  4: Fifty Shades of Green?

  3. HISTORY AND SCIENCE

  The Birth of Ornithology

  1: Dirty Underwear

  2: Folk and Fowls

  3: Pioneers and Puffins

  4: A Little Latin

  5: A Correspondence Course

  4. TAMING NATURE

  The Organisation of Bird Names

  1: A Man of Kent

  2: Flaming Galahs and Fairy-Wrens

  3: The Nature Poet

  4: The Military Man

  5. EPONYMS AND EXPLORATION

  Bird Names go Global

  1: The Museum Man

  2: Eponymous Birds

  3: Into the North

  4: Scotland’s Forgotten Genius

  5: Exploration and Empire

  6. TWENTIETH-CENTURY FLOCKS

  The Names we use Today

  1: Redbreasts and Hedge Sparrows

  2: Tit-Willow and Willow Tit

  3: Reed Warblers and Roasted Larks

  4: Canada Geese and Crossbills

  5: Eiderdowns, Cranes and Kites

  6: Hobbies and Spies

  7. TOMORROW NEVER KNOWS

  The Future of Bird Names

  1: Bird Names at a Crossroads

  2: Titmice and Ring-Doves

  3: Politics and Political Correctness

  4: Splitting Species

  5: New Birds, New Names

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgements

  Appendix

  Index

  About the Author

  Also by the Author

  Copyright

  ILLUSTRATIONS

  1 Cuckoo – Cuculus canorus

  2 Redstart – Phoenicurus phoenicurus

  3 Puffin – Fratercula arctica

  4 Dartford Warbler – Sylvia undata

  5 Leach’s Petrel – Oceanodroma leuchorhoa

  6 Robin – Erithacus rubecula

  7 Kestrel – Falco tinnunculus

  INTRODUCTION

  And out of the ground the Lord God formed every beast of the field, and every fowl of the air; and brought them unto Adam to see what he would call them: and whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was the name thereof. And Adam gave names to all cattle, and to the fowl of the air …

  Genesis, 2:19-20

  Swallow and starling, puffin and peregrine, blue tit and blackcap. We use these names so often that few of us ever pause to wonder about their origins. What do they mean? Where did they come from? And – Old Testament mythology aside – who originally created them?

  Sometimes it’s easy to assume that we know what a bird’s name means, and often that assumption is quite correct. Treecreepers creep around trees, whitethroats have a white throat, and cuckoos do indeed call out their name.

  The origin of other names can seem obvious, but may not be quite as straightforward as first appears. Even the simplest of English bird names, ‘blackbird’, turns out to be more complicated than you might imagine. There is also a whole range of folk names, from ‘scribble lark’ to ‘sea swallow’ and ‘flop wing’ to ‘furze wren’, each of which has its own tale to tell about our language, history and culture.i

  Ornithologists have often been rather dismissive of ‘folk names’, as though they are somehow inferior to the official, authorised ones. Yet, as the French scholar Michel Desfayes points out in his monumental two-volume work on the origins of European bird names, it is purely a matter of chance that, while some folk names remained localised, others were adopted as the name we still use today.1

  *

  Another pressing question is, when were birds given their names? Broadly speaking, it is reasonable to assume that most common and familiar birds were named a long time ago, by ordinary people – hence the term ‘folk’ names – while scarce and unfamiliar birds were named much more recently, by professional ornithologists.

  Another general rule is that most early names were based on some obvious feature of the bird itself: its sound, colour or pattern, shape or size, habits or behaviour. Some of our longest-standing names reflect this, such as cuckoo and chiffchaff, blackcap and whitethroat, woodpecker and great tit.

  Once the professionals got involved, from the seventeenth century onwards, names began to be based on more arcane aspects of birds’ lives, such as where they live or the locality where they were found. These include habitat-based names such as reed, sedge and willow warblers, along with place-based names such as Dartford warbler and Manx shearwater. Many compound names, such as black-tailed and bar-tailed godwits, and pink-footed and white-fronted goose, also arose during this period, to help tell similar species apart.

  The final category of bird names – most of which also originated fairly recently, during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries – is in many ways the most beguiling. These are the species called after people, such as Montagu’s harrier, Bewick’s swan, Cetti’s warbler and Leach’s petrel.

  The stories behind these birds, and the people after whom they were named, are told in Chapters 4 and 5. They include the country parson Gilbert White, author of The Natural History of Selborne; James Clark Ross, a young midshipman who shot his eponymous gull on a failed expedition to reach the fabled North-West Passage; and the disgraced military officer George Montagu who, following a midlife crisis, fled to Devon with his mistress, where he pursued the study of birds for the rest of his days.

  *

  According to the opening book of the Old Testament, once Adam had been created, almost the very first thing he did was to give names to the birds. As one commentator has shrewdly pointed out, this means that – more dubious claimants aside – taxonomists can justifiably claim to be the world’s oldest profession.2

  Since then, names have always fascinated us, yet they can also frustrate us. In Romeo and Juliet, Shakespeare’s lovelorn heroine laments,

  What’s in a name? That which we call a rose

  By any other name would smell as sweet.

  Superficially at least, the Bard makes a valid point. As philosophers have long argued, the name we give to a person, place or object often has little or no connection with its sense and meaning: if we called a rose something completely different, it would still be the same flower.

  But is that always the case? After all, names are not always random or meaningless labels, unconnected with the object to which they are attached. More than any other words, names carry with them the baggage of their etymological history: a history that, once we begin to investigate more deeply, reveals unexpected origins, and often yields a profound association between the name and the object that bears it. That’s certainly true of onomatopoeic names, which derive from the sound the bird makes, and also of many names based on a bird’s colour, pattern, habits and habitat.

  At other times, though, a bird’s name can cause confusion and misunderstanding. Some lead us down a blind alley, as i
n hedge sparrow – long used for the dunnock – which is not a sparrow at all, but an accentor. Other misleading names include stone curlew, a bird only distantly related to the true curlews; and bearded tit, which is neither bearded (it sports magnificent ‘moustaches’), nor a tit.

  In an ideal world, the names we give to birds would all make perfect sense. But in the real – and far more fascinating – world, they do not. This is for one simple reason: they were not handed down to mankind since time immemorial, as depicted in the Book of Genesis. Instead, they were coined by a whole range of different people, over many thousands of years, from the prehistoric era to the present day.

  For this pressing urge to name the things we see around us dates back to our earliest ancestors. Initially, at the dawn of human civilisation, it would have been for purely practical reasons. Our hunter-gatherer ancestors would have soon realised that they needed to give names to the various wild creatures they came across, so they could easily distinguish between those that might be good to eat, and those that might kill and eat them.

  As the evolutionary biologist Carol Kaesuk Yoon has pointed out, the ability to name things – and then recall what they were named at a later date – would have been essential for survival: ‘Anyone living in the wild who could not reliably order, name, communicate about, and remember which organisms were which – who could not do good caveman taxonomyii – would most likely have led a considerably tougher and possibly shorter existence.’

  From roughly ten thousand years ago, the coming of agriculture brought a new dimension to the naming of living things. Those first farmers needed to know when a particular wild flower would come into bloom, or at what time of year a migratory bird would depart and return. Understanding the timing of these events allowed them to chart the changing of the seasons, and know when to plant and harvest their precious crops.

  As a result of these primordial needs, human beings evolved to notice the plants and animals around them, perceive their similarities and differences, and give them names based on those characteristics. Indeed, had our ancestors not learned to read the natural world, and shape that world around their needs, it is unlikely that human society and culture would have made such rapid and spectacular progress.

  So although in the modern world we no longer need to learn names to know which creatures are good to eat – and which might in turn eat us – there can be no doubt that we live with the legacy of that early impulse. Having evolved as a hunter-gatherer, we continue to use many of those skills and techniques, even today. For what is birding, if not a sublimated form of hunting?

  *

  Names – and in particular the names of the other living things around us – help us make sense of the world. But do they do more than that? Do they also affect the way we perceive the very objects to which we give those names? And if, as we can probably agree, they do, then is this a positive or negative thing?

  A strong case can be made for the idea that when we know the names of living creatures, it helps us appreciate the diversity of the natural world, and treat other species better. The Indian entrepreneur Aishwarya Shiva Pareek goes a step further, making an explicit connection between naming and being human: ‘This is the main objective of human life … to give unique identity to unknown things in our native languages and to categorize them… Without us these things are nameless…’3

  But this anthropocentric world-view has its dangers. It raises the valid concern that by naming living creatures, and bringing them under our own sphere of control, we may somehow diminish them. As the author Joanne Harris perceptively notes, ‘A named thing is a tamed thing.’4 When we give a wild creature a name, are we not perhaps extending mankind’s sovereignty over other species, in an act that goes right back to Adam’s naming of ‘every fowl of the air’ in the first book of the Bible?

  So on the one hand, it is clear that names enable us to better know, understand and appreciate the natural world. Yet on the other hand, they can create an artificial barrier between the rest of nature and humankind. ‘Names are masks’, argues the American novelist Matthew Woodring Stover, ‘they get in the way’:5 naming can reinforce the growing gulf between humanity and other living things.

  The author John Fowles had no doubt on which side of the argument he belonged: ‘Even the simplest knowledge of the names and habits of flowers or trees … removes us a step from total reality towards anthropocentrism; that is, it acts mentally as an equivalent of the camera viewfinder. Already it destroys or curtails certain possibilities of seeing, apprehending and experiencing.’6

  Fowles’s belief that by naming other species we create a distance between them and us, as when we look at the world through the lens of a camera, is a potentially seductive idea.iii Indeed, this creative tension – whether names bring us closer to the natural world or distance us from it – reverberates through this book. But although I can sympathise with Fowles’s point, I must come down firmly on the side of the namers.

  I believe that by giving linguistic labels to the multifarious wonders of life around us – by watching, seeing, focusing on and separating one organism from another, closely related species – we are then better able to understand and appreciate the natural world in all its glorious variety and confusion.

  *

  Sometimes, of course, the origin of a bird’s name is simply lost. We can only guess at the meaning of the names we call many of our commonest and most familiar birds: swan, goose, sparrow and starling. As the man who spent more time studying the origins of bird names than virtually anyone, the late Professor W. B. Lockwood, pointed out, ‘There is good reason to believe that in a number of cases answers may for ever elude us.’7

  What we do know is that the process of naming birds was, like so many other aspects of our language, strongly influenced by major events in our own history. This began with the initial shift from a nomadic, hunter-gathering existence to the beginnings of settled agriculture on the fertile river plains of present-day Iraq, more than ten thousand years ago. It continued via the emergence of the ancestral language of so many modern tongues, Proto-Indo-European, on the steppes of central Eurasia, about three thousand years before the birth of Christ. And it developed and changed as a result of the successive invasions and conquests of our own islands, and our later expansion and empire-building, both of which helped define the nature of the English language spoken not just by 65 million Britons, but also as a lingua franca around the rest of the world.

  The story of how birds got their names takes us on a journey through the major events in our language, history and culture. We shall discover how a small band of Anglo-Saxon invaders began the process of giving English names to birds; how the Norman Conquest led to a linguistic and cultural divide between lords and servants, still reflected in many modern bird names; and how writers like Chaucer and Shakespeare made their own important contributions to our knowledge and understanding of what our birds were called.

  Yet, as we’ll also find, despite radical changes in our language a surprising number of names dating back well before 1066 are still in use today, including yellowhammer, redstart and wheatear, all of whose real meanings are very different from their apparent ones. The persistence of these ancient names (all at least a thousand years old, and probably far older) reflects the extraordinary tenacity of names of any kind – whether of birds, people or places – to persist in the language long after other words from that time have been lost.

  Some of our bird names are even older than the Anglo-Saxon era. These include gull (from Cornish), auk (Old Norse), ptarmigan and capercaillie (Scottish Gaelic), rook, crow and raven (West Germanic) and goose. The last is possibly the oldest of all the names we still use today, and may go all the way back to the language spoken on the steppes of eastern Europe and western Asia more than five thousand years ago.

  As already noted, though, not all bird names are quite so ancient. From the seventeenth century onwards, as more and more species were discovered, a cohort of profess
ional ornithologists – men such as William Turner and John Ray, Thomas Pennant and William MacGillivray – devised new names and attempted to codify and standardise those already in use. Some new names were created from scratch, while others were based on ones already long in existence, with many folk names ultimately gaining formal status as the ‘official name’ for the species.iv

  Meanwhile, the Ages of Exploration and Empire saw a vast increase in the number of species discovered around the world, many of which were given their new name by intrepid Britons as they explored the far reaches of the globe. From the yellow-bellied sapsucker of North America to the locust finch of Africa, and the many-coloured rush-tyrant of Patagonia to the short-billed leaftosser of the Amazonian rainforest, the world’s ten thousand and more different species of bird now sport a mind-boggling variety of common names.

  Back home in Britain, by the start of the twentieth century the vast majority of birds had been given the names we use today. Even so, there have been a number of changes during living memory, such as the switch from ‘redbreast’ to robin, and ‘hedge sparrow’ to dunnock.

  But throughout this period, the wishes of tidy-minded scientists have often been trumped by what Lockwood calls ‘ordinary users of the language … [who] do not necessarily feel bound by the prescriptions of the ornithologists, indeed … will generally not even be aware of them.’8 So however much the bird books insist on the official name dunnock, many people still choose to call the little bird foraging unobtrusively around the base of their shrubbery a hedge sparrow.

  So what of the future? As we shall see in the final chapter of this book, a radical change in the way scientists classify species is already leading to an explosion in new names, even as the birds themselves are threatened with extinction. Yet despite the pressures of globalisation, and the resulting homogenisation of the English language, most bird names are still proving remarkably resistant to change.