Mrs Moreau's Warbler

by Stephen Moss

  Now, almost forty years later, she is finally being recognised as an equal partner in Reg’s life and work, not simply his willing and devoted assistant.2 The American academic Nancy J. Jacobs has discovered that in his writings on new birds discovered in the Usambaras, Reg always used the first person plural, to highlight that these had been jointly found and named by him and Winnie.iii As Reg himself wrote: ‘The frequent use of the pronoun “we” … is a natural result of our close collaboration.’3

  Amidst their busy lives, Reg and Winnie also found time to raise two children: a daughter, Prinia – named after a family of African songbirds – and a son, David, who later made a career for himself as an author of rather racy novels, mostly set in expatriate circles in Tanzania.iv

  David Moreau – who narrowly escaped being christened ‘Buphagus’ after the scientific name for the oxpeckers – depicted his parents as a loving but rather unpredictable couple. He claimed that Reg once warned Prinia to ‘cover your ears. There’s going to be a loud bang’, just before he shot and wounded a leopard hiding beneath her bed.

  Reg delighted in reciting saucy limericks to his dinner guests, while Winnie frequently cared for abandoned baby birds, tucking them into a sock, which she then placed inside her bra. Indeed, she once did so while entertaining the visiting provincial governor. Such recollections suggest that Reg and Winnie Moreau’s long and happy marriage and family life were enlivened by a great sense of fun.v

  The only photograph I can find of Reg and Winnie together comes from late in his life, long after they had returned to England. They stand side-by-side in front of a brick fireplace: he wearing a jacket, tie and jumper, she looking rather smarter, in a neat two-piece outfit. Both are smiling, as well they might, given their many achievements: not least the discovery of the warbler that bears Winifred’s name.

  *

  In January 2017, almost half a century after I first read about Mrs Moreau’s warbler, I finally travelled to the Uluguru Mountains in eastern Tanzania, on a quest to see this bird for myself. For the story of that journey – and whether or not I succeeded – you will have to wait until the end of this book…

  Notes

  1 David Moreau, More Wrestling than Dancing (London, 1990).

  2 Nancy J. Jacobs, ‘The Intimate Politics of Ornithology in Colonial Africa’, Journal of the Society for Comparative Study of Society and History, 2006.

  3 W. L. Sclater and Reginald Moreau, Taxonomic and Field Notes on Some Birds of North-Eastern Tanganyikan Territory, Ibis 2: 487–522 (1932).

  i The rather exotic family name came from a French ancestor who had moved to London to sell books.

  ii James Ferguson-Lees was one of the most influential birdwatchers and ornithologists of the second half of the twentieth century. He was a successful author, editor, conservationist and dedicated field birder, who influenced his own and subsequent generations. It was a privilege and a pleasure to get to know him in his later years, until his death, just after his eighty-eighth birthday, in January 2017.

  iii The only other female ornithologist to rival Winifred Moreau is Maria Koepcke. Born Maria von Mikulicz-Radecki in Leipzig, Germany, in 1924, she and her husband Hans pioneered ornithology in Peru, before her untimely death in an air crash on Christmas Eve, 1971. She has two species of bird named after her: Koepcke’s hermit (a type of hummingbird) and Koepcke’s screech-owl.

  iv I later discovered that Reg himself had also written a collection of short stories under the barely concealed pseudonym ‘E. R. Morrough’ – because, working for the Civil Service, he was not permitted to publish under his own name.

  v More Wrestling than Dancing, the memoir by Reg’s son David, contains many more wonderful anecdotes and descriptions of family life with the Moreaus.

  1

  SOUND AND ECHOES

  The Origins of Bird Names

  Names turned over by time, like the plough turning the soil. Bringing up the new while the old were buried in the mud.

  Joe Abercrombie, The Heroes

  1: The Cuckoo’s Calling

  The sound, as it percolates into my consciousness with the full force of an early-morning espresso, is quite unmistakable. Two notes float across the fresh spring landscape, hanging momentarily in the warm, still air, before fading away. Way out of sight, in the far distance, a second bird echoes with another round of notes, followed by a third, this time almost beyond the horizon.

  ‘Cuck-ooo, Cuck-ooo, Cuck-ooo…’

  The spring call of the male cuckoo.i The very name encapsulates its sound, and is so familiar that, even if you have never caught a glimpse of the bird itself, you are instantly aware of its identity. Despite the cuckoo’s recent decline, it remains the classic harbinger of spring; even today, a letter to The Times newspaper traditionally marks the first sighting of the bird each year.

  In the West Yorkshire village of Marsden, local people still celebrate the cuckoo’s annual return towards the end of April with the ‘Cuckoo Day Festival’. There is a craft fair, a village procession and that staple ritual of English village life: a maypole around which Morris dancers, complete with white handkerchiefs, perform their terpsichorean displays.

  Along with other ‘cuckoo fairs’ that used to take place up and down the country, the Marsden festival was once a key event in the rural calendar. It marked the shift from winter into spring, with all the hope the new season brings. Traditionally, villagers also took part in the ritual of ‘penning the cuckoo’: building a wall in order to capture the returning bird, and so supposedly prolong the summer. In rural Shropshire, as soon as the first cuckoo was heard each year, farm labourers would down tools and drink beer for the rest of the day.

  So why, of all our spring migrants, was the cuckoo’s return so widely marked and celebrated? After all, it is not a showy bird: even where cuckoos are common, in the far north of Scotland, they are still more often heard than seen. The reason for the cuckoo’s fame is, of course, its distinctive and inimitable sound. As the Victorian clergyman-naturalist, the Revd C. A. Johns, pointed out, the cuckoo’s call is closer to the human voice than that of any other bird. This, surely, explains why it has been so important to rural communities, for whom it was the unmistakable signal that winter was finally over, and spring was here to stay.

  The cuckoo’s sound appears in the very first entry of the Oxford Book of English Verse. It is the subject of a poem created by an anonymous scribe some time during the mid-thirteenth century, and widely regarded as the earliest verse written in something clearly recognisable as English:

  Sumer is icumen in,

  Lhude sing cuccu!ii

  Surprisingly, perhaps, this is the very first recorded use of the word ‘cuckoo’ in written English. That’s because its origins lie across the Channel: it came into our language from the Old French word cucu, which derives from the Latin cuculus, still used in the cuckoo’s scientific name. Both of these are, of course, also onomatopoeic.

  Before this time, people would have used a very different name: ‘yek’, which came from the Old English ‘geac’. This is similar to the names for the cuckoo in today’s Scandinavian languages (such as the Swedish gök), indicating its ancient Germanic lineage.

  The old name remained remarkably resistant to the more obvious charms of the new one. Cuckoo did not gain the upper hand until quite late on, as can be seen in the writings of Randle Holme, who in 1688 stated: ‘The Cuckow is in some parts of England called a Gouke.’ Incredibly, in some parts of northern England and Scotland the word has survived right up to the present day: the wildlife sound recordist Geoff Sample remembers growing up in Northumberland during the 1960s and hearing people being called ‘a daft old gowk’.iii

  *

  The cuckoo – or rather the geac – first appears in written Old English in the earliest dictionary of our language, the Corpus Glossary, which dates back to AD 725. It can also be found in a contemporary poetic tribute to the monk Guthlac of Crowland (later canonised as Saint Guthlac), who lived f
rom 673 to 714.

  For much of his life, Guthlac lived as a hermit on a small island in the Lincolnshire Fens. When he first arrived in this watery wonderland at the start of spring, it’s hardly surprising that one of the first birds he encountered was the cuckoo:

  Bright was the glorious plain and his new home;

  sweet the birds’ song; earth blossomed forth;

  Cuckoos heralded the year.1

  This early reference to the species – which in the original is referred to by its Anglo-Saxon name ‘geac’ – is unusual: according to the great ornithologist and broadcaster James Fisher the cuckoo is one of just sixteen species of bird recorded in Anglo-Saxon literature.iv

  Yet it’s only by pure chance that these particular names lived on to the present day, while others did not. As Fisher points out, the entire surviving corpus of Old English writings totals less than a quarter of a million words. So doubtless many other birds were named in written works that sadly perished from fires, flood or simple neglect.

  But we do have one vitally important manuscript from this period. Dating from the final decades of the first millennium – somewhere between AD 960 and 990 – the Exeter Book is the largest collection of extant Old English writings, and one of the oldest surviving books of poetry in the world.v

  *

  On a fine spring afternoon, I was briefly tempted to join the sun-seekers lounging on the grass on Exeter’s Cathedral Green. But instead I headed indoors, to the red sandstone library and archive, tucked out of sight around the corner of the cathedral. As I entered, a charm of goldfinches flew overhead, delivering their light, tinkling songs – a good omen, I hoped.

  I had come, along with a handful of other curious visitors, on the one day each month when the Exeter Book is on display to the public. We were shown round by Stuart, one of those people whose deep historical knowledge is matched by an engaging ability to deliver fascinating facts.

  As Stuart pointed out, this stout volume has had its ups and downs in the millennium or more since it first arrived here. It was, at some stage, used as a chopping board for cutting manuscripts (and still shows the stains from glue pots on some of its pages), and probably lay on a dusty bookshelf for most of its long lifetime. Indeed, the Exeter Book was only truly appreciated when, some time during the seventeenth or eighteenth centuries, these ancient manuscripts began to be valued once again.

  The reason the book was overlooked was simple: hardly anyone could read or understand its contents. That was because less than a couple of centuries after it had been produced, the English language had changed out of all recognition.

  Soon after the Norman Conquest, Anglo-Saxon began to be neglected as a written language. Even a few decades after they were transcribed, therefore, the poems contained in the Exeter Book would have been incomprehensible to any but the most determined scholar. So in many ways it is incredible that it has survived at all.

  Stuart beckoned us forward, so we could examine the volume more closely. To my surprise, the first impression was not of poetry, but of densely written, evenly spaced prose. As he explained, that is because sheepskin parchment was so expensive that the scribe could not afford to waste space by writing in short lines, so he filled each page all the way up to the margins. The yellowish sheets are etched with words written in dark-brown ink, made from a mixture of oak galls, gum to make it sticky, and either vinegar or urine as a preservative. This unpromising recipe worked: after more than a millennium the book still looks clean and fresh, and the script has hardly faded at all.

  The Exeter Book contains roughly forty poems – and almost a hundred verse riddles – composed many centuries earlier, and handed down through the generations by word-of-mouth. Amongst the riddles is a verse devoted to a very familiar bird:

  In former days my mother and father

  forsook me for dead, for the fullness of life

  was not yet within me. But a kinswomen

  graciously fitted me out in soft garments,

  as kind to me as to her own children,

  tended and took me under her wing;

  until under shelter, unlike her kin,

  I matured as a mighty bird (as was my fate).

  My guardian then fed me until I could fly

  and wander more widely on my

  excursions; she had the less of her own

  sons and daughters by what she did thus.2

  This is, of course, the cuckoo. Whoever wrote this riddle was clearly aware of this bird’s unusual habit of laying its eggs in the nests of other species, and fooling them into raising its young, at the expense of their own offspring.

  Fascinating though this and the other riddles are, they were not what I had come to see. I wanted to read (or, given my lack of fluency in Anglo-Saxon, gaze at) a much longer work: the 124-line autobiographical verse known as The Seafarer.

  Written by an anonymous mariner, some time towards the end of the seventh century, this haunting and evocative poem wonderfully captures the hardship of life on the high seas. More importantly, for anyone searching for the origins of English bird names, The Seafarer is an ornithological goldmine:

  There I heard nothing but the roar of the sea,

  of the ice-cold wave, and sometimes the song of the wild swan;

  I had for my amusement the cry of the gannet

  and the sound of the whale instead of the laughter of men,

  the sea-mew singing instead of the drinking of mead.

  Storms beat on the rocky cliffs, where the tern, ice on its wings, gave answer;

  Very often the dewy-winged eagle screamed…3

  In an earlier translation, James Fisher chose different identities for some of the wild creatures in the poem, suggesting that the ‘whale’ could have been a flock of whimbrels (a smaller cousin of the curlew), and that the ‘sea-mew’ (a kind of gull) was the kittiwake. His translation runs as follows:

  There heard I naught but seething sea,

  Ice-cold wave, awhile a song of swan.

  There came to charm me gannet’s pother

  And whimbrels’ trills for the laughter of men,

  Kittiwake singing instead of mead.

  Storms there the stacks thrashed, there answered them the tern

  With icy feathers; full oft the erne wailed round

  Spray-feathered…4

  Fisher speculated that The Seafarer would have been written around the year AD 685, at Bass Rock, a vast and noisy seabird colony just off the east coast of Scotland. He suggested that the (whooper) swans would have been heading north, back to their breeding grounds in Iceland; while the whimbrels would have just arrived back from Africa, en route to Shetland or Scandinavia. As Fisher pointed out, this could only have occurred during a brief window at the height of spring migration – in his view, the week from 20 to 27 April.

  The language in which The Seafarer was written is not easy for the modern reader to comprehend, but even in the original West Saxon (a dialect of Old English) we can recognise some species, including ‘ganot’ (the gannet, our largest seabird), and ‘stearn’ (the tern, one of our smallest).

  Both ‘earn’ (erne, or white-tailed eagle) and ‘mæw’ (mew, a kind of gull) are of very ancient origin, almost certainly predating Old English. They were ultimately supplanted by ‘eagle’, from Norman French, and ‘gull’ – which, perhaps uniquely amongst modern English bird names, comes from one of the south Celtic languages, probably Cornish.vi Yet they have endured as folk names right up to the present day.vii

  Variations on the word ‘mew’ – including ‘maw’, ‘maa’ and ‘ma’ – are still heard to describe common or herring gulls in the Lowland Scots dialect. The word also survives in the North American name for the common gull (‘mew gull’), and in a more ancient form in the name fulmar, from the Old Norse, which means ‘foul gull’, because of the bird’s habit of spitting smelly, sticky oil on any intruders that come too near its nest.

  *

  The continued existence of ancient names such as
gowk, mew and erne, along with many other names from the same period, is not merely a quaint historical footnote in our story. Instead, it goes to the very heart of the way we use language.

  We live in an age of globalisation; as a result, our language is being pulled in two different and conflicting directions. One trend sees English becoming simpler, as different dialects merge and disappear under the onslaught of the mass media and the Internet. Yet at the same time, it is becoming more rich and varied, through its longstanding habit of borrowing words from other tongues. In the linguist David Crystal’s memorable phrase, English is still ‘a vacuum-cleaner of a language, sucking in words from any other language that its speakers come into contact with…’5

  Yet one key area of language – the names we use for birds – goes against both these trends, by staying more or less the same. Some, indeed perhaps the majority, of the names we use every day have remained virtually unchanged over centuries, and in some cases for millennia. This is all the more surprising, given the extraordinary shifts that have occurred in the English language during the past 1,500 years.

  *

  If we try to read poems such as The Seafarer and Beowulf in their original Old English, they appear utterly impenetrable. Even the Middle English used by Chaucer and the Gawain poet can at first be hard to understand, though on a closer look (or better still, when read out loud) it does become more or less comprehensible.

  For most of us, the first easily recognisable works, written in what we now call Early Modern English, appeared during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. The poetry of Edmund Spenser and John Donne, the poems and plays of William Shakespeare, and the majestic King James Bible, are often regarded as the zenith of our literary achievement, and are also the earliest still readable examples of the global language now spoken by millions of people around the world.