by Stephen Moss
The impact of this cannot be overstated. As we British discover to our cost when we come to learn a foreign language, what must seem perfectly natural to generations of French, Spanish and German children – the use of gender to qualify nouns, as in ‘le chat’, ‘el perro’ and ‘das Auto’ – is a real struggle for native English speakers, for whom gender in language effectively disappeared almost a thousand years ago.
By the time of Geoffrey Chaucer, who was writing in the closing years of the fourteenth century, the competing claims of Old English and Norman French were over, and Middle English was firmly established – a language that, with a little effort on the part of the reader, can still be understood today.
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Although Chaucer is rightly celebrated for his classic works, most notably The Canterbury Tales, we should not forget that he also contributed to the slow but steady growth in the understanding of Britain’s birdlife. The ornithologist and broadcaster James Fisher described him as an ‘ornithological hero’, and while this may be a slight overstatement, it does have some validity. As Fisher points out, Chaucer not only knew the names of more than forty species of birds, he also added several others to the embryonic list of birds seen in Britain, which by the time of his death in 1400 had reached the landmark 100 species.
One of Chaucer’s best-known works, ‘The Parlement of Foules’, features more than thirty British birds, which have gathered together to choose their mates. These range in size from the robin to the swan, and include resident species like the lark and the lapwing, and migrants such as the turtle dove, cuckoo, nightingale and swallow, along with more exotic visitors (perhaps commoner in those days), including the stork and the crane.
But one common and widespread bird is missing from this otherwise comprehensive catalogue of species: the blackbird. Its absence conceals a fascinating story of one of the most profound changes of all: the switch from ‘fowl’, the standard word for all birds in Chaucer’s time, to the one we use today: ‘bird’.
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Bird names don’t come much more basic than that of the most familiar member of the thrush family: the blackbird. It’s a bird, and it’s black. End of.
Except that, when you start to think about it, lots of other birds are black, too. Crows, rooks, ravens and jackdaws would also have been common, widespread and very familiar to our rural ancestors. So out of all these ‘black birds’, why did they choose just one species for this epithet?
This is only confusing because we are looking at the name from the wrong angle. For the key word here is not ‘black’, but ‘bird’. This goes back to the Anglo-Saxon word brid, which comes from the same root as the words ‘breed’ and ‘brood’. It had a very different meaning from the modern word ‘bird’, and referred purely to baby birds or fledglings, as the OED explains in its primary definition of the word:
Bird, n. The general name for the young of the feathered tribes; a young bird; a chicken, eaglet, etc.; a nestling. The only sense in Old English; found in literature down to 1600. [My italics]
So what were adult birds called? Until long after the Norman Conquest they were known as fowls, from the Old English ‘fugol’ (or in Beowulf, ‘fugle’).ix
But gradually, around the time Chaucer was writing (towards the end of the fourteenth century), the original meaning of ‘bird’ was starting to change. Indeed, Chaucer himself occasionally uses the word in its modern sense: in his poem ‘The Legend of Good Women’, written around the year 1385, he makes a passing reference to ‘whanne the brid began to synge…’
The title ‘Parlement of Foules’ is one of the last recorded examples of fowl being used to refer to all shapes and sizes of bird, large and small. About this time, ‘bird’ started to be used to denote the smaller species – those that today we call songbirds, although the name ‘foules’ persisted for larger birds.
So whereas today the meaning of the spoken phrase ‘there’s a black bird’ could be unclear, referring perhaps to a crow or raven rather than a blackbird, in those days such ambiguity was not a problem, as those larger species would have been known as ‘foules’.x So the name ‘blackbird’ made perfect sense.
The use of ‘fowl’ to mean all birds persisted well into the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, as in the King James Bible of 1611, which in the opening chapter of the Book of Genesis refers to ‘every fowl of the air’. But the new distinction between the two words was becoming more established. In Dr Johnson’s epic Dictionary of the English Language, first published in 1755, the great lexicographer defines the word ‘bird’ thus:
A general term for the feathered kind; a fowl. In common talk, fowl is used for the larger, and bird for the smaller kind of feathered animals.
This distinction can still be found in some parts of Scotland, where larger birds are known as ‘fowls’ and smaller ones are ‘birds’ – as in ‘muir [moor] fowl’, a common Scots term for red grouse. But elsewhere the use of ‘fowl’ is today mostly confined to domestic birds such as chickens, or other groups of larger birds. These include ‘wildfowl’ and ‘waterfowl’ (ducks, geese and swans), and the names guineafowl and peafowl (the correct term for the species we usually call the peacock).xi
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Given the very specialised original meaning of the word ‘bird’, it is perhaps not surprising that the first recorded use of the name ‘blackbird’ is as recent as 1350, as ‘blacbrid’.
So what would the blackbird have been called before this time? A clue lies in the name we still use today for its upland counterpart, the ring ouzel. Alternatively spelled ‘ousel’ or ‘wosel’, this derives from the same root as the modern German word for the blackbird, Amsel. Also known as the mountain (or moor, fell or hill) blackbird, the male ring ouzel can be told apart from its commoner cousin by the distinctive white band across its upper breast – hence the name ring ouzel.
A further clue to the blackbird’s old name comes in Act 3 of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, when Bottom refers to ‘the Woosell cocke, so blacke of hew, with orange-tawny bill…’ This must be the blackbird, as ring ouzels have pale edges to their feathers and a pale lemon-yellow bill, whereas male blackbirds are indeed all black, and their bill is a deep orange-yellow shade. Even though the name ‘blackbird’ has been around for more than 600 years, in some parts of northern England and the Midlands blackbirds were still widely referred to as ‘ouzels’ well into the twentieth century, in another example of the remarkable persistence of folk names. The Nottinghamshire-born author D. H. Lawrence certainly used the name ‘black ousel’, having learned it from his mother, who would often lapse into archaic words and phrases from her childhood.xii
Not surprisingly, given our fondness for this common and familiar species, the name ‘blackbird’ has spread around the world. Today it is used for several close relatives of our species, such as the grey-winged, Indian, Tibetan and white-collared blackbirds of Asia, and also for a group of entirely unrelated birds found in the Americas, the family Icteridae, which includes the colourful New World orioles and oropendolas as well as the crow-like grackles, parasitic cowbirds and colourful meadowlarks.
The New World use of the name ‘blackbird’ dates back to the earliest settlers in North America. In 1602, the Norfolk clergyman turned adventurer John Brereton wrote of the birds he encountered in northern Virginia: ‘We saw in the country … Doves, Sea-pies [Oystercatchers], Blacke-birds with carnation wings.’7
This refers to the most abundant North American bird, the red-winged blackbird, which does indeed superficially resemble our own species – until it takes flight, to reveal bright crimson epaulettes on each shoulder.
In this strange new world, it is perhaps no surprise that when homesick settlers such as Brereton encountered a new species of bird, they looked for any superficial resemblance to a more familiar species back home, and named it accordingly – something we shall investigate further in Chapter 4.
4: Fifty Shades of Green?
The blackbird is just one of
over 130 species on the official ‘British List’xiii (totalling just over 600 species in all) whose names feature at least one colour.
Not surprisingly, given their prominence in the plumage of so many birds, red and black are the top two colours, with thirty-two and thirty species respectively. Bird names we have already come across featuring these colours include redstart, red grouse and red-wing, along with blackcap, blackbird and – with two for the price of one – black redstart.
Next on the list comes yellow, with fourteen species, including yellowhammer and yellow wagtail, then white, with thirteen species, including whitethroat (and of course lesser whitethroat). Grey is surprisingly high on the list, in fifth place, with twelve species, including grey heron, phalarope, wagtail and plover, while gold/golden and green have nine and eight species respectively, including several ‘golden’ plovers, golden eagle, goldfinch, greenfinch and green woodpecker.
One colour that comes surprisingly low on the list, with just seven species, is blue. Yet while blue may be a ubiquitous colour in the human world, when it comes to the plumage of birds it is fairly rare. Of common British birds only the kingfisher is predominantly blue, and is named after its feeding habits rather than appearance; the blue tit, on the other hand, has a prominent blue crown and tail, but is in fact mainly yellow and green.xiv
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It may seem obvious to name a bird after its colour, but it is a system not without pitfalls, and colour-based names can sometimes confuse the unwary. For instance, female and young male blackbirds are brown, while the female blackcap has a chestnut-coloured crown. Grey wagtails are indeed grey, but they also show prominent flashes of lemon yellow, and so are often mistaken for their cousin, the yellow wagtail.xv
Later on, as ornithologists began to explore further afield, they soon found that, as they discovered more species, they needed more and more subtle ways of telling them apart. And so a second tranche of colour-based names began to emerge. These go beyond the usual reds, blacks, whites, greens, blues and yellows to encompass more complex and subtle shades. The best known of these is ‘pied’, as in pied flycatcher and pied wagtail. Others include roseate (tern), snowy (owl), tawny (owl and pipit), dun (meaning brown, as in dunnock and dunlin), buff (buff-bellied pipit and buff-breasted sandpiper), coal (tit), rose (-ringed parakeet) and ruddy (duck).
Heading north, the globe-trotting ornithologists came across two Arctic species of seabird, whose pallid plumages led to them being dubbed ivory and glaucous gulls – the latter from the Greek glaukós (via Latin glaucus), and meaning pale bluish-grey or green.
As they explored other bird-rich continents such as Africa, Asia and South America, they discovered various reddish-yellow species, including an antshrike, babbler, owl, wren and whistling duck, all of which were given the Latin-derived epithet ‘fulvous’. Darker, more reddish-brown ducks, hawks, partridges and pygmy owls were described as ‘ferruginous’, from the Latin for iron-coloured or rusty; while a tiger heron and imperial pigeon, whose colour can best be described, in the wise words of the OED, as ‘of a colour tending to reddish; somewhat rufous…’ were named ‘rufescent’.
Within a particular family, too, many different subtleties of colour and shade are needed in order to name a host of similar-looking species. Take the Old World Warblers: a family comprising roughly 280 species found in Europe, Asia and Africa (including, of course, Mrs Moreau’s eponymous bird). These birds are famously tricky to identify in the field, mainly because very few (with the exceptions of the blackcap and whitethroat – both named after their most obvious plumage feature) are easy to tell apart from their cousins. Indeed, most appear to be basically brown, green or yellowish in shade: what birders often contemptuously dismiss as ‘LBJs’ or ‘little brown jobs’.
If we just look at two colours, yellow and green, there is a plethora of subtly different ways of naming a species after its shade. Some are obvious, such as yellow-breasted and lemon-throated. Others are far more refined, among them the descriptors olivaceous, sulphur-bellied and icterine – the last deriving from the Greek ikteros, meaning jaundiced, from the erroneous belief that a sighting of a yellow bird was supposed to cure this medical condition.
In the Americas there is another family of superficially similar-looking birds, known as wood-warblers, which like the American blackbirds were named by homesick settlers after familiar species they recalled from back in Britain. This family includes even more birds whose names feature a green, gold or yellow hue, such as black-throated green, citrine (meaning lemon-coloured), golden-cheeked, green-tailed, grey-and-gold, olive-capped, yellow-rumped and a dozen different species of yellowthroat.xvi
There are some species whose colours and shades are so subtle they can only be described with what the ornithologist and author Jeremy Mynott called ‘a nice note of ruminative hesitation’.8 These include greenish warbler, reddish egret, yellowish flycatcher and the rather sad-sounding greyish mourner, a South American flycatcher.
But of all the names of birds on the British list named after colours and shades, the most fascinating story of all is the supposed origin of a name given to two rare vagrants, a shrike and a wheatear: each of which rejoices in the name Isabelline. The story of how they acquired this unusual epithet takes us to the next stage in the story of how birds got their names: the beginnings of modern ornithology.
Notes
1 Allan Massie, Daily Telegraph, 12 October 2012. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/history/9606163/In-everything-we-say-there-is-an-echo-of-1066.html
2 Lockwood, op. cit.
3 Thomas Fuller, The Historie of the Worthies of England (London, 1662).
4 Charles Hindley (ed.), The Works of John Taylor: The Water-Poet (London, 1872).
5 Charles Johnson (ed. and trans.), Dialogus de Scaccario (1177) (London, 1950).
6 Simon Horobin, How English became English (Oxford, 2016).
7 John Brereton, Briefe and True Relation of the Discoverie of the North Part of Virginia in 1602 (1602), Wisconsin Historical Society Digital Library and Archives.
8 Jeremy Mynott, Birdscapes (Princeton, 2009).
i As described by William of Jumièges, writing just four years after the event, in 1070.
ii Which ultimately derives from the Latin pipion, meaning ‘young bird’, a word that also comes from its sound (from ‘pipiare’, meaning ‘to cheep’).
iii Peregrine is from a Latin word meaning ‘coming from foreign parts’. This first appeared in its Latin form peregrinus around the year 1250, when the writer Albertus Magnus noted that young birds caught on migration proved better for falconry than those taken straight from the nest. It has since gained the more general meaning of ‘wandering’, as in the word peregrination, which originally referred to a lifelong spiritual journey or pilgrimage, but now usually refers to any kind of meandering voyage.
iv It is also a very common name in German (Schmidt or Schmitt) and Dutch (Smid or Smidt), and has direct parallels in Romance languages, such as the Italian Ferrero (meaning ironworker) and the French Fabre. The pseudonym ‘John Smith’ is also the one most frequently adopted by British men who do not wish to reveal their true identity for personal or nefarious reasons.
v Confusingly, though, in German the yellowhammer is the Goldammer, while several English folk names also prefer gold to yellow, as in ‘golden amber’ and ‘gladdie’ or ‘go-laddie’, now obsolete West Country names which probably derived from the phrase ‘gold laddie’.
vi The first written reference to ‘fieldfare’ – with the modern (and etymologically incorrect) spelling – appears in John Florio’s pioneering dictionary, Worlde of Wordes, in 1598.
vii The OED dissents from this view, however, maintaining that the original name was a combination of two words meaning ‘to leap’ and ‘to totter, waver or wink’, and so does indeed refer to the bird’s flight, in which the alternating dark upperwing and white underwings look rather like a winking eye.
viii Modern English does still uses some inflexions,
for example the possessive – ‘the girl’s book’ – and to indicate the difference between singular and plural – ‘boy’ and ‘boys’.
ix Closely related to the modern Dutch and German words for bird, Vogel.
x In practice, as David Crystal has pointed out, we can still tell the difference, as ‘black bird’ is stressed equally on both syllables, whereas in ‘blackbird’ only the first syllable is stressed.
xi It also survives in a handful of ancient folk names, such as ‘rain fowl’, for the green woodpecker, whose ringing call is supposed to herald a change in the weather; and ‘garefowl’, for the now extinct great auk.
xii Another, unrelated species also retained the name ‘ouzel’ until at least the middle of the nineteenth century, as this line from Charles Kingsley reveals: ‘The startled water-ousel, with his white breast, flitted a few yards.’ The mention of the white breast immediately gives away the bird’s identity: the author of Westward Ho! and The Water-Babies is of course referring to the dipper.
xiii The official British List of birds accepted as having been seen in a truly wild state in Great Britain (England, Scotland and Wales and associated waters) has been maintained by the British Ornithologists’ Union (BOU) since 1879. The current figures were taken in spring 2017, but do change as new birds are added and/or their names are revised.
xiv The remaining colours that appear in the names of birds on the British List are brown and purple, with four each, including brown shrike and purple heron; and finally pink, with just one: pink-footed goose. Incidentally, the reason no British bird has the name ‘orange’ is that this colour did not enter the English language until the late Middle Ages, by which time most common birds – including the robin redbreast – had already been named.
