by Stephen Moss
xv Any ‘yellow’ wagtail seen in winter – or on a fast-flowing river at any time of year – is definitely a grey wagtail, as yellow wagtails are spring and summer visitors to Britain, usually found in wet meadows.
xvi Although most New World warblers are named after the predominant shades of yellow or green, there are also cerulean, a deep shade of blue, and plumbeous, meaning lead-coloured.
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HISTORY AND SCIENCE
The Birth of Ornithology
‘What’s the use of their having names,’ the Gnat said, ‘if they won’t answer to them?’
‘No use to them,’ said Alice; ‘but it’s useful to the people that name them, I suppose. If not, why do they have names at all?’
Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass
1: Dirty Underwear
12 August 1566 was an auspicious day for the Spanish royal family. It saw the birth of Princess Isabella Clara Eugenia, a little girl whose royal pedigree was second to none. She was not only the daughter of the mighty King Philip II of Spain, but also the granddaughter of the two most powerful rulers in the Renaissance world: the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V and the French king Henry II.
Princess Isabella’s arrival was a triumph of hope over experience. Her 21-year-old mother, Elisabeth of Valois, had previously miscarried twin girls, and had also survived a bout of smallpox, which nearly killed her. So Princess Isabella’s father greeted his daughter’s safe delivery with more than the usual relief and joy.i
During her long and eventful life, Isabella did her best to live up to her distinguished royal antecedents. She was a strong and determined woman, and more than held her own in this male-dominated world. Indeed, her stubbornness is at the root of a curious legend: one that links her with the names of several species of bird and mammal.
The adjective ‘Isabelline’ is found in the English name of three species of bird: a shrike, a wheatear and a bush-hen (a type of rail from the Indonesian province of Sulawesi), and in the scientific names of several others. It has also been used to describe a distinctively pale form of the Himalayan brown bear, Ursus arctos isabellinus, and several breeds of horses and dogs.
All these creatures have one thing in common: their predominant coloration is a dirty greyish-brown, as though they need a good wash. Given the legend of how this very unusual shade got its name, this is rather apt.
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From infancy, Isabella was expected to marry for strategic and political reasons, rather than for love. At just two years old, she was betrothed to her cousin, the future Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II. But when she reached maturity, it became clear that the eccentric, depressed and probably homosexual Rudolf was never going to honour his original agreement to wed her.
In 1599 – at the relatively advanced age of thirty-two – she finally married Rudolf’s younger brother, Archduke Albert of Austria. A later portrait, by the artist Peter Paul Rubens, shows the couple posing side-by-side, for, despite the somewhat inauspicious start to their married life, they remained devoted to one another until Albert’s death in 1621.
Back in 1598, a year before the couple wed, the dying Philip II had installed Albert and Isabella as joint rulers of the Netherlands. Saying that they were in charge of this far-flung corner of the vast Spanish Empire was one thing; maintaining control over it proved quite another. To combat the growing threat from Spain, the English and Dutch joined forces to defend the city of Ostend, and Archduke Albert was sent to win it back.
In a gesture of marital devotion and self-sacrifice, his loving wife Isabella vowed not to change her undergarments until the siege was over. But unfortunately for her, Albert and especially the beleaguered people of Ostend, there was no quick resolution to this bloody conflict. The siege lasted another three long years, during which more than 100,000 people perished, in what was described by one contemporary as ‘a long carnival of death’.ii
After the eventual Spanish victory, in the autumn of 1604, Isabella was finally permitted to remove her underwear. By then, it had turned a rather unpleasant shade of greyish-brown, duly dubbed ‘Isabelline’, after the defiant monarch.
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There is only one teensy little problem with this rather repugnant, yet strangely touching, tale: the word ‘Isabella’ had been used to describe exactly the same colour several years before the siege ever took place. It first surfaces in 1600, in an inventory of royal garments, amongst whose pages we find ‘one rounde gowne of Isabella-colour satten … set with silver spangles’.1
Confronted with this troublesome fact, proponents of the legend quickly switch their attention to another famous queen: Isabella of Castile, who reigned jointly with her husband Ferdinand of Aragon during the latter years of the fifteenth century. Conveniently, Ferdinand also took part in a siege – of the Moorish stronghold of Granada. Although this conflict lasted less than just nine months, from April 1491 to January 1492, there would still have been plenty of time for his spouse’s underwear to turn that rather dingy shade of greyish-brown.
I hate to contradict such beguiling tales, but both these stories may have arisen as a convenient way to explain an etymological coincidence. It appears that ‘Isabelline’ is more likely to be a corruption of the Italian word zibellino. This name was given to a pelt of an animal such as a marten or sable, worn as a fashion accessory by wealthy women during the sixteenth century. It may originally derive from an Arabic word meaning ‘lion’ – and therefore mean ‘lion-coloured’.iii
The theory goes that when this term was first heard in England, it somehow became associated with Queen Isabella, and the word changed as a result. I must say, though, I still prefer the royal underwear theory.
2: Folk and Fowls
Whatever the truth about its origins, the use of the name ‘Isabelline’ marks the beginning of an era that saw an explosion in the number of species given English names.
According to James Fisher, from 1460 to 1776 the ‘British List’ doubled from roughly 114 species at the start of this period, to 228 species by the end. Given that about 250 or so species of breeding, migrant and wintering birds are found in Britain today, we can see that by the late eighteenth century the vast majority of common birds had been given English names – or, to put it more precisely, official English names. Most familiar species already had a wealth of folk names: some widely used throughout Britain, others confined to particular localities or regions.
Folk names are just that – everyday names coined by everyday folk. Many, though quaint and wonderfully descriptive, have long since vanished through disuse. Others, though – including robin, dunnock and wren – ultimately became the accepted name for the species.
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As we have already seen, colour and shade feature in many early bird names, often dating back to well before the Norman Conquest. But there’s a problem with naming birds after an aspect of their appearance. And that is that, unlike sounds, colours are not unique to a single species. So it’s not surprising that the same name was often used to describe several different, and often unrelated, species.
Take the name ‘blackcap’. Today this refers solely to the greyish-brown warbler Sylvia atricapilla, whose males sport a prominent black crown. But over time the name has also been used for other species of bird with black on their heads, including marsh, coal and great tits, reed bunting, and even black-headed gull. One name for several species.
The opposite was also true. The proliferation of folk names up and down the country meant that a single species was often called completely different things in different places, a recipe for muddle and misunderstanding.
So in parts of Scotland and northern England the yellowhammer (which, as we have already seen, might be called the ‘golden amber’, ‘gladdie’ or ‘go-laddie’) was known as the ‘yoldring’.iv Even more confusingly, in other parts of Britain it was called the ‘goldfinch’, the name normally given to the small, tuneful member of the finch family with a red face and yellow flashes on its wings.
> In turn, the goldfinch also had a wealth of alternative names (as you might expect for such a common and colourful bird). These included ‘red cap’, from its crimson face patch; ‘thistle finch’, an allusion to its diet of thistle seeds; and the sartorially inventive ‘proud tailor’, referring to its smart plumage. More obscure names included ‘sheriff’s man’, after the black and gold livery worn by sheriffs, and ‘King Harry’. As Lockwood suggested, the latter was probably a cheeky reference to King Henry VIII: ‘that monarch’s ostentatious attire being linked with the ornate plumage of the bird’.2
Sadly, the vast majority of these alternative folk names are now long forgotten. However, despite the fact that modern English is becoming more homogenous, due in part to the influence of television and the Internet, a handful of folk names have managed to survive to the present-day. Across much of Britain people still call lapwings ‘peewits’ (or in Lincolnshire, ‘pyewipes’), after their plaintive, penetrating call; while the green woodpecker is still occasionally known as the ‘yaffle’, in reference to the laughing sound it makes as it flies away from you.v
But the drive towards coining official names would inevitably lead to a simplification in the plethora of different folk names for the same species, as well as a reduction in the potentially confusing use of the same name for different species. This coincided with a much deeper understanding of Britain’s birds, our knowledge of which would increase dramatically during the period in question, from 1500 to 1750.
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The impulse behind the giving of standard names to birds was the great outpouring of learning taking place at this time: from the sixteenth-century Renaissance, through the seventeenth-century Age of Reason, to the eighteenth-century Age of Enlightenment, during which, as the historian Roy Porter has noted, ‘the key … concept was Nature’.3
This period also saw great advances in the way we perceived, catalogued and categorised what Shakespeare called ‘nature’s mysteries’, with the seismic shift from what historian Keith Thomas termed ‘the cruelty of indifference’ to a far more modern and enlightened approach to the natural world.4
Until this time, mankind’s dominion over nature was more or less absolute. Indeed, as this verse from the Book of Genesis shows, it had been sanctioned at the highest level of authority, the Old Testament: ‘And God blessed them, and God said unto them, be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.’
We humans have never quite managed to shake off the notion that we can and should exploit, without compunction or consequence, the Earth’s natural resources. But during this period from 1500 to 1750 we did at least begin to move away from a primarily exploitative relationship between human beings and wild animals, and towards a more inclusive, benevolent approach – what the environmental historian Dr Rob Lambert calls the shift ‘from use to delight’.
One consequence of this change in attitudes was that we began to appreciate the natural world for its own sake, rather than simply as a resource for us to exploit. Very gradually – and through intermediate stages such as the Victorian mania for shooting, collecting and stuffing specimens of wild birds – this would ultimately lead to the rise of popular, nature-based hobbies including, of course, birdwatching.5
For the very first time in history, we were finally beginning to regard other creatures with a combination of empathy, understanding and curiosity – not all that different from the outlook millions of us have towards nature today. Birds, being more ubiquitous and visible than any other creatures, were at the forefront of this new approach. And this led to a slew of new, and now very familiar, names.
3: Pioneers and Puffins
The movement towards standardising the official names of birds (along with many other species of animals and plants) was begun by a cohort of people who, for the first time, called themselves ‘naturalists’.vi Amongst these pioneering men (and a few exceptional women like the seventeenth-century lepidopterist Eleanor Glanville) was the herbalist, natural historian and theologian William Turner (1509/10-68).
For an academic scholar and scientist, Turner led a turbulent and often dangerous life. He held controversial, reformist views, at a time when every change to the holder of the English throne dictated the prevailing religion. Thus in 1538, towards the end of the reign of Henry VIII, he was imprisoned for preaching without a licence. When he was released he left England to travel around Europe, where his radical opinions found a more receptive audience. After Henry’s death in 1547, and the accession of the more sympathetic King Edward VI, Turner returned home to become Dean of Wells in Somerset.
But unfortunately for both Turner and his brand of radical Protestantism, Edward’s reign was soon cut short by chronic ill health. When the young king died in 1553, aged just 15, his Catholic half-sister Mary succeeded him. Turner’s life was now in mortal danger, and he fled abroad once again. He escaped just in time, narrowly avoiding the dreadful fate of his contemporaries Nicholas Ridley and Hugh Latimer, both of whom were burned at the stake by Queen Mary for heresy.
After Mary’s half-sister Elizabeth acceded to the throne in 1558, and the Catholic faith gave way to Protestant beliefs for the final time in this unsettled period in our history, Turner could at last return permanently to England.
I include these biographical details as we cannot separate the religious crusader from the pioneering naturalist; indeed, in his fiery personality the two vocations fused, as the editor and translator of his ornithological writings noted:
‘It must be understood that, his scientific work apart, nearly the whole of Turner’s life was spent in religious controversy…’6
Perhaps it was this love of argument and desire to go against the grain that allowed him to make such advances in our ornithological knowledge. For Turner was in every sense a true ‘Renaissance Man’, in the modern meaning of the phrase: both as a polymath, straddling different fields of learning, and also in his constant striving to advance the boundaries of human knowledge about the world – in his case, the natural world.
William Turner certainly did that, taking a particular interest in the classification and naming of birds. Avium Praecipuarum, written in Latin and published in 1544, was the first printed book entirely devoted to ornithology. As its full title suggests,vii he relied heavily on the classical works of Pliny and Aristotle, who had been the last people to attempt to classify birds, between 1,500 and 1,900 years earlier. Incredibly, in all that time virtually no progress had been made in our ornithological knowledge.
Turner set out to systematically record the names of every known bird in Greek, Latin, English and German – a daunting task, given that hardly any prior research had been done on the naming of species. He obtained much of his information by talking to bird-catchers and wildfowlers, for whom a working knowledge of the range of names used for different kinds of birds was essential.
James Fisher notes that Turner listed more than a hundred different kinds of British bird, of which no fewer than fifteen were named for the first time. These included the hen harrier, woodlark and brambling – the latter with the unusual spelling of ‘bramlyng’. According to Lockwood, this is a corruption of ‘brandling’, and refers to the brindled plumage of this handsome finch, rather than having anything to do with the blackberry-producing plant. If so, then the modern name ‘brambling’ is yet another of those ‘faux amis’: unwary linguistic traps set to confuse us.
Turner also first coined the name ‘creeper’ for the species we today call the treecreeper.viii This minuscule bird, often seen moving jerkily around a gnarled tree trunk as it searches for tiny insects, already had a wide range of folk names, including ‘tree climber’, ‘tree clipper’, ‘tree speeler’ (from a Scottish word meaning climber), ‘bark creeper’ and ‘bark runner’. The most evocative example, perhaps, was the Somerset name ‘tree mouse’. But a word of caution: the suffix ‘mo
use’, as used in the old name for tits, ‘titmouse’, is thought to derive from the Old English word ‘mose’, simply meaning ‘small creature’, so does not necessarily refer to the treecreeper’s rather rodent-like habits.
Turner also either found or coined the name ‘nut jobber’ for the nuthatch, deriving from the now obsolete word ‘job’, meaning to peck or jab at something. The modern suffix, ‘hatch’, derives from the word ‘hack’, from the bird’s habit of jamming a nut into a crevice in the bark of a tree, and then pecking at it to break off morsels to eat.
Turner was not simply naming the birds; he was also trying to distinguish genuine accounts of their behaviour from purely spurious and inaccurate ones, many of which had gained currency through continued repetition down the centuries. Given how little was known about Britain’s birdlife at this time, it is remarkable how accurate many of Turner’s observations were. He wrote that ‘Cranes … breed in England in marshy places’, and noted that bitterns ‘can easily be driven into nets by the use of a stalking horse’.
Not surprisingly, Turner did repeat several long-held errors and misinterpretations. He confused the osprey with the sea eagle, repeated the hoary old myth that barnacle geese hatch from goose barnacles, and claimed that the heron ‘screams while it couples and (they say) emits blood from its eyes’. He also thought – along, to be fair, with many others – that male and female hen harriers were separate species, a confusion not cleared up until more than 250 years later, by George Montagu (see Chapter 4).
