Mrs Moreau's Warbler

by Stephen Moss

  Before I go on, however, one important misconception should be laid to rest. Linnaeus did not actually invent binomials. That honour goes to the Swiss botanist Caspar Bauhar, who lived and worked more than a century earlier, and who began pruning the over-ornate compound names into those with just two elements. However, Bauhar did not seek to adopt this as a universal system; Linnaeus did. Linnaeus’s genius was to recognise that, if widely used, binomial nomenclature would revolutionise the study and classification of living things forever, as Anna Pavord points out: ‘The binomial system worked … because it effectively mirrored the way that common names had evolved. Hoary plantain is, in effect, a binomial tag… In the English language the describing word comes before the generic one. In Latin it’s the other way around.14

  Linnaeus’s simple but ingenious approach transformed the infant science of taxonomy, allowing all the world’s organisms to be neatly classified in relationship to one another, and removing the room for error and confusion caused by over-complicated compound names.

  Binomials are not simply used in academic or scientific circles. Even today birders, especially if they are amongst a multilingual group from several different countries, will often refer to a bird by its scientific name, in order to make it clear which particular species they are talking about.

  I can still recall my first visit to Spain in the mid-1980s, when I was lucky enough to go to the Coto Doñana with the late Tono Valverde, the man who had done so much to save this extraordinary wetland, one of Europe’s last great wildernesses. We travelled south from Seville in his dilapidated car on a warm spring day, finally reaching the edge of the vast reserve in the late afternoon. Birds were simply everywhere: herons and egrets, geese and flamingos, and many, many more. My Spanish was poor, and his English worse, but we soon found a workable means of communication by using binomials. Our conversation that day largely consisted of phrases such as ‘Gelochelidon nilotica’, ‘Glareola pratincola’ and ‘Sturnus unicolor’, allowing us to communicate easily through this universal language.xvii

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  Even today, scientific names continue to play a crucial role with regard to changing English bird names. At a time when many species still labour under a range of different local names, depending on where you are in the world – such as ‘diver’ and ‘loon’, ‘skua’ and jaeger’, and ‘bunting’ and ‘longspur’, in Britain and North America respectively – scientific names help provide stability and continuity.

  Or at least they did. However, now that the classification of all the world’s birds is undergoing a major revolution, thanks to advances in our understanding of DNA, there has been a drive to change scientific names to reflect these new relationships; a move laudable from a scientific point of view, but likely to cause great confusion in the future (see Chapter 7).xviii

  Notwithstanding this current complication, scientific ornithologists and ordinary birders the world over owe a massive debt to Linnaeus, for dragging the classification of birds and other living things into the modern age. As John Wright notes: ‘It [binomial nomenclature] was by no means perfect … but it was good enough for the moment and, more importantly, became accepted by nearly everyone.’15

  One other important consequence arose as a result of the new Linnaean system of classification: several scientific names were translated more or less directly from Latin into English, and became the standard name for the species. These included oriole, from oriolus, which Lockwood suggests derives from the golden oriole’s tuneful, whistling call, but may also be a nod to aureolus, meaning ‘golden-coloured’.

  Another Latin-based name is phalarope. Two of the world’s three species of phalaropes occur regularly in Britain: the red-necked, which breeds in Shetland and the Western Isles; and the grey, an autumn passage migrant. Their name derives (via French) from the Latin phalaropus, which means ‘coot-footed’. This refers to the lobes on phalaropes’ toes that enable them to swim, and which resemble those on the feet of coots and moorhens.

  As Lockwood points out, because phalaropes are so scarce and localised in most parts of Britain, neither species ever acquired an English folk name. But there is one notable exception. On Shetland, where it breeds, the red-necked phalarope is known in the local dialect as the ‘peerie deuk’, meaning ‘little duck’, from its tiny size and habit of swimming on shallow lochans when feeding. Intriguingly, the Scottish National Dictionary defines the noun ‘peerie’ as ‘a child’s spinning-top’, and this certainly fits the frantic feeding action of these tiny waders, which revolve like wound-up clockwork toys as they stir up tiny aquatic invertebrates.

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  On 10 January 1778, Carl Linnaeus, the man who began this revolution in the world of science and naming, died at his home in Hammarby, near Stockholm. He was seventy years old.

  Linnaeus’s final years had been blighted by illness, yet his scientific discoveries had also brought him fame and fortune. In 1761 he was ennobled by King Adolf Frederick (as Carl von Linné), creating a coat of arms divided into three, featuring what he considered to be the three kingdoms of nature – animal, vegetable and mineral – and after his death he was buried with great honour in Uppsala Cathedral. His continuing legacy, though, is the 4,400 species of animals and 7,700 species of plants to which he gave scientific names; including, of course, many species of birds.

  5: A Correspondence Course

  In 1789, just four years before his death, Gilbert White, a country vicar in a rural parish in Hampshire, published The Natural History of Selborne,xxix which eventually became one of the best-selling books of all time.xx

  Yet despite his enduring fame, when it comes to the story of the naming of our birds, White is something of a footnote. His correspondent Thomas Pennant, to whom many of the ‘letters’ in Selborne are addressed, was far more important and influential in this regard.

  Whether or not White actually sent his letters to Pennant (and his other correspondent, Daines Barrington), or simply used them as a literary device to impart information to the reader, is not especially relevant. What is significant – especially for our story – is that at the time the book was published, Pennant was far better known than White. He was one of the leading scientists of his day, and influenced, amongst others, that great man of letters Dr Samuel Johnson. So when he coined new names, or popularised existing ones, they were likely to be widely adopted and used by others.

  Born in 1726, Thomas Pennant lived his whole life at the family estate in Flintshire, in his native Wales. Here, as a twelve-year-old boy, he was given a copy of Willughby’s Ornithology, an event to which he later ascribed his lifelong love of natural history. Pennant may have been true to his Welsh roots, but during a long and busy life he also travelled extensively around the British Isles, writing detailed notes on the plants, animals and landscapes he encountered.

  His findings appeared in a series of highly influential books. The best known of these, British Zoology, was published in several editions from the 1760s onwards, and soon became the definitive zoological work of its time.xxi This combination of scholarly rigour and wide readership meant that Pennant performed a crucial role in both developing new names and authorising existing ones. Indeed, he was so successful that we continue to use many of his chosen names today.

  When it came to classifying birds, Pennant’s approach broadly involved taking Linnaeus’s classification of a group of related species into a genus or family, and then giving each member an English name within that grouping, to make these relationships more apparent. This was very helpful, as names such as ‘sparrow’ and ‘wren’ had until then been used interchangeably for several species from very different families.

  Previously, for example, the reed bunting had often been called ‘reed sparrow’, which confusingly was also used for other small birds sharing the same habitat, including reed and sedge warblers. Pennant decided on the name reed bunting, along with ‘common bunting’ (later renamed corn bunting), and ‘yellow bunting’, the logical term for the
yellowhammer, which nevertheless failed to catch on (as we saw in Chapter 2). The name of our hardiest species, the snow bunting, also emerged at about the same time.

  The name ‘bunting’, which initially referred only to the corn bunting, goes back to the fourteenth century, and as a surname (meaning ‘plump or thick-set person’) is recorded as early as 1275. That original meaning also survives in the nursery rhyme ‘Bye baby bunting’, which first appears in print in 1784, but whose origin is almost certainly far older. So Pennant’s role was more about organisation than innovation: it had long been known that these species were members of the bunting family but, as with so many other familiar species, their vernacular names had arisen by a series of accidents. The tidy-minded Pennant was not the first person, and will probably not be the last, to try to render bird names more logical.

  During his career, he developed a number of compound names, combining a colour or shade with a part of the bird’s body. These included white-fronted goose (‘front’ derives from the French for forehead, and refers to the white patch around the bird’s bill), black-throated and red-throated divers, red-necked grebe, red-breasted merganser and red-backed shrike. And he either coined or popularised several other names derived from key plumage features, such as spotted flycatcher, ringed plover, long-tailed titmouse (later simplified to ‘tit’), and long-eared and short-eared owls.

  Pennant also adopted ‘bearded titmouse’, a direct translation from the French. The bearded tit, as we now call it, is an attractive bird found almost exclusively in reed beds, with a butterscotch and blue-grey plumage, long tail, and distinctive black markings on the sides of the male’s bill. Yet these are more reminiscent of the fictional Chinese villain Fu Manchu’s drooping moustaches than of any kind of beard. ‘Tit’ is also misleading: the species is entirely unrelated to the true tits, and indeed has now been placed in its very own family, Panuridae.

  Avocet, bean goose, little egret, eider, linnet, night heron, oystercatcher, pochard, ruff, sanderling, tawny owl and wood sandpiper are just some of the many other species for which Pennant either invented the current name, or chose it from the various ones already in use.

  Thanks to his influence, these are the names we still use today, even though perfectly acceptable alternatives (for example ‘brown owl’ instead of tawny owl, ‘sea-pie’ for oystercatcher) were available at the time. Pennant’s choice of names did not always prevail: he preferred water ouzel instead of dipper, eared grebe (still used in North America) for black-necked grebe, golden-crested wren for goldcrest, goatsucker for nightjar and land rail for corncrake.xxii And in the early editions of British Zoology he called the stone curlew the ‘Norfolk plover’, but later wrongly decided that this curious wader must be from a different family, and so gave it the wonderfully evocative name ‘thick-kneed bustard’, which also failed to catch on.xxiii But by and large, when Pennant named a bird, that name prevailed.

  Popular and widely respected – he was described by one observer as an ‘elegant scholar and refined gentleman’ – Pennant died at home in 1798, aged seventy-two. In the centuries since, his fame has, as one early twentieth-century writer put it, ‘suffered somewhat by the lapse of time’.16 But although he may no longer be a household name, like his friend and contemporary Gilbert White, Thomas Pennant’s influence on the development of English bird names remains unmatched.

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  And what of Gilbert White? Perhaps I have been a little harsh on him; after all, he did famously sort out the confusion between three species of summer visitor to our shores: the chiffchaff, willow warbler and wood warbler.

  To the modern birder, the very notion that these three superficially similar little birds might be impossible to distinguish from one another seems absurd. But we are forgetting two things: first, that during the late eighteenth century our knowledge of birds was both limited and piecemeal, as very few people took any interest at all in the natural world; and second, that the kind of sophisticated optical aids we now take for granted, such as binoculars, telescopes and digital cameras, were simply not available.

  So as he wandered the highways and byways of his rural Hampshire parish, Gilbert White had to rely on his ability to observe bird behaviour at a distance, with his naked eyes. When it came to telling small, flighty warblers apart, this was fairly limited in its use and efficiency.

  But White had another weapon up his sleeve, or rather, on the sides of his head: his ears. Today birders often use the sound of these birds, rather than their appearance, to tell them apart; White may not have been the first person to do so (surely the distinctive two-note sound of the chiffchaff would have aroused interest long before this?), but importantly he was the first to point out the key differences between the three species.

  He set out his findings in Letter XIX of The Natural History of Selborne, written on 17 August 1768, though presumably relying on evidence gained earlier that spring, when all three would have been singing: ‘I have now, past dispute, made out three distinct species of the willow-wrens, … which constantly and invariably use distinct notes.’ White had also noticed that

  The yellowest bird [which we now know to be the wood warbler] is considerably the largest, and has its quill-feathers and secondary feathers tipped with white, which the others have not. This last haunts only the tops of trees in high beechen woods, and makes a sibilous grasshopper-like noise, now and then, at short intervals, shivering a little with its wings when it sings.17

  As a description of the wood warbler’s distinctive song, this could hardly be bettered. But if you are thinking of praising the good parson for his acute observations of the bird’s plumage, you may have second thoughts when I tell you that he did have the advantage of having examined dead specimens, which he had presumably asked some local marksman to shoot – or perhaps even killed himself.

  The other two species, both smaller and less distinctive than their scarcer relative, are the chiffchaff and willow warbler. Again, they are only superficially similar: as a long-distance migrant to and from southern Africa, the willow warbler needs longer wings, which give it a more elegant appearance. The marginally smaller, shorter-winged and more olive-plumaged chiffchaff is a short-distance migrant, with most of our breeding birds wintering in Spain, Portugal or North Africa.

  For most birders, by far the easiest way to identify the chiffchaff is by the distinctive song that gives the species its onomatopoeic name, as White himself noted: ‘The smallest uncrested willow wren, or chiffchaff … utters two sharp piercing notes, so loud in hollow woods, as to occasion an echo, and is usually first heard about the 20th of March.’

  White does not appear to have got to grips with the third species – the one we now call the willow warbler – until some time after he identified the other two. At first this may seem rather odd, for the willow warbler is by far the commonest summer visitor to Britain, with well over two million pairs breeding here.xxiv Yet although its silvery song, descending the scale like water running down a slope, is very distinctive, the bird’s habit of avoiding parks and gardens means it is far less well-known than its cousin the chiffchaff.

  Incidentally, the name ‘warbler’, with which we are so familiar today, does not appear in print until – you’ve guessed it – the 1773 edition of Thomas Pennant’s British Zoology. Although the new name eventually gained the upper hand over earlier epithets, the name wood-wren continued to be used for the wood warbler, and was stubbornly resistant to change. It was still preferred by William MacGillivray as late as 1839.

  Gilbert White has many claims to fame, but two are especially pertinent to this story. First, there is his contribution to the pastime millions of us enjoy today. James Fisher called him ‘the man who started us all birdwatching’,18 and for me, this sums up his crucial contribution to the modern world. Before White, people had ‘watched birds’ so they could hunt and kill them for food, to observe their migratory journeys to try to predict the weather and the seasons, or as objects of superstition, folklore and
worship. A few pioneers, such as William Turner, John Ray and Francis Willughby, had begun to carefully observe the habits and behaviour of birds in order to advance the cause of science. But Gilbert White brought a new and different viewpoint: clear, scientific inquiry, of course, but also a pure delight in the way birds are – an attitude that laid the foundations for the way we continue to watch and enjoy birds in the present day.

  Gilbert White’s other, more minor, distinction is that he is one of that small and select band of Britons who have had a bird named after them. Sadly, though, he never got the chance to see his eponymous species, an Asiatic relative of our own song and mistle thrushes that was named for him posthumously: White’s thrush.

  White’s thrush breeds across a wide swathe of Asia, in the forests of central and eastern Siberia and the Himalayan foothills, and usually spends the winter in India or China. But in autumn, young birds occasionally go astray, heading in exactly the opposite direction from their usual migratory course, in a phenomenon known as ‘reverse migration’. Most perish, but a tiny handful make it as far as Europe, which explains how one of these large and distinctive thrushes was shot near Christchurch (now Dorset, but at that time part of Hampshire) in January 1828, twenty-five years after Gilbert White had died.

  This bird nearly escaped its fate, as this later account reveals: ‘It attracted his attention, on disturbing it, in passing through a plantation, where it appeared to have established a haunt in a high furze brake, as it returned to it repeatedly before he could succeed in shooting it.’19