Mrs Moreau's Warbler

by Stephen Moss

  The eagle-eyed marksman was none other than James Edward Harris, 2nd Earl of Malmesbury. Recognising that the bird was unusual, he sent it to Thomas Eyton, who in his 1836 work A History of the Rarer British Birds named the species ‘in memory of one with whom everybody is familiar by name’,20 his ornithological hero Gilbert White.

  The choice of this species may not be particularly apt – the only connection being that White lived in the county where the bird was shot – but at least he does have a British bird named after him. It is deeply ironic that the name of his contemporary Thomas Pennant, who gave so many birds the names we still use today, can only be found in two now obsolete bird names that never made it to British shores: Pennant’s parakeet (the common Australian species now known as crimson rosella), and the long-forgotten scientific name of the king penguin, which used to be known as Aptenodytes pennanti (since changed to Aptenodytes patagonicus).xxv

  But the naming of White’s thrush did signal a new and growing trend that had begun in the eighteenth century, and would reach its zenith in the nineteenth: eponymous bird names, those named after a deserving (or occasionally undeserving) human being.

  This is the theme I shall be exploring in the next two chapters. These stories – and a fascinating cast of characters – reflect a new era of competition: the race to give names to the last remaining regularly occurring British species that, until then, had remained anonymous and unknown.

  Notes

  1 The rather grandly titled Inventory of all garments, jewels, silks, etc., in the queen’s Garderobe of robes in the charge of Sir Thomas Gorges as surveyed by Sir Thomas, Lord Buckhurste, Lord Treasurer and others appointed by a commission under the great seal 4 July.

  2 Lockwood, op. cit.

  3 Roy Porter, The Enlightenment (Basingstoke, 1990).

  4 Keith Thomas, Man and the Natural World: Changing Attitudes in England 1500–1800 (London, 1983).

  5 For a more detailed analysis of this, see my earlier book A Bird in the Bush: A Social History of Birdwatching (London, 2004).

  6 In A. H. Evans (ed.), Turner on Birds (Cambridge, 1903).

  7 Thomas Moffett, Health’s improvement or, Rules comprizing and discovering the nature, method and manner of preparing all sorts of foods used in this nation (London, c. 1595).

  8 James A. Jobling, Helm Dictionary of Scientific Bird Names (London, 2010).

  9 William Dampier, A voyage to New Holland, etc., in the year 1699 (London, 1703).

  10 Ray Reedman, Lapwings, Loons and Lousy Jacks (Exeter, 2016).

  11 Anna Pavord, The Naming of Names (London, 2005).

  12 John Wright, op. cit..

  13 Tim Birkhead, The Wisdom of Birds (London, 2008).

  14 Anna Pavord, op. cit.

  15 John Wright, op. cit.

  16 W. H. Mullens, ‘Some Early British Ornithologists and Their Works’, in British Birds (1908–9).

  17 Gilbert White, The Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne (London, 1789).

  18 In James Fisher, op. cit. See also my book A Bird in the Bush (London, 2004).

  19 T. C. Eyton, A History of the Rarer British Birds (London, 1836).

  20 ibid.

  i Sixteen months later, Elisabeth gave birth to Isabella’s younger sister Catherine; less than a year later, after miscarrying another daughter, she was dead. Isabella was just two years old.

  ii In the words of the historian Anna Simoni, ‘the Spanish assailed the unassailable; the Dutch defended the indefensible’. Ostend Story (2003).

  iii We may never know the true origin of a word that does not appear in the OED until as late as 1859, in a description of desert-dwelling birds in the journal Ibis written by the distinguished ornithologist Henry Baker Tristram (see Chapter 5): ‘The upper plumage of every bird, whether Lark, Chat, Sylvian, or Sand-grouse … is of one uniform isabelline or sand colour.’

  iv Alternative spellings include youldring, yowdring, yoldrin, yaldrin, yaldran, yeld(e)rin and yieldrin.

  v It can, of course, be argued that many of the names of birds we use today are simply folk names that won the battle to be recognised as the ‘official’ name! For what are ‘whitethroat’ and ‘blackcap’, ‘robin’ and ‘blackbird’, if not folk names?

  vi The term ‘naturalist’ is first recorded in 1581, in a work by the controversial Scottish Catholic John Hamilton. However, the first use of the word in its modern meaning is not until 1600, in Christopher Sutton’s popular devotional work Disce Mori: Learne to Dye, in which he writes of ‘A lion, of whom the naturalist writeth, that he is of such courage…’

  vii Avium praecipuarum, quarum apud Plinium et Aristotelem mentio est, brevis et succincta historia, which roughly translates as: ‘A Short and Succinct History of the Principal Birds Noticed by Pliny and Aristotle’.

  viii Treecreeper is a relatively recent coinage, first noted in 1814, and not officially adopted by the BOU until as late as 1883. It soon caught on: one popular Victorian nature-writer, George Rooper, extolled ‘the pretty lady-like tree-creeper [which] ran like a mouse up the tree.’

  ix In Anna Pavord, The Naming of Names (London, 2005). Ray’s modesty was underscored by his deep religious beliefs, revealed in the title of his 1691 work, The Wisdom of God Manifested in the Works of the Creation.

  x The full title is the rather unwieldy, The ornithology of Francis Willughby of Middleton in the county of Warwick, Esq. In three books: wherein all the birds hitherto known, being reduced into a method sutable [sic] to their natures, are accurately described: the descriptions illustrated by most elegant figures, nearly resembling the live birds, engraven in LXXVIII copper plates.

  xi Shearwaters do exactly what their name suggests: glide low over the waves, their stiff wings almost touching the surface of the sea.

  xii Physician, medical pioneer and co-founder of my old college, Gonville and Caius, Cambridge.

  xiii Several other British birds are named after what they eat, including bee-eater (bees), mistle thrush (mistletoe berries) and linnets (flax seeds – linum in Latin). But sparrowhawks rarely catch sparrows, goshawks don’t usually hunt geese, and hen harriers don’t eat poultry. Thanks to fish shortages, herring gulls now snatch ice creams from the hands of unwary holidaymakers, while oystercatchers don’t often get the chance to feed on luxury shellfish. Hartlepool fishermen used to call this black-and-white wader ‘mussel cracker’, which is far more appropriate.

  xiv Or, as they are more correctly known, ‘scientific’ names, because they frequently derive from Greek as well as Latin.

  xv Professor Å. Gustafsson of the University of Lund, writing in 1979.

  xvi Should a species of bird (or any other plant or animal) need to be further subdivided into different races or subspecies, then a third name (trinomial) is added. So the white wagtail, found over much of Europe and Asia, is called Motacilla alba alba, while the pied wagtail, which we see here in Britain, is Motacilla alba yarrelli.

  xvii Gull-billed tern, collared pratincole and spotless starling respectively.

  xviii For example, the black-headed gull has been transferred from the genus Larus to a new one, Chroicocephalus, and so is now known by the tongue-twister Chroicocephalus ridibundus. Meanwhile the blue, coal and crested tits (once in the genus Parus, along with the other British members of their family), are now in the genera Cyanistes, Periparus and Lophophanes respectively, while the marsh and willow tits have been moved to the genus Poecile. Only the great tit (Parus major) remains unchanged.

  xix In keeping with the pedantry of this age, its full title reads: The Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne, in the County of Southampton. To which are added The Naturalists Calendar; Observations on Various Parts of Nature; and Poems.

  xx Whether Selborne can claim to have sold as many copies as Quotations from Chairman Mao (better known as The Little Red Book), or various works by Tolkien, J. K. Rowling and Agatha Christie, is hard to tell, as reliable sales figures were not available back in the eighteenth and nineteenth c
enturies. But it has never been out of print, has been translated into many foreign languages, and in the two-and-a-half centuries since it was first published has appeared in almost 300 different editions.

  xxi In 2008 a copy was sold at the London auction house Christie’s for over £16,000.

  xxii Some of these alternative names, such as dipper (1388), corncrake (1455) and nightjar (1630), were already in use; but goldcrest was not officially adopted until 1883, and black-necked grebe as recently as 1912. And of course ‘Brown Owl’ is still used today for the leader of a Brownie pack!

  xxiii In some ways Pennant was ahead of his time: in most of the rest of the world the nine species in the same family as the stone curlew are known as ‘thick-knees’, after the bony protuberances on their legs. Oddly, even though this species is not closely related to the curlews, we still prefer the inaccurate and misleading name ‘stone curlew’.

  xxiv To put this figure into perspective, that means there are three times as many willow warblers in Britain as swallows, and the same number as the next two commonest migrants – chiffchaff and blackcap – combined.

  xxv As some consolation, Pennant does have three species of mammal named after him, including the North American carnivore, and relative of the pine marten, the fisher Martes pennanti.

  4

  TAMING NATURE

  The Organisation of Bird Names

  A named thing is a tamed thing.

  Joanne Harris, Runemarks

  1: A Man of Kent

  A thin layer of hoar frost coats every available surface, turning all to white. Ground, trees, bushes and sky merge into one, the sparse vegetation etched onto the landscape like a medieval engraving. In such intense winter cold, surely no small bird can survive – let alone a tiny warbler that depends on insects for its food?

  So it is hardly surprising that the vast majority of this bird’s relatives are far away to the south. Some, like the willow warbler, have flown all the way to Africa, where they now flit about on the parched savannah, feeding amongst elephants, lions and vast herds of wildebeest. Others, such as the blackcap, have stayed closer to home, on this side of the Sahara, and are foraging amongst the maquis bushes around the Mediterranean Sea. A few chiffchaffs, meanwhile, have remained in Britain, mostly heading to the south-west to take advantage of the milder winter climate in recent years.

  But one kind of warbler has chosen a very different way of life. Instead of evolving to migrate each autumn, when the temperature drops and its food supply runs low, this species has chosen to remain right here on the Dorset heath where it was born – the landscape of Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles.

  Staying put is a big gamble. For this is one of our smallest and lightest birds, measuring just twelve centimetres from the tip of its bill to the end of its long, cocked tail, and weighing a mere ten grams – about the same as an old one pound coin.

  It may be bone-chillingly cold, but according to the calendar, today is the equinox marking the start of spring – which means the start of the breeding season. With the passing of each day, there are a few more minutes of daylight; and in response to this, hormones are produced that encourage this warbler – indeed force it, for it has no real choice in the matter – to sing. So it hops up onto a sprig of gorse, whose custard-yellow flowers are just visible beneath a thick layer of frost, and bursts into song. A harsh, hesitant rattle of rapid-fire notes, rather like a speeded-up recording of a jammed machine-gun, floats over the heath, before evaporating in the chill March air.

  This minuscule bird spends its whole life here, on this blasted heath. It is usually either perched on top of a gorse bush, or hidden inside the spiky foliage, searching for tiny insects, which it grabs and despatches with its small, pointed bill.

  Given the bird’s deep attachment to this one plant, and a plant itself so characteristic of its heathland home, you might imagine that it would be named after its habitat: heath warbler, perhaps, or gorse warbler. Indeed, one folk name is ‘furze wren’, after an old name for gorse. Instead, though, this species carries a misnomer so bizarre that when people hear it, they often assume they must be mistaken. For this bird is a Dartford warbler.

  Yes, Dartford. A town that is famous for its tunnel and bridge, and for traffic snarl-ups during rush hours and on bank holiday weekends. Famous – amongst historians of rock music – as the childhood home of Mick Jagger and Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones. And famous, at least in the world of ornithology, as the place that gave its name to this tiny, and undeniably charming, little bird.i

  Many birds are named after the habitat where they live: from marsh harrier to sand martin, and tree sparrow to wood pigeon. Some are named after buildings: house sparrow and barn owl, for example; others sport a name associated with farming, such as corncrake and corn bunting. And a few – less than a score of regularly occurring British birds, including the Scottish crossbill, Canada goose and Mediterranean gull – are named after a country or region. But of all the 600-plus species on the British Ornithologists’ Union’s official British List, only three are named after an English town or county: Kentish plover, Sandwich tern and Dartford warbler.

  As you may have noticed, all three names originate in the same county – Kent. This is no coincidence, for the names of the plover, tern and warbler go back to one man: the eighteenth-century physician and amateur ornithologist Dr John Latham. It was he who first came across these three species, and gave them their fascinating – but utterly inappropriate – names.

  *

  John Latham was born in Eltham (now in south-east London, but then a village in Kent), on 27 June 1740. His father was a surgeon, while his mother was descended from the Sotheby family, the founders of the famous London auction house.

  As the eldest son, it was inevitable that John Latham would follow his father into a medical career, and indeed he did. But like many professional gentlemen of this era, he used his ample leisure time to pursue his passion for nature, becoming a distinguished ornithologist, and doing much to extend our knowledge of British (and later Australian) birds.

  Like all ornithologists at this time, Latham practised his science down the barrel of a gun. Optical aids such as telescopes were still in their infancy, and the first book that might enable observers to identify birds in the field – Thomas Bewick’s A History of British Birds – would not be published for another quarter of a century. So the only way to be absolutely sure of identifying any unusual bird was to shoot it.

  Thus it was that early on a fine spring morning, in April 1773, John Latham left his home with his gun over his shoulder, to take a walk around Bexley Heath, near Dartford.ii

  During John Latham’s day, both Dartford and Bexley Heath were still very rural in character, with a large area of trees and scrub extending between the two towns. It was here that he came across a pair of birds he could not even recognise, let alone identify. So he did what he always did under such circumstances: lowered the barrel of his gun and discharged a volley of lead shot towards the unfortunate creatures. Being a practised marksman, he hit both his targets, and they fell lifeless to the ground.

  He examined the corpses carefully. Superficially they resembled the common whitethroat: small and slender, with a thin bill and long tail. But the colour was like no bird he had ever seen. The male had deep magenta underparts, the shade of a fine red burgundy, a greyish-brown back and head, and a few tiny pale spots around the throat and bill. The female was more drab and browner in shade, but shared her mate’s basic plumage pattern.

  Excited but mystified by his find, Latham took the specimens home and showed them to his fellow bird collectors. These included Thomas Pennant, the man who, as we have seen, had already made such a huge contribution to the naming of Britain’s birds.

  Pennant agreed that this was indeed a new bird to science, and granted Latham the honour of naming it. Even though the birds had actually been shot on Bexley Heath, he decided for some unknown reason to call the species Sylvia dartfor
diensis:iii Dartford warbler.

  *

  Unlike its cousins, most of which have large breeding ranges stretching across Europe, western Asia and the Middle East, the Dartford warbler is confined to a small area of maritime western Europe. Its range runs from southern England, through western France, Spain and Portugal, to the north-western tip of Africa. With such a restricted distribution, and a declining population, the species has been categorised as ‘Near Threatened’ by the global conservation organisation BirdLife International.

  Being on the very northern edge of its range here in Britain, the Dartford warbler is vulnerable to anything that might threaten its survival. In the two centuries or so since Latham’s discovery, its primary habitat – lowland heath – has been largely destroyed. Today, less than one-fifth of England’s original heathland remains, mostly in the southern counties of Dorset and Hampshire, with a few outlying patches in Devon, Surrey, Sussex and East Anglia.

  But habitat loss is only one problem faced by this tenacious little bird. As a resident rather than a migrant, and with a diet of small insects, it is very susceptible to hard winters. This is particularly problematic during long spells of ice and snow, which make it hard to find food, and also weaken the birds by lowering their body temperature.

  The cold winters of the first few decades of the twentieth century gradually reduced the population and range of Britain’s Dartford warblers. The crunch came during the infamous ‘Big Freeze’ of 1962–3. For more than two months, from late December through to early March, Britain froze solid, with a thick layer of snow covering the ground, in conditions more severe than had been seen for over 200 years.

  The winter of 1962–3 was horrendous enough for the human inhabitants of the British Isles; but for our birds it was, quite simply, a disaster. The ornithologist and broadcaster James Fisher summed up the enormity of the situation when, towards the end of the worst winter in living memory, he announced that ‘It seems likely that at least half the wild birds living in this country before last Christmas are now dead.’