by Stephen Moss
For the Dartford warbler, the situation was critical. Its population had already been heavily reduced by the previous year’s cold winter, which had left just a hundred breeding pairs on the heaths of Dorset and the New Forest. But following the winter of 1962–63, numbers plummeted: in spring 1963 only a dozen pairs could be found, mostly on the coast around Poole Harbour, where temperatures had stayed marginally higher than elsewhere.
From this tiny and unpromising base, however, the fortunes of the Dartford warbler at last began to turn. Thanks to a long run of mild winters from the 1970s onwards, numbers steadily grew, to reach a peak by the mid-1990s of well over 3,000 breeding pairs. The two hard winters of 2009–10 and 2010–11 stalled the recovery a little, but the Dartford warbler is now thriving in a way that no-one could have predicted after those terrible events of the early 1960s.
As for the Dartford warbler’s discoverer, John Latham, he lived a long and productive life, dying at his home in Hampshire on 4 February 1837, in his ninety-seventh year. And he certainly enjoyed the freedom he gained after his retirement from practising medicine. Having stopped working in 1796, he devoted the remaining four decades of his life to ornithology.
Like other pioneering ornithologists of his day, many of whom we shall encounter in the next chapter, he gave his name to a number of birds around the globe, such as Latham’s snipe (sometimes known as Japanese snipe). Other species, including the glossy-black cockatoo, Australian brush-turkey, grosbeak starling and forest francolin, were also originally named after Latham, but have since been given new names.
Yet even he might be surprised to discover that the deeply unsuitable epithet he gave to the Dartford warbler has survived so long. And it’s not the only one. Latham named two other British birds after his adopted county, Kent: the Sandwich tern, discovered by his fellow-ornithologist William Boys in 1784, and described and named by Latham three years later; and the Kentish plover, a small wader also discovered by Boys, when he shot three unfamiliar birds on the East Kent coast in May 1787.
Both names are, like that of the Dartford warbler, totally unsuited to the species that bear them. The Sandwich tern (named after the town, not the foodstuff) is found along the coasts of five continents, only being absent from Australasia and Antarctica; while the Kentish plover is also globally widespread. At least the Sandwich tern does regularly occur in Kent, whereas the Kentish plover no longer even breeds in Britain, having disappeared during the second half of the twentieth century. Yet their names survive: a reminder that the most suitable name for a bird is rarely the one by which it is known.
Latham spent many of his later years attempting to bring together the many new ornithological discoveries being made at that time, which he published in a massive ten-volume work, A General History of Birds, which appeared in instalments between 1821 and 1828.1
However, his advanced age unfortunately meant that the work contained many basic mistakes, as the Revd Charles Swainson, a Victorian parson-ornithologist and the author of a seminal book on the folk names of birds,2 pointed out: ‘His memory was not good; hence he has frequently described the same species by different names; and he placed too much faith in drawings, which led to the same error.’3
To be fair on Latham, he was doing his best to clarify a very confusing situation. The late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries had seen a huge proliferation in the number and variety of bird specimens brought back to Britain from across the globe, thanks to the boom in exploration led by the expansion of the British Empire from roughly 1783 to 1815. ‘The museums of Europe’, Swainson also commented, ‘became crowded with new birds, quite unknown to Linnaeus, without any one naturalist to describe them’.4
John Latham had set himself the mission of categorising and classifying all the world’s birds; a daunting task for a man by then in his eighties. But although he did not fully succeed, he did at least try. And of all the new places being investigated at this time, and the new species of birds discovered, none were more exciting than the exotic specimens from that newly discovered land far away in the southern hemisphere: Australia.
Decades earlier, these extraordinary birds had captivated Latham, who by examining specimens had written the descriptions of many new species in The Voyage of Governor Phillip to Botany Bay, by Arthur Phillip, the first governor of New South Wales, which was published in 1789. And although he never visited Australia himself – indeed, never actually set foot outside Britain – he was nevertheless instrumental in naming many of Australia’s best-known birds, including the superb lyrebird, wedge-tailed eagle and the sulphur-crested cockatoo. His fascination with birds down under ultimately led to him being widely called ‘the grandfather of Australian ornithology’.
Latham’s fascination with Australia’s birds was a consequence of a series of historical events, which make a fascinating diversion in our story of how birds got their English names. The coincidence of several factors brought it about: a rise in crime, the loss of a war, and the convenient and timely discovery of a new land on the other side of the globe.
Since the early 1700s, in an increasingly lawless Britain, it had made economic and political sense to send convicts abroad – a process known by the euphemistically benign word ‘transportation’. During the middle years of the eighteenth century, more than a thousand people had been sent across the Atlantic Ocean to America, but after the War of Independence ended with the triumph of the rebel colonists in 1783, that avenue was closed. As a result, a new destination had to be found for these unfortunate prisoners. That place was just about as far away from Britain as you could get: Australia.
2: Flaming Galahs and Fairy-Wrens
It had been a long, and at times unspeakably horrendous, voyage. The fleet of eleven ships had left Portsmouth on 13 May 1787, and sailed across the world’s oceans for more than eight months, until the first vessel finally made landfall at Botany Bay on 18 January the following year. During the 15,000-mile journey, almost 1,500 crew and passengers had endured baking heat, freak storms, food and water rationing, an aborted mutiny, the company of rats, lice, bedbugs, fleas and cockroaches, and the deaths of almost fifty of their fellow men and women through sickness, violence and the occasional drowning.
The story of the First Fleet has become the stuff of legend. For these were no ordinary passengers, but convicts, being deported from England to this new and unknown land, in what would eventually become one of the greatest mass movements of people in the whole of history: the colonisation of Australia.
Along with the earlier settlement of North America by the Pilgrim Fathers, and the later expansion of the British Empire into Africa and Asia, this would extend the influence of English bird names around the world. But for the people being taken to the other side of the globe, the naming of the birds in this new land was probably the very last thing on their minds.
In The Fatal Shore, his eloquent and moving account of the history of transportation, Robert Hughes points out that crew and convicts alike were being sent into the complete unknown:
Never had a colony been founded so far from its parent state, or in such ignorance of the land it occupied. There had been no reconnaissance. In 1770, Captain James Cook had made landfall on the unexplored east coast of his utterly enigmatic continent, stopped for a short while at a place named Botany Bay and gone north again. Since then, no ship had called: not a word, not an observation, for seventeen years, each one of which was exactly like the thousands that had preceded it…5
It is no wonder that, as the ships finally made landfall, the overriding emotion amongst the passengers was one of relief at having survived the voyage at all. But this was swiftly followed by bafflement: at the unforgiving sandstone landscape with its unusual greyish-green vegetation, the terrifying appearance of the indigenous peoples, and especially the truly bizarre wild creatures they encountered as they began to explore their new and utterly unfamiliar surroundings.
There were peculiar animals that jumped along on their hind leg
s, egg-laying mammals sporting a beak and webbed feet, and an astonishing array of impossibly colourful and noisy birds. As his ship Lady Penrhyn was making her way up the narrow channel towards Port Jackson (now Sydney), the ship’s surgeon Arthur Bowes Smyth made this excited entry in his journal: ‘The singing of the various birds among the trees, and the flight of the numerous parraquets, lorrequets, cockatoos, and maccaws, made all around appear like an enchantment…’6
He may have been wrong about macaws (they are only found in the Americas) but, as Hughes points out, there were still plenty more birds for him to marvel at:
Several dozen kinds of parrot thronged the harbour bush: Galahs, bald-eyed Corellas, pink Leadbeater’s [now Major Mitchell’s] Cockatoos, black Funereal [now Yellow-tailed Black] Cockatoos, down through the rainbow-coloured lorikeets and rosellas to the tiny, seed-eating budgerigars which, when disturbed, flew up in green clouds so dense that they cast long rippling shadows on the ground.7
These birds can still be seen in the Sydney area, and across much of the rest of this vast nation, though sadly in far lower numbers than when the First Fleet arrived. But from the awestruck accounts of those early settlers, through later generations of Australians, right up to today’s visitors from abroad, that sense that Australia’s birds – and their names – are truly unique has never really gone away. I discovered this for myself more than two centuries later, in 2008, when I visited this strange and beguiling land.
*
The plains-wanderer may sound like the jolly swagman out of ‘Waltzing Matilda’, Australia’s unofficial national anthem, but it is actually one of that country’s rarest, least-known and most sought-after birds. About the size of a song thrush, and with the physique of a pot-bellied quail, its nearest relatives are the South American seedsnipes.
On that trip to Australia I had a rare opportunity to connect with this almost mythically elusive bird. Nervous with anticipation, a small group of us gathered under a clear, star-filled sky in a paddock in rural New South Wales. I say ‘paddock’ but, being Australia, it covered an area of more than 80 square miles, and its perimeter was comfortably longer than a marathon course.
Torches at the ready, we set off. It was a chilly night, and I was soon wishing I had worn warmer clothes, as it looked set to be a long one. Yet barely five minutes after we began our search, one of the guides caught a pale, moth-like creature in her spotlight beam. Fluttering on long, slender wings, it plummeted to the ground – surely never to be seen again.
The torches swept around like anti-aircraft lights, and then I heard a clear warning voice: ‘Stephen … don’t step forward.’
As the torch beam reached me, I looked down, to find a small, brown creature crouching motionless, exactly where my foot was about to tread. It was a male plains-wanderer, staring right back at me with a mixture of fear and bafflement. Although at that point I had been watching birds for over 40 years, and seen almost 2,000 different species around the world, this truly was the most extraordinary, heart-stopping moment of my entire birding life.
The appreciative noises coming from the darkness around me suggested I was not alone. We stood and stared at this extraordinary creature like members of some minor religious sect until, a few moments later, it flew away into the darkness, never to be seen again.
This was my very first visit to Australia and, despite my long years of watching birds, on each of the other six continents, it was like starting birding all over again in some kind of weird parallel universe. That was because of the 200-plus different species of bird I saw on my whistle-stop tour, more than eighty per cent were completely new to me.
Before I go birding in a new place, I like to do my homework; looking up the birds I hope to see, and trying to learn the key plumage features that will help me identify them. But this time, the very act of doing so left me more confused than ever. What on earth were galahs and gerygones, currawongs and pardalotes, blue bonnets and bronzewings? What was a weebill, or a dollarbird? What was the difference between an apostlebird and a mistletoebird, apart from their vaguely festive names? And what – or perhaps who – was a Jacky winter or a Willie wagtail?
Some species – along with their names – were far more familiar. I was hoping to catch up with one of the largest of the all the world’s birds, the emu, and one of the best known, the budgerigar. I knew that the brolga was a species of crane, and a cockatiel a kind of miniature cockatoo. I was well acquainted with bowerbirds and lyrebirds from David Attenborough’s television programmes, and could guess that a varied sitella might look rather like a nuthatch (Sitta is the generic name for nuthatches) – as indeed it does.
But I had no idea that the bell miner, the noisy friarbird, and the eastern spinebill are all members of the vast honeyeater family, whose seventy-plus species covered page after page of my field guide. Gazing at their names, many of which appeared to be some combination of a colour and a part of the body – yellow-faced, white-eared, black-chinned, blue-faced, and brown-headed, together with scarlet, black, dusky, banded, striped and painted – I began to suffer from blurred vision, and wondered whether I would be able to cope when faced with this bewildering array of new birds.
*
The reason that Australian bird names seem so odd is that many of the birds themselves are confined to this particular part of the world. Australasia finally broke away from the much larger landmass of Gondwanaland about 100 million years ago; that’s an awfully long time for its fauna and flora to have evolved along a very different path from the rest of the planet.
As a result, more than four-fifths of Australasian mammals, 90 per cent of reptiles, and 93 per cent of amphibian species are endemic – found only in Australasia, and nowhere else in the world. Because birds can fly, and therefore colonise new lands across the sea, a far lower proportion is endemic: even so, about 350 out of the 800 regularly occurring species of bird in Australasia – almost one in two – are only found here. Compare this to Britain, with just one endemic species (the Scottish crossbill), or Europe, with about a dozen.iv Yet despite the fact that many of Australia’s birds cannot be seen anywhere else in the world, their names often seem strangely familiar to a British birder. So where did these names come from? On my week-long trek from Melbourne to Sydney, via the eucalypt forests, wetlands and mountains of Victoria and New South Wales, I came across the welcome swallow, Australian raven and black swan, all of which are indeed cousins of our own species.
But the woodswallows, fairy-wrens, robins, treecreepers and the Australian magpie are not at all closely related to their Eurasian counterparts. The magpie-lark, a black-and-white bird about the size of a blackbird, is neither a magpie nor a lark, but a monarch flycatcher – one of a family of small, insectivorous songbirds. Despite their familiar sounding names, many of these birds – including the fairy-wrens and robins – are more closely related to one another than they are to the groups of birds they superficially resemble.
The reason they have such unsuitable and misleading names is, of course, a legacy of those early settlers. Convicts – and many of the sailors – were forced to make a new life in this new land, but that did not mean that they forgot their former existence. And so when one homesick colonist came across a small, plump, perky bird with a red breast hopping across the ground in front of him, it was only natural that he should name it after a favourite bird from home.
This explains why a family of almost fifty species, taxonomically sandwiched between the birds-of-paradise of New Guinea and the picathartes (bald crows) of West Africa, is still known today as the ‘Australasian robins’. Some, like the scarlet, rose, pink and flame robins, do indeed have that familiar red breast. But others, including the eastern and western yellow robins, the smart black-and-white hooded robin, and the skulking, greyish-coloured mangrove robin, sport a wide range of different colours. And none of them is even vaguely related to our own robin redbreast.
Not every Australian bird was named out of a nostalgic yearning for the English
countryside and its native wildlife. Some were given names based on what they were called by Australia’s indigenous population. But even though the aboriginal peoples had been on the continent for at least 30,000 – and perhaps as long as 60,000 – years before the western settlers first arrived, precious few Australian bird names derive from their languages.
Those that do include the gang-gang cockatoo, a greyish-brown and scarlet-headed bird confined to south-east Australia; and its noisy and colourful grey and shocking pink cousin, the galah, one of the most familiar of all Australian birds. This sociable, noisy species has given rise to the slang phrase ‘flaming galah’, still widely used as an insult to describe a simpleton or fool.
One of Australia’s best-known birds also bears an aboriginal name. The laughing kookaburra is a dry-country species of kingfisher whose ringing call does indeed sound like hysterical human laughter. The name ‘kookaburra’ – clearly onomatopoeic in origin – has been traced back to several indigenous languages. Yet such was the prejudice against ‘native’ names that, despite being widely used for almost a century, kookaburra was only adopted as the species’ official name in 1926. Before then it was known as the ‘great brown kingfisher’, a rather prosaic name originally coined by Latham.
Such an extrovert bird was also bound to attract its fair share of folk names – perhaps more than any other Australian bird. Many of the names listed by Ian Fraser and Jeannie Gray in their definitive work on the subject, Australian Bird Names,8 including ‘Jacky’, ‘Jacko’ and ‘laughing John’, derive from the English word ‘jackass’, referring to the kookaburra’s donkey-like call. Others, such as ‘alarm bird’, ‘breakfast bird’ and ‘clock bird’, all acknowledge the impossibility of staying asleep when a kookaburra is calling outside your bedroom window, while ‘woop woop pigeon’ and ‘ha ha duck’ acknowledge the sound’s similarity to human laughter.
