Mrs Moreau's Warbler

by Stephen Moss

  The most famous of all aboriginal bird names is – thanks to its worldwide popularity as a cagebird – budgerigar.v The name is supposed to come from a phrase meaning ‘good cockatoo’. ‘Good’ in this case refers to these birds’ uncanny ability to find precious sources of water out in the bone-dry outback, a crucial aid to nomadic people in times of drought.

  But other names which to our untrained ears may sound aboriginal, in fact have a very different origin. The word ‘cockatoo’, used for a family of birds closely associated with Australia, is actually from the Malay language – hence its early appearance in Arthur Bowes Smyth’s 1788 journal. Likewise the names of Australia’s tallest bird, the emu, and the heaviest, the southern cassowary, are not aboriginal either, but derive respectively from Portuguese and Malay, the latter coming into English via Dutch or French. In both cases, this is because members of the cockatoo and cassowary families had previously been discovered in south-east Asia, and so had already been given names.

  Australian bird names are also distinguished by their frequent use of nicknames, and some over-the-top – yet often very appropriate – epithets. These include noisy (pitta, friarbird and miner), magnificent (riflebird), graceful (honeyeater), rainbow (lorikeet, bee-eater and pitta) and elegant (parrot). But for sheer hyperbole, it is hard to beat a quartet of fairy-wrens, tiny yet colourful birds with cocked tails, whose names get more and more elaborate as they go up the scale: from variegated, through lovely and splendid, to superb.

  As for those originally based on nicknames, my favourites are Jacky winter, another member of the Australian robin family, and Willie wagtail, a species of fantail. Jacky winter may have arisen from the bird’s habit – like its European counterpart the robin – of singing during the winter months. Willie wagtail, as Fraser and Gray point out, is the ‘most archetypal of Australian bird names’. Yet it seems more likely that when the colonists came across a slender black-and-white bird with a long tail they simply named it after a bird familiar from back home, the pied wagtail (‘willie wagtail’ was already used as a folk name in Britain, especially in Scotland).9

  Despite their informal and unscientific origins, a handful of other names coined by those early colonists have somehow managed to escape the tendency of modern ornithologists to ‘tidy up’ bird names, and are still used today. These include the Cape Barren goose, a peculiar-looking bird with a grey body and lime-green bill, named after an island off the north-east coast of Tasmania; the brush-turkey, a member of the megapode family, which incubates its eggs by burying them in a huge mound of earth and leaves; and the lyrebird, whose fan-like tail does indeed closely resemble that ancient stringed instrument.vi

  *

  Despite the awful start to their new life, those unfortunate convicts transported to Australia on the First Fleet, and the sailors who accompanied them, did ultimately manage to create a new home in this forbidding and quintessentially foreign land, many thousands of miles from their old lives.

  In doing so, they began the process of globalisation that led to the world we know today, in which shrinking horizons have seen the sharing of knowledge and the homogenisation of culture and language. At the same time as these new names were springing up in Australia, successive revolutions were occurring in the way we understood the natural world, leading inevitably to slow but steady standardisation in the English names given to birds.

  Not everyone was able to take advantage of this expansion in travel and knowledge. Back in Britain, the vast majority of people – especially those living in rural areas – led a virtually sedentary life, rarely travelling more than a few miles from where they were born. For them, the world was bounded by a few familiar places and people, and also by a few well-known and frequently encountered birds.

  So despite the best efforts of pioneering ornithologists from Turner to Pennant – and of course Linnaeus – to standardise the names being used for birds, there was still a powerful pull in the opposite direction. Well into the nineteenth century, and sometimes beyond, ordinary folk still preferred to use folk names: those that had been used by their parents and grandparents before them. Many of the new names took a long time to reach rural communities; and even when they did, were unlikely to gain acceptance over the simpler and more familiar names used for centuries.

  This tension between the new and the old names – and between the new science and the old traditions of the countryside – is demonstrated in the life story of one remarkable man: the poet and naturalist John Clare. Although he was courted by literary society, he still retained his rural roots – and the bird names he had learned as a boy – for the whole of his life. And even as ornithology was gaining reputation as a science, these old names were proving remarkably resistant to change.

  3: The Nature Poet

  No other poet wrote about birds as often – or as well – as John Clare. This nineteenth-century farm labourer turned man of letters was, as the ornithologist and broadcaster James Fisher deftly put it: ‘the finest poet of Britain’s minor naturalists and the finest naturalist of Britain’s major poets’.

  Thanks to his field skills, observational talents and hard-won expertise, Clare’s writings contain references to at least 120 (and possibly as many as 150) different species. These observations give us a profound insight into the dramatic and often devastating changes to the birds of our farmed countryside over the past two hundred years. Foremost amongst these is the loss of the bird Clare described as a ubiquitous ‘summer noise among the meadow hay’: the corncrake or, as Clare called it, the landrail.

  Patronised by the London literati as a ‘peasant poet’, Clare, and in due course his poetry and prose, were intimately linked to the place where he grew up, and spent the majority of his life: the village of Helpston. Living on the edge of the flat, watery fens of East Anglia, but also close to the classic ‘Middle England’ landscape of Northamptonshire, the young Clare could explore fields and meadows, streams and rivers, woods and fens, and get to know their birdlife.

  Through his rootedness in one place, during his twenties and thirties John Clare produced some of the finest nature poems ever written. However, for over a century these were neglected by literary critics and the general public alike, until from the 1950s onwards his reputation was restored and rehabilitated. Today he is widely hailed as one of the most influential of all writers on nature.

  I became hooked on Clare’s bird poetry more or less by accident, when studying English Literature at Cambridge back in the early 1980s. My Director of Studies at Gonville and Caius College, the famously enigmatic poet J. H. Prynne, learned of my interest in birds and enthusiasm for the poetry of John Clare, and suggested I meet John Barrell, who I later discovered was one of the world’s greatest experts on Clare’s writings.

  Sitting in Professor Barrell’s wood-panelled room in the forbidding surroundings of King’s College, I nervously explained that I had noticed that the verse structure of Clare’s bird poems somehow seemed to mimic the movements and behaviour of the bird itself. Encouraged by his positive response, I went on to write my undergraduate dissertation on this very subject.10

  I am not alone in my love and admiration of John Clare; he has inspired many of today’s cohort of ‘new nature writers’. But at the time, not everyone approved of the way he wrote about the natural world. His contemporary John Keats complained that in his verse ‘the description too much prevailed over the sentiment.’ While that may occasionally be true, it is impossible to dispute Clare’s intimate knowledge and understanding of nature, gained from day to day, season to season and year to year, and more importantly his skill in turning these marvellously detailed observations into poetry.vii

  Yet despite Clare’s undoubted influence and popularity today, for the new reader the poems can at first appear rather baffling. This is not just because of the style of writing, which, once you get used to his lack of punctuation and rather eccentric spelling, is actually very accessible – and full of delightful insights into bird behavi
our – but also because in many cases the self-taught Clare chose to ignore the official name for the species, preferring to use the folk name he grew up with.

  So in his poems we find the land rail and fern owl, butter bump and fire tail, water hen and peewit – now known respectively as the corncrake and nightjar, bittern and redstart, moorhen and lapwing.viii

  At other times, Clare would use the correct epithet for the species, but ascribe it to the wrong family, as when he referred to the reed sparrow (reed bunting), reed wren (reed warbler) and grasshopper lark (grasshopper warbler). He would also often use names interchangeably for several different species, as in the opening lines of this sonnet, where ‘black cap’ refers to the great tit:

  Under the twigs the black cap hangs in vain

  With snow white patch streaked over either eye

  The bird we now know as the blackcap – a member of the warbler family – Clare also called the March nightingale, because of its early return from its winter quarters and melodious song. However, while he may have titled his sonnet after the folk name, ‘The March Nightingale’, within the poem he preferred the official name:

  The rocking clown leans oer the spinney rail

  In admiration at the sunny sight

  The while the Blackcap doth his ears assail

  With such a rich and such an early song

  He stops his own and thinks the nightingale

  Hath of her monthly reckoning counted wrong

  Clare’s use of folk names is in some ways a throwback to an earlier age, before the standardisation brought about by ornithologists, when bird names were far more fluid and changeable.

  But even Clare could not resist the tide forever. Changes were afoot, and nineteenth-century ornithologists were busily continuing the work of Thomas Pennant and his predecessors in standardising the names given to birds. In the longer term the messy assemblage of folk names so beloved of Clare, with several alternative names for each species, was simply not sustainable.

  This also reflected bigger changes occurring at the time: the growing gulf between the rise of science, epitomised by a new generation of museum-based ornithologists who we shall meet in the next chapter, and men such as Clare, who based their knowledge on hard-won observations in the field, and were often contemptuous of the professionals. According to Clare scholar Eric Robinson, the poet did not have a very high opinion of revered ornithologists such as Pennant, as is evident in this comment on the plucking of geese: ‘Mr Pennant says he saw the buisness of Geese pulling baere and that they pulled gosslings that were not above 6 weeks old I have no hesitation in saying that Mr Pennant is a Liar.’11

  *

  One reason why names had to be standardised was purely pragmatic, and due to the birth of a new publishing phenomenon: books about the natural world. Following the popularity of White’s bestselling The Natural History of Selborne (see Chapter 3), there was a growing demand for ‘guidebooks’ enabling ordinary people to identify the wild creatures they saw.

  This gap in the market was soon filled by the engraver and political radical Thomas Bewick, with his pioneering A History of British Birds, published in two volumes: Land Birds (1797) and Water Birds (1804). These reached a very wide audience, thanks to their delightful woodcut illustrations and clear, readable prose.

  As was the custom of his day, Bewick referred to willow-wrens and throstles, titlarks and ringtails, pied and barred woodpeckers.ix Many of his readers would have known these, while some would have had their own preferred local versions. But Bewick also used a number of truly obscure names, including cravat goose, ash-coloured sandpiper and castaneous duck,x which would have been baffling to many of his readers. It was clear that from now on the names used for birds needed to be standardised, to enable the reader to know which species was being referred to, whether they lived in Penzance or Penarth, Inverness or the Isle of Wight. Someone needed to take on the thankless and time-consuming task of collating all the different names in use at the time, and making clear and lasting decisions on which should prevail. Such a person would have to be tough and uncompromising, knowledgeable and clear-thinking, assiduous and at times inspired, with the hard-won skills of a field observer combined with the scientific knowledge of the professional ornithologist. On top of all this, they would need the stamina to take on a workload that might defeat a lesser man.

  The time was ripe for the entrance onto the scene of one of the least likely of all James Fisher’s ‘ornithological heroes’; a man who simply got on with the job in hand: ‘In his efficient way, he swept up almost the last of our birds that were unknown because unrecognised, and usually unrecognised because undistinguished from some close relative.’12

  The name of this often misunderstood and underrated man, who gave his name to one of the rarest and most elusive of all Britain’s breeding birds? George Montagu.

  4: The Military Man

  As I gazed across the field of golden barley, my eyes were momentarily dazzled by the reflection from the sun, high in the clear blue July sky. Then, in the distance, close to the hedgerow bordering the back of the field, I saw a movement. This time it wasn’t just heat haze, but – at last – the bird I had come to see.

  The female harrier rose up on long, slender wings just a few feet above the sea of barley, the crop waving to and fro in the gentle breeze. As she floated effortlessly in the thick summer air I could see the distinctive white rump at the base of her long, narrow tail, contrasting with the brownish hue of the rest of her plumage.

  For a few moments, I took in her elegant shape and form before, seemingly out of nowhere, another bird appeared. This was the male: even slimmer and more aerodynamic than his mate, and sporting a pale, dove-grey plumage with black tips to his wings, as if he had just dipped them in a bottle of ink. As the male approached, she rose higher into the sky, and they began an aerial dance, twisting and turning in the warm summer air to cement their bonds of courtship.

  Then I noticed that the male was carrying something in his talons – a vole, or perhaps a meadow pipit or skylark. He flew above his mate, stalled in mid-air, and dropped his prey; a fraction of a second later she stalled too, then twisted almost upside-down to grab her gift from the air, before flying down to her hidden nest.

  I had witnessed one of the most intimate of all bird behaviours and, as the male powered away into the distance, I was left wondering if I had really seen it at all, so quickly had it happened. But I had – and I’m one of the few lucky ones, for although this elegant harrier breeds across a wide swathe of Europe, western Asia and north-west Africa, barely a dozen pairs of this beautiful creature return each spring to nest in the arable fields of southern Britain.

  Yet despite this bird’s rarity in the UK, it was in south Devon that, just over two centuries ago, one man identified it as a species new to science; a species that would eventually come to bear his name: Montagu’s harrier.

  *

  George Montagu first came across what would become ‘his’ harrier on a hot August day in 1803. A local man had shot and killed a bird of prey and, unable to identify it, brought it to Montagu for him to inspect. As he dissected the bird, discovering that it had a freshly caught skylark in its stomach, Montagu became more and more excited. For although it superficially resembled a male hen harrier, this bird was noticeably smaller and more slender, and also had a longer tail, with reddish-brown markings on its pale grey wings.

  Confident that it was a species hitherto unknown to science, Montagu gave the bird its original scientific and English names: Falco cinerarius, the ‘Ash-coloured Falcon’. Two decades after Montagu’s death, the French ornithologist Louis Vieillot and his Dutch colleague Coenraad Temminck commemorated its discoverer by renaming it ‘le busard Montagu’, from which William MacGillivray coined the current English name: Montagu’s harrier.

  But George Montagu’s contribution to our knowledge and understanding of Britain’s birds went far beyond this tribute. His life story reveals much about the stifl
ing formality of the society in which he lived; a society he ultimately chose to reject, so that he could pursue his lifelong passion for birds.

  Montagu packed a lot into his six decades on this Earth. Born in 1753, he joined the army at the age of seventeen and was married a year later to Ann Courtenay, the high-born daughter of a nobleman. She gave birth to six healthy children – four sons and two daughters – while Montagu himself rose to become a lieutenant colonel in the county militia of Wiltshire.

  But despite his outwardly successful and respectable life, all was not well with George Montagu. He had always been fascinated by the natural world, yet the demands of his military career, and his obligations towards his large and growing family, made him increasingly unhappy and frustrated. By the time he reached his thirty-sixth year he was suffering from what we might now call a mid-life crisis.

  A letter survives which sheds some light on his state of mind: written in June 1789 to the Hampshire vicar and naturalist Gilbert White. White had just published his life’s work, The Natural History of Selborne, which would go on to become the bestselling nature book of all time. In the pages of his letter, the much younger Montagu pours out his heart, telling White that he has ‘delighted in being an ornithologist from infancy, and, was I not bound by conjugal attachment, should like to ride my hobby into distant parts’.

  Eventually, that’s exactly what he did. But not before he faced crisis after crisis: a series of disasters that might have broken a lesser man. For during the following decade, Montagu’s life began to fall apart in a quite spectacular manner.