Mrs Moreau's Warbler

by Stephen Moss

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  William Bullock was, like Leach, an eccentric and extraordinary man. Described by Barbara and Richard Mearns (authors of Biographies for Birdwatchers) as ‘a naturalist, collector, traveller, antiquary, auctioneer, and showman’,1 he ran a travelling museum that contained well over 30,000 exhibits, including more than 3,000 specimens of birds and their eggs, and attracted hordes of visitors. But in 1819 he decided to sell off this vast collection to fund a characteristically madcap scheme to make his fortune in Mexico. This was how Leach came to purchase the bird that still bears his name.

  We have no idea whether Bullock was aware of the fact that he had a prior claim to the naming of this enigmatic seabird, but we do know that three years later, in 1822, he and his son (also called William) finally headed off to Mexico, where they hoped to make a killing by investing in silver mines. However, the scheme was not a success, and the elder William later returned to Britain via the United States, writing several books about his travels along the way. He died in Chelsea, in 1849, at the age of seventy-six.

  William Bullock may have been denied his moment of fame by Leach, but he did live to see a bird named after him – and his son. While in Mexico, they had continued their obsession with shooting and collecting birds. Later, another William – Swainson – chose to name a new species of bright-orange-and-black bird discovered there after them, as Bullock’s oriole. ‘This, the most beautiful of the group yet discovered in Mexico’, wrote Swainson,ii ‘will record the name of those ornithologists who have thrown so much light on the birds of that country’.

  However, despite its auspicious start Bullock’s oriole has had a rather chequered history: for many years it was considered merely a well-marked race of the Baltimore oriole, but it has now been granted full specific status once again. (This is discussed in more detail in Chapter 7.)

  Back in England, William Leach had also thrown himself into the nomenclatural fray, and was busily giving names to a number of new species. Unfortunately, most of these were later quietly dropped, as he had chosen some rather odd naming systems, such as the nine different genera of birds he christened with variations on the name Caroline (or the Latin ‘Carolina’), including anagrams such as Cirolana, Conilera and Rocinela. As Barbara and Richard Mearns suggest, although some people took these to be a tribute to Queen Caroline of Brunswick, the wife of George IV, it is more likely that they referred to a mysterious woman with whom Leach was in love.

  All this was taking its toll on Leach’s already fragile mental and physical health. In 1821 he fell ill, having ‘overworked himself to such a degree that his health and mind became affected’, and retired to Italy, accompanied by his devoted sister.

  But although gone, he was certainly not forgotten. As well as Leach’s storm petrel, William Elford Leach’s name featured, in one form or other, in the scientific names of well over a hundred species. More importantly, he was ultimately recognised for his efforts in putting museum science in Britain on a more organised and professional basis.

  For decades, zoologists on the continent had pioneered the revision of Linnaeus’s original method of classifying species into new and different groups, based on a range of different characters, rather than just one. This helped them work out the relationships between different species – along with larger groups such as families – with a far greater degree of accuracy than before. But British scientists, slavishly following the teachings of their Swedish master, had become inflexible in their thinking, refusing to budge from the original approach. As a result, British zoological studies had become stagnant and ossified.

  Leach had always corresponded with French zoologists (something both difficult and unpopular at a time when the Napoleonic Wars between Britain and France were at their height), and soon realised that they were onto something. Despite opposition from his peers, through his determination, insight and hard work, he managed to drag the science of zoology in Britain into the modern era, and give it the status it deserved.

  In 1836, the year of William Leach’s untimely death from cholera, a parliamentary enquiry delivered its verdict on the management of the Natural History Museum. Leach, noted one observer ‘was the first to make the English acquainted … with the progress that had been made in natural science on the Continent. Thus a new impetus was given to zoology’.iii

  His career may have been cut short by illness but, by dragging the infant science of zoology into the modern world, William Leach had paved the way for the next generation, and in particular two far more famous men: Alfred Russel Wallace and Charles Darwin. It is fitting that he should be memorialised in the name of one of our scarcest and most elusive seabirds.

  2: Eponymous Birds

  William Leach and George Montagu are just two of several thousand people commemorated in the vernacular or scientific names of the world’s birds – or, as these names are often known, ‘eponyms’.2 The heyday for this trend was during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when new species of birds were being discovered at a tremendous rate.

  This was fuelled by the expansion of the British Empire and its associated exploration of the globe, and especially by the rise of a new breed of intrepid gentleman-explorers, whose gung-ho attitudes would lay the foundation for much of our knowledge and understanding of the world’s birds.

  Appropriately, many of these men (and a handful of women) are still commemorated in the English names of birds. But even at a time when the fashion for eponyms was at its height, getting your name attached to a new species was not quite as easy as it might appear.

  First, you had to travel to distant places with a shotgun over your shoulder, and enough supplies to enable you to spend long and arduous periods in the field. Then you had to find a bird that had never been seen before, shoot it, retrieve the lifeless corpse, and preserve this for long enough for someone else to examine it – ideally one of the museum-based ornithologists back home in Britain. They needed to verify that what you had found was indeed new to science, and not simply some aberrant form, or unknown plumage, of an already familiar species.

  Finally, you had to persuade them to honour you by giving it your name – either in English or Latin, or preferably both. But this presented a further problem. The protocol was very clear: you were not under any circumstances permitted to name a bird after yourself, but you could name it after a fellow ornithologist, who would then, perhaps, return the favour by naming another new species after you.

  That was the theory. Unfortunately, however, this cosy mutual arrangement did not always work. In 1826, Charles Payraudeau named Audouin’s gull, which he had discovered on a visit to Corsica, after his ‘excellent ami’ Jean Victor Audouin. However, Audouin somehow neglected to return the favour, and so while his own name lives on in the field guides, the unfortunate Monsieur Payraudeau is consigned to ornithological obscurity. I like to imagine Payraudeau writing a series of increasingly desperate letters to Audouin, imploring him to fulfil his side of the bargain.iv

  Charles Payraudeau was perhaps unfortunate – after all, many other ornithologists of his day did end up being commemorated in eponymous bird names. Yet looking down a list of the 250 or so different birds that occur regularly in Britain, it immediately strikes me how few are named after people. The reason is obvious: by the time it became the norm to do so, from the late eighteenth century onwards, the vast majority of common British birds had already been found, and so already had vernacular names.

  Apart from Montagu’s harrier and Leach’s petrel, only one regular British breeding bird has an eponymous name: Cetti’s warbler, named after an eighteenth-century Italian Jesuit priest, Francesco Cetti.

  If we include passage migrants, wintering species and occasional breeders, six other species occurring in Britain are named after people: Bewick’s swan, Cory’s shearwater, Lady Amherst’s pheasant, Temminck’s stint, Richard’s pipit and Savi’s warbler. But when we consider vagrants – those rare birds that are occasional wanderers to our shores – then the p
icture changes dramatically, with another 42 species with eponymous names, making 51 in all.v Again, this makes sense: these mostly live in the more far-flung corners of the globe, so throughout this era were still being discovered and named.

  When it comes to nationality, as you might expect, most of those who have given their names to our birds are British – eighteen in all – followed by eight Italians, seven Germans,vi five Frenchmen and three Americans, with one Swede and one Dutchman. Some are so obscure we know virtually nothing about them, while others are amongst the most famous naturalists of all time.vii

  The vast majority of them – roughly three-quarters – were mainly active during the nineteenth century, though many were born in the eighteenth and did some of their most important work at this time. Spanning such a crucial period in British and world history, their names are not simply a narrative about ornithology and the naming of birds; they also conceal very human stories, which give us a detailed picture of the world in which they lived and worked.

  When I look down the list of the forty-three individuals,viii however, one thing immediately strikes me: the gender imbalance. Only three are women.

  They are Eleonora of Arborea, a fourteenth-century Sardinian princess, politician and military leader (Eleonora’s falcon); the eighteenth-century museum curator Anna Blackburne (Blackburnian warbler); and the British aristocrat Sarah Amherst (Lady Amherst’s pheasant). All three birds that bear their names are, like the women they honour, fascinating in their own particular way.

  Eleonora’s falcon is a slim but powerful raptor which has strayed northwards to Britain from its Mediterranean breeding grounds on only a handful of occasions, since the first was seen over Formby Point in Lancashire in August 1977. Uniquely amongst European birds of prey, Eleonora’s falcons delay their breeding until late in the summer, so that they have chicks in the nest during September, the peak period for the autumn migration of songbirds. This guarantees a ready supply of fresh food for their youngsters, which having fledged then follow their parents all the way to Madagascar, where they spend the winter. The next spring, they return to the cliffs of islands such as Mallorca, where I have watched flocks of them during late April catching dragonflies in bright blue skies.

  Despite its striking appearance – the species comes in two colour phases, with some birds similar in plumage to a hobby, others all dark – Eleonora’s falcon was not described until 1839, from specimens shot by the Italian soldier and naturalist Alberto della Marmora (of whom more later) on the island of Sardinia. Della Marmora sent his specimens to his colleague in Turin, Giuseppe Gené, who decided to commemorate the location of the birds’ discovery by naming it after Eleonora of Arborea, a Sardinian princess famed for leading her troops into battle. This may at first appear a rather odd choice, until we discover that she is not only still the island’s greatest heroine, but also passed a law protecting the falcons, by preventing the young being taken from the nest – an act of benevolence far ahead of its time.

  Anna Blackburne, after whom one of the most beautiful of all North American wood warblers is named, cannot claim quite such a heroic life. Indeed, as Barbara and Richard Mearns point out in their companion volume dealing with North American eponyms, Audubon to Xantus, ‘she is scarcely known at all’.3 But in her own quiet way she bucked the trend for women of her time, by becoming a professional naturalist in all but name.

  Anna was born in 1726 near Warrington in Lancashire (now Cheshire), and after her mother’s death spent much of her life looking after her rich industrialist father in his home at Orford Hall. Being both wealthy and unmarried, she could and did devote much of her spare time to studying nature, an interest she inherited from her father, who conveniently was a friend of Thomas Pennant.

  To develop her knowledge of the natural world, Anna first learned Latin, and then began a lengthy correspondence with none other than Linnaeus himself. Inspired by the great man, she set up her own museum at Orford Hall, which eventually housed a major collection of birds, plants and insects. Some of these were sent by another of her correspondents, the German ornithologist and collector Peter Simon Pallas, who also had several species of bird named after him.ix

  Meanwhile, Anna’s younger brother Ashton had travelled to North America, where like many young men of this era he indulged his passion for shooting every living thing within range of his gun. Writing in 1784, after Ashton’s death, Thomas Pennant was suitably impressed at his dedication and industry:

  To the rich museum of American birds, preserved by Mrs. ANNA BLACKBURN [sic], of Orford, near Warrington, I am indebted for the opportunity of describing almost every one known in the provinces of Jersey, New York and Connecticut. They were sent over to the Lady by her brother, the late Mr. Ashton Blackburn; who added to the skill and zeal of a sportsman, the most pertinent remarks on the specimens he collected for his worthy and philosophical sister.4

  Sadly, we do not know if the colourful, black and fiery orange specimen that Pennant named Blackburnian warbler was among those shot by Ashton, but, on the balance of probability, we can infer it was. This has led some to believe that the warbler was named after Ashton, and not his sister; but given Pennant’s closeness to the family it is likely that in naming the bird he intended to commemorate both.x

  The third member of this diverse trio of women after whom birds on the British List are named is the redoubtable Sarah, Lady Amherst. Born the Hon. Sarah Archer in July 1762,xi she was widowed with three children before she was forty. But less than a year after her first husband’s death, she married again, to a man ten years younger than her: William, Lord Amherst.

  Despite Sarah’s relatively advanced age, she went on to bear him four children, making seven in all, before in 1823 Lord Amherst took up his post as Governor-General of India. Life there was far from easy, marked by war, mutiny and, for Lady Amherst, by then in her sixties, a dose of cholera that would have killed anyone with a weaker constitution.

  After Sir Archibald Campbell, commander of the British forces, had made peace with the King of Burma, he presented Lord and Lady Amherst with two stunningly beautiful pheasants, which in 1828 they eventually brought back to England. A year later, the London taxidermist Benjamin Leadbeater named the species Lady Amherst’s pheasant, ‘as a tribute due to the distinguished lady to whom ornithologists are indebted’ – even though all she had actually done was arrange for the birds to be transported back to England.

  Sadly, the rest of her life was marred by tragedy. Having lost one son, Jeffrey, to fever in India, two of her remaining three sons also pre-deceased her, before her death in 1838, aged seventy-five.

  The bird named after her has enjoyed mixed fortunes, too. Confined to a forested stretch of Asia from Myanmar in the west to southern China in the east, Lady Amherst’s pheasant would not normally appear in any book on British birds. But from the late nineteenth century onwards, a number of these exotic gamebirds were bred and released in the grounds of stately homes such as Woburn Abbey in Bedfordshire.

  For almost a century, the birds quietly got on with their lives in the woods and fields of Bedfordshire, near to where they had originally been released, with a few crossing the county border into Hertfordshire and Buckinghamshire. By the late 1960s, the population stood at between 100 and 200 pairs. But because they were regarded as little more than an escaped cagebird, few birders took any real interest in them.

  Then, in 1971, all that changed, with the surprising (and, in hindsight, misguided) decision to elevate Lady Amherst’s pheasant to the official British List, where it joined other originally feral species such as the Canada goose, mandarin duck, and its cousin the golden pheasant. This was done on the grounds that the population was thought to be self-sufficient, a decision that now appears to have been based on rather dubious evidence.

  Almost as soon as the species gained official status, and birders finally began to seek it out to add to their lists, numbers began to fall. By the 1980s there were perhaps 200 individuals, and by 199
0 as few as 60. I recall one day in early 1987 taking a walk around the woods near Ampthill in Bedfordshire where the few remaining pheasants were supposed to be. Having drawn a blank, I returned to where I had parked my car, only to notice a group of birds at the back of a field. Four magnificent male Lady Amherst’s pheasants, their impossibly long tails barred with black-and-silver, were feeding unobtrusively along the edge of a wood. It was the only time I ever saw the species in Britain.

  Soon afterwards, Lady Amherst’s pheasant did make a brief comeback, but at the turn of the millennium the population was down to as few as 30 individuals. By then, its days as a British bird were numbered: genetic bottlenecks meant the species could not recover unless new birds were released, something no one was willing to do. At the time of writing the population is down to a single male, so the species is inevitably doomed to vanish from Britain.

  As to why Lady Amherst’s pheasant declined so rapidly, there are a number of reasons. According to the acknowledged authority on introduced species in Britain, Sir Christopher Lever,5 predation by foxes and the taking of their eggs and chicks by magpies may be one factor, as may human disturbance and loss of habitat. But ironically, two other introduced species may also be at least partly to blame. Goshawks, whose native population was augmented through the late twentieth century by birds released by falconers, would surely make short work of such a showy and colourful bird. Meanwhile another species introduced from Asia, Reeves’s muntjac, has destroyed much of the woodland understorey where the pheasants find shelter and make their nests.

  It’s a matter for debate to whether the loss of such a bird is a cause for concern, considering that it should never really have been present in Britain in the first place. But when the species in question is one of just a handful of regularly occurring British birds named after people – and the only one named after a woman – it is, to my mind, rather sad.