Mrs Moreau's Warbler

by Stephen Moss

  Had things been different, and MacGillivray’s view prevailed, birders might even now be referring to furzelings and quaketails, reedlings and hedge chanters, blue-throated redstarts and long-tailed muffins. I have a tinge of regret this never came to pass, and that instead we are saddled with the far more familiar, yet perhaps less imaginative, names we use today.

  5: Exploration and Empire

  As the nineteenth century rolled on, Britons continued to travel around the world, and discover more and more birds, for which new names had to be found – many of them prolonging the fashion for eponyms. Exploration and empire-building provided plenty of reading material for generations of schoolboys, with the dramatic episodes of polar exploration we have already witnessed – packed with adventure, suffering and derring-do – winning an eager audience through a plethora of classic Victorian books for boys.

  But other travellers preferred to pursue their quarry at a slower and more gentlemanly pace, and in warmer, more equable climes. Typical of this latter breed was the Reverend Henry Baker Tristram (1822–1906). Tristram spent much of his working life as a country parson, though he eventually became Canon of Durham Cathedral. Yet despite his weighty clerical responsibilities, he still managed to pursue his abiding passion: the collection and study of the birds of North Africa and the Middle East.

  He was so enthusiastic about his travels around the Middle East that, like the parody of an absentee clergyman Dr Vesey Stanhope in Anthony Trollope’s Barchester Chronicles, he appears to have spent considerably more time in the deserts of Palestine than the cloisters of Durham. What his long-suffering wife Eleanor (who bore him seven daughters and a son during their fifty-three-year marriage) thought of his peregrinations is not recorded.

  Not for nothing was Henry Baker Tristram known as ‘The Great Gun of Durham’.xxi But he did not simply aim and fire at any bird that moved, like some of his less fastidious contemporaries. As well as being a fine shot, he had a keen eye for the unusual. Moreover, at a time when few ornithologists ventured into these regions, he had the field more or less to himself. As a result eleven species of bird have, at one time or another, borne his name.xxii The best-known of these is Tristram’s starling (often known as Tristram’s grackle), a striking, glossy-black bird with orange wing-linings which can be seen over much of Israel, and whose loud, wolf-whistling call is very distinctive.

  Canon Tristram lived a long and satisfying life, dying at the age of eighty-three in spring 1906. Before this, however, he had experienced a Damascene conversion. He acknowledged that amassing vast collections of bird skins and their eggs – in his case comprising well over 20,000 different specimens – was not how the study of birds should continue in this new century. Indeed, for the last two years of his life he served in the honorary role of Vice-President of the newly formed bird protection organisation the RSPB, just after King Edward VII had granted the Society its royal charter.

  From this point onwards, the pendulum slowly began to swing, away from killing birds with shotguns and towards studying them using binoculars. Tristram was among the last of his kind: gentleman-naturalists and crack shots, with the time, money and inclination to travel to far-flung corners of the world, indulging their passion for killing birds in the name of furthering the science of ornithology.

  But just before this, there had been one last hurrah for the old guard. During the final decades of Queen Victoria’s reign, history provided the perfect opportunity for ambitious young men to contribute to the naming of the world’s birds. It came about because of the most important (and arguably most controversial) institution of that complex and fascinating era: the British Empire.

  *

  On the last day of July 1912, amidst the searing summer heat, the city of Etawah in the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh came to a standstill. In the usually thriving and noisy bazaar, every shop and stall remained closed for the day, while the people mourned the loss of a man whose death, at the age of eighty-three, had just been announced. Yet this man was not some fêted maharajah – indeed, he was not Indian at all – but an officer of the ruling, and mostly despised, British Raj.

  Allan Octavian Hume – the man mourned not just in Etawah but right across the vast nation of India – was by turns a civil servant, political reformer, co-founder of the Indian Congress Party, poet and naturalist.

  So how did this modest, hardworking (and for his day surprisingly liberal) man earn such love and respect from the people he ruled? How on earth did he find time, in his busy political and administrative life, to put together the largest private collection of Indian birds ever created, and end up having no fewer than fourteen different species of bird named after him?xxiii And what does his life story tell us about the largest empire the world has ever seen?

  At its height, the British Empire’s colonies, dominions and protectorates covered almost one-quarter of the globe’s land – more than 13 million square miles – and ruled over more than 450 million people, about one in five of the world’s population.

  From small beginnings, thanks to pioneering expeditions led by men such as John Cabot, Walter Ralegh and Francis Drake during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the Empire had expanded hugely, to include large parts of the Americas, Africa, Asia and the Pacific. That oft-repeated cliché, ‘the Empire on which the sun never sets’ was not simply a jingoistic metaphor, but the literal truth: Britain’s imperial possessions were so scattered around the world that there was always daylight falling on the Union Flag somewhere.

  The vast size of the British Empire was not only its greatest strength, but also a fatal weakness. As other nations grew envious of Britain’s powers, they wanted to diminish them and grab a share of the booty for themselves. Even though the British Empire continued to expand until the 1920s, the seeds of its downfall were already sown: the new world order decided at the Treaty of Versailles in 1919 would never allow one nation to be so globally dominant again.

  During the second half of the nineteenth century, all this was yet to come. The Empire was still supreme, especially in India, where more than 300 million people lived under British rule, governed by men like Allan Octavian Hume.

  Hume’s career was certainly a colourful one. Having arrived in India in 1849, at the age of twenty, he had spent the next few years rising up the Indian Civil Service to become the chief officer of a district twice the size of Wales. Then, in 1857, the rebellion known as the Indian Mutiny began nearby. Showing great courage, Hume stormed a temple where the rebels were holed up, and later – despite having recently recovered from cholera – led a charge that forced them to retreat.

  During the following decade, as the political situation eventually settled down, Hume finally had time to pursue his passionate interest in Indian birds. He began to amass a vast assemblage of skins, nests and eggs that eventually topped 100,000 specimens, the second largest private collection in the world after that owned by Walter Rothschild at Tring. In one single expedition, Hume collected no fewer than 1,200 skins of 250 different kinds of bird, of which eighteen species were new to India.

  To house this extraordinary collection, he spent £20,000 (equivalent to more than a million pounds today) building a large extension on his home, in which row after row of beautifully crafted wooden cabinets housed his precious eggs and skins. He wrote several books on Indian birds, and started his own quarterly journal, entitled Stray Feathers – a journal of ornithology for India and his dependencies, in which he wrote racy accounts of his collecting trips around the sub-continent.

  In 1879, on what would be his final expedition, he noticed that the feathers in a ceremonial head-dress worn by a local official came from a species of gamebird he did not recognise. After sending hunters out to procure live examples, he named the bird Mrs Hume’s pheasant (after his beloved wife Mary), the name still used today.xxiv

  In 1882, at the age of fifty-three, Hume retired from the Indian Civil Service and returned to his home in Simla, to begin work on his life’s masterwork: a
book that would include every species of bird found in India. Soon afterwards, however, disaster struck. Having spent the winter of 1884 at his other residence on the lowland plains, Hume returned to discover – to his unimaginable horror – that all his research papers, weighing several hundredweight and containing more than twenty-five years of detailed notes and information, had been taken down to the local bazaar by his servants to be sold as waste paper. His dream was in tatters, and the world was deprived of what would have been the definitive work on Indian ornithology.

  But Hume left another, arguably far more important, legacy. Having been so cruelly thwarted in his ornithological ambitions, he could have retired from the fray. Instead, he chose to devote the rest of his life to politics. Ornithology’s loss was India’s gain, because in 1885 Hume was instrumental in setting up the Indian National Congress. Guided by Mahatma Gandhi, who became the party’s leader in 1921, Congress grew to be India’s dominant political force, and spearheaded India’s eventual independence from Britain in 1947. Without Hume’s vision and hard work on behalf of the Indian people, it could be argued that independence might have come much later, or in a very different form.

  In 1890 Hume took a trip back home to Britain, where on arrival he was informed of Mary’s death back in Simla. Four years later, he decided to leave India for good, settling in the suburban district of Upper Norwood in south London, where he lived quietly until his death in 1912.

  With Hume’s passing, an era was over. The days of the British Empire were numbered, and the world was about to change dramatically with the onset of the First World War.

  The way birds were named would change too, as the age of exploration drew to a close, and with it the tradition of new species being named after their discoverers, which had lasted for almost 200 years from the early eighteenth through to the late nineteenth centuries.

  From now on, new bird names would be decided by committees using pen and paper, rather than by pioneering individuals carrying shotguns. The days when an amateur naturalist such as Allan Octavian Hume could push the boundaries of our knowledge of the world’s birds, and give his name to so many species, were finally – and permanently – at an end.

  Notes

  1 Barbara and Richard Mearns, Biographies for Birdwatchers: The Lives of Those Commemorated in Western Palearctic Bird Names (London, 1988).

  2 For more about these men and women, see Bo Beolens and Michael Watkins, The Eponym Dictionary of Birds (London, 2014).

  3 Barbara and Richard Mearns, Audubon to Xantus: The Lives of Those Commemorated in North American Bird Names (London, 1992).

  4 Thomas Pennant, Arctic Zoology (London, 1784).

  5 In Christopher Lever, The Naturalized Animals of Britain and Ireland (London, 2009).

  6 In James Fisher and Ronald Lockley, Seabirds (London, 1954).

  7 In British Birds magazine, vol. LXXIX (1975).

  8 William Parry, Journal of a second voyage for the discovery of a North-West Passage (London, 1824); quoted from Michael Densley, In Search of Ross’s Gull (Leeds, 1999).

  9 Elliot Coues, quoted in A Bibliography of British Ornithology, op. cit.

  10 ibid.

  11 Apsley Cherry-Garrard, The Worst Journey in the World (London, 1922).

  12 In The Handbook of British Birds, edited by Witherby et al (London, 1938–41).

  13 Fridtjof Nansen, Farthest North (London, 1897).

  14 For more information on this mysterious seabird, I highly recommend Michael Densley, In Search of Ross’s Gull (Leeds, 1999).

  15 From Robert Ralph, William MacGillivray (London, 1993).

  16 A Bibliography of British Ornithology, op. cit.

  17 Alfred Newton, quoted in William MacGillivray, op. cit.

  i To his delight he also acquired a great auk (also with an egg) for £16 – about £1,200 today. Less than half a century later, this statuesque flightless seabird would become globally extinct.

  ii William Swainson is himself commemorated in the names of three North American birds – a hawk, a thrush and a warbler, as well as a host of tropical species, most of which have since been given new names.

  iii The zoologist John Edward Gray, speaking to an 1836 parliamentary investigation into the management of the British Museum.

  iv Actually he is not totally forgotten: Payraudeau’s collection of bird specimens can still be seen at a small museum in La Chaize-le-Vicomte in the Vendée.

  v In taxonomic order, these are: Steller’s eider, Barrow’s goldeneye, Fea’s petrel, Scopoli’s shearwater, Wilson’s and Swinhoe’s storm-petrels, Baillon’s crake, Allen’s gallinule, Macqueen’s bustard, Baird’s sandpiper, Wilson’s phalarope, Wilson’s snipe, Cabot’s and Forster’s terns, Sabine’s, Bonaparte’s, Ross’s, Franklin’s and Audouin’s gulls, Pallas’s sandgrouse, Tengmalm’s owl, Eleonora’s falcon, Pallas’s, Hume’s, Radde’s, western and eastern Bonelli’s, Marmora’s, Ruppell’s, Moltoni’s subalpine, Pallas’s grasshopper, Sykes and Blyth’s reed warblers, White’s, Swainson’s and Naumann’s thrushes, Moussier’s redstart, Blyth’s pipit, Cretzschmar’s and Pallas’s reed buntings, Blackburnian and Wilson’s warblers.

  vi Including some born in Prussia (part of which is in present-day Poland) – borders were fairly fluid at this time.

  vii At one end of the fame scale we have Gilbert White (White’s thrush), while at the other end there is ‘Monsieur Richard of Lunéville’ (the capital of Lorraine in eastern France). In October 1815 he ‘collected’ (i.e. shot) the bird that now bears his name, Richard’s pipit. Yet today that is the only thing we know about him.

  viii Forty-three, as opposed to fifty-one, because some people are commemorated in more than one species. Alexander Wilson (1766–1813) – a Scotsman who left to seek his fortune in the United States and became known as ‘the father of American ornithology’ – and Peter Simon Pallas each have four species named after them, while Edward Blyth and Franco Andrea Bonelli each have two.

  ix Including Pallas’s sandgrouse, Pallas’s warbler, Pallas’s grasshopper warbler and Pallas’s reed bunting – all of which have been seen in Britain.

  x Blackburnian warbler has only ever been recorded twice in Britain, both times in October on offshore islands: on Skomer in 1961 and on Fair Isle in 1988. I was the only birder on Fair Isle at the time who managed to miss the bird!

  xi Sarah was the eldest daughter of Lord Archer, Baron of Umberslade (near Tanworth-in-Arden, Warwickshire).

  xii This anomaly is explained by the fact that the bird bearing his name, Moltoni’s subalpine warbler, was only recently elevated to full species status, having been separated from its very similar-looking cousin, the subalpine warbler.

  xiii In France and Spain, however, Radde’s warbler retains its link with the man originally honoured: pouillot de Schwarz and mosquitero de Schwarz respectively.

  xiv Now in its own monotypic genus, Rhodostethia rosea.

  xv Three species of bird are named after Audubon: a shearwater, a warbler and an oriole.

  xvi In 1830, Yarrell was the first person to distinguish between the two species of ‘wild swans’, winter visitors from the north. He named the smaller of the pair Bewick’s swan, after Thomas Bewick, who had died two years earlier. Later he popularised the name whooper swan for the larger species.

  xvii Provenceångare (Swedish), Provencesanger (Danish and Norwegian), Provencegrasmücke (German) and Provenceaalse (Dutch). In French the Dartford warbler’s name is Fauvette pitchou.

  xviii A hundred and fifty years later, a cabal of late twentieth-century ornithologists attempted to standardise British bird names once again – and, just like MacGillivray, they failed to do so. See Chapter 7.

  xix A hundred and thirty years later, from 1969–71, IPC magazines and John Gooders followed in Yarrell’s footsteps with the ten-volume partwork Birds of the World, a seminal influence on birders of my generation (see Prologue).

  xx Yarrell’s History of British Birds was reprinted several times during the remaind
er of the nineteenth century, and formed the basis for a very popular single-volume work, Howard Saunders, An Illustrated Manual of British Birds (London, 1889).

  xxi He was also, more affectionately, dubbed the ‘Sacred Ibis’, after the symbol of the British Ornithologists’ Union – hence the title of an excellent biography of Tristram by W. G. Hale, Sacred Ibis: The Ornithology of Canon Henry Baker Tristram (Durham, 2016).

  xxii Tristram’s wheatear, serin, starling, warbler, bunting, scrubfowl, honeyeater, flowerpecker, storm-petrel, woodpecker and pygmy parrot. Only four (the starling, warbler, bunting and storm-petrel) still carry his eponym.

  xxiii Hume’s ground tit, wheatear, babbler, hawk-owl, lark, wren-babbler, blue-throated barbet, parakeet, leaf warbler, owl, swiftlet, whitethroat, treecreeper and reed warbler. Of these, only six (the wheatear, hawk-owl, lark, leaf warbler, owl and whitethroat) still bear his name.

  xxiv Sadly, as with so many of that region’s birds, it is now threatened by over-population, habitat loss and hunting.

  6

  TWENTIETH-CENTURY FLOCKS

  The Names we use Today

  Names are not always what they seem.

  Mark Twain

  1: Redbreasts and Hedge Sparrows

  Max Nicholson – birdwatcher, scientist and pioneering conservationist – spanned the twentieth century like an ornithological Colossus. Born in 1904, the same year as Fats Waller, Salvador Dalí and Cary Grant, he lived to see the turn of the new millennium, before dying in 2003, in his ninety-ninth year. More than any other person, before or since, he witnessed – and to a great extent was also responsible for – the science of ornithology being dragged out of a bygone era and into the modern age.