by Stephen Moss
Birds also feature in the names of several music groups. In some cases, like the Eagles (and indeed the Byrds), there is no genuine ornithological link, but some bands were named deliberately after birds. Capercaillie is the name of a longstanding Scottish folk group, founded in the 1980s, and was chosen to celebrate that iconic highland grouse.
The band names Doves and Guillemots are no coincidence, either: founder members Jimi Goodwin (Doves) and Fyfe Dangerfield (Guillemots) are both keen birders – as are a surprising number of other members of rock bands, including Guy Garvey of Elbow and Martin Noble of British Sea Power, both of whom, however, chose non-ornithological names for their bands.
One of the most intriguing references to a bird name in popular culture is the goldeneye: a handsome species of diving duck that breeds in the Scottish Highlands and spends the winter on lakes and reservoirs in many parts of Britain.
Fans of James Bond will recognise Goldeneye as the name of author Ian Fleming’s home in Jamaica – and, long after his death, the title of a 1995 film starring Pierce Brosnan as the eponymous hero. But sadly the villa was not named after this handsome duck, but rather Operation Goldeneye, a Second-World-War sabotage operation in which Fleming was involved (the operation, however, may well have been named after the bird).
There is, nevertheless, an avian connection with the Bond franchise. When Ian Fleming was looking for a name for his superspy hero, he wanted one that sounded ‘as ordinary as possible … brief, unromantic, Anglo-Saxon and yet very masculine’. With the deadline fast approaching for the delivery of his first book Casino Royale, he happened to glance at his bookshelf, and noticed a slim volume entitled Birds of the West Indies. On the spine was the name of the author: the renowned American ornithologist, James Bond.xxxix
That’s not the end of the story. Several years later the real James Bond’s wife wrote to Fleming complaining about the way her husband’s name had become associated with the hard-drinking and womanising spy. Fleming sent a contrite reply:
Your husband has every reason to sue me … for practically every kind of libel in the book. In return I can only offer your James Bond unlimited use of the name Ian Fleming for any purposes he may think fit. Perhaps one day he will discover some particularly horrible species of bird, which he would like to christen in an insulting fashion…xl
Sadly, Bond never took Fleming up on his offer, so there is no Fleming’s leaftosser skulking in the Amazonian rainforest, no Fleming’s cisticola roaming the African plains, nor a Fleming’s laughingthrush hiding halfway up a mountainside in Asia. But if there were it would hardly come as a surprise, even in these exotic locations. For there are an astonishing number of similarly bizarre official English names amongst what is, at the last count, the world’s 10,700 or so species of birds. From Himalayan flameback to Indian pitta, malleefowl to magnificent frigatebird, sad flycatcher to joyful greenbul, and aberrant warbler to invisible rail, these birds and their wonderful names continue to inspire and delight us.
*
Now that we appear to have reached the point at which almost every species of bird in the world has been found and named, you might imagine that we are coming towards the end of our long and eventful story of the origins of English bird names.
Yet that assumption might turn out to be a little premature. For thanks to exciting new advances in science, we have recently discovered – to our astonishment, delight and perhaps some apprehension – that the birds we already know about, and have given names to, may simply represent the tip of a much larger iceberg. And so we come to the final chapter of this story.
Notes
1 Edmund Selous, Bird Watching (London, 1901).
2 W. H. Hudson, British Birds (London, 1895).
3 Phyllis Barclay-Smith, Garden Birds (London & New York, 1945). Incidentally, this is the first mention I can find of the phrase ‘garden birds’ – which strikes me as surprisingly late in the day
4 E. M. Nicholson, Birds and Men (London, 1951).
5 British Birds, vol. I (1907).
6 ibid.
7 William Yarrell, Supplement to the History of British Birds (London, 1845).
8 Mark Cocker and Richard Mabey, Birds Britannica (London, 2005).
9 For more information on the corncrake’s decline, and the status of other birds during the late nineteenth century, see Simon Holloway, The Historical Atlas of Breeding Birds of Britain and Ireland 1875–1900 (London, 1996).
10 K. H. Voous, Atlas of European Birds (London, 1960).
11 BirdLife International estimate: http://datazone.birdlife.org/species/factsheet/22694443.
12 Quoted on the BBC News website, 25 December 2015, http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-34848546.
i One can only assume that Nicholson turned down a knighthood and a peerage; both of which were richly deserved but never bestowed.
ii With the addition of the 600th species, a Yelkouan shearwater off the coast of Devon (seen in 2008, but not finally accepted until 2016), the rapid growth of the British List has long confounded James Fisher’s 1966 prediction that ‘we are … unlikely to reach a list of more than 480 wild species by the year 2000, or more than 500 ever’ (The Shell Bird Book, London, op. cit.).
iii Other old names also lasted longer than we might imagine. In the 1912 A Hand-list of British Birds, compiled by Dr Ernst Hartert, our smallest species of bird was still known by the taxonomically misleading name ‘golden-crested wren’, even though the BOU had preferred goldcrest almost thirty years earlier.
iv As W. B. Lockwood acidly remarked, ‘This half-Latin book name found little support … and quickly fell into disuse’. The name ‘accentor’ was coined by the German naturalist Johann Matthäus Bechstein in the early nineteenth century, and is derived from the Latin cantor, meaning ‘singer’.
v See King Lear, Act 1 Scene IV, in which the Fool warns Lear against his scheming daughters:
For you know, nuncle,
The hedge-sparrow fed the cuckoo so long,
That it’s had it head bit off by it young.
vi The other proposed changes were: great spotted and lesser spotted woodpeckers to ‘pied’ and ‘barred’ woodpeckers, great black-backed and lesser black-backed gulls to ‘great blackback’ and ‘lesser blackback’, and common gull to ‘mew gull’.
vii It has been suggested – not entirely in jest – that the willow tit should now be renamed the ‘marsh tit’, and the marsh tit given the new name of ‘oak tit’.
viii Soon afterwards, Lord Walter Rothschild was sent two similar birds shot in a wood in nearby Finchley; these too proved to be willow tits.
ix See Chapter 4 for more on Colonel Montagu.
x This also makes me wonder whether the bird given the name ‘marsh titmouse’ by John Ray, back in the late seventeenth century, was also a willow tit – especially as another name from that period was ‘fen titmouse’. It’s tempting to think that had the early ornithologists spent less time firing off their shotguns and more time studying bird behaviour and choice of habitat, the confusion between the two species might have been sorted out a couple of centuries earlier.
xi If we include European warblers that are rare or occasional visitors to Britain, several other names derive from watery habitats. These include river, paddyfield and aquatic warblers.
xii Other habitat-based names are more accurate: woodcocks inhabit woods, sand martins nest in sandbanks, and water rails and marsh harriers live in wetlands, as, indeed, do moorhens – the ‘moor’ part of the name doesn’t refer to the heather-covered moors of the Brontë sisters, but is a corruption of the word ‘marsh’ or ‘mere’. (The fact that a widespread folk name for marsh harrier is ‘moor buzzard’ confirms this, as does the official name for the area around my home, the Somerset Moors and Levels.)
xiii Despite their obvious behavioural differences and distinct plumage, rock and water pipits were not ‘split’ by taxonomists from one into two separate species until 1986.
xiv Folk names for this fam
iliar countryside bird include ‘heaven’s hen’, ‘rising lark’, ‘sky-flapper’ and the widespread ‘laverock’ – the last most often used in the north of England and Scotland.
xv A Roman recipe for larks’ tongues outdoes even this:
Get 1,000 larks.
Remove their tongues and set aside.
Discard the larks.
Put the tongues in a pan with a little oil and sauté quickly.
Transfer to a hot platter.
Serves four.
xvi The phrase ‘up with the lark’, denoting an early riser, goes back to Tudor times, while ‘as happy as a lark’ appears a little later, during the eighteenth century. For more examples of the way bird names have influenced our day-to-day language, see Chapter 6, Part 5.
xvii A poignant example appears in Charles Dickens’ novel (and David Lean’s film) Great Expectations. After Pip has been transformed into a gentleman thanks to an unexpected bequest from the former convict Magwitch, his brother-in-law Joe visits him at his new home. The change in Pip’s social status has created a barrier between them, which Joe attempts to overcome by telling Pip what a good time they’ll have when he returns home: ‘And when you’re well enough to go out for a ride – what larks!’ Yet sadly, as we – and they – realise, this will never come to pass.
xviii The other species named after the food we grow, the corn bunting, is not in quite so dire straits as its near namesake. But ‘the fat bird of the barley’, as it is affectionately known, has now vanished from large areas of lowland Britain. This includes my own home county of Somerset, where in 2012, for the first time since records began in the nineteenth century, not a single corn bunting was seen.
xix Note that, as with ‘pigeon’ and ‘dove’, ‘swallow’ and ‘martin’ are more or less interchangeable. For example, in North America the sand martin is known as the ‘bank swallow’.
xx Northern wheatear is, like barn swallow, a relatively new name. It was deliberately coined in the latter years of the twentieth century to help sort out any confusion between the bird we simply call the ‘wheatear’ and its many other relatives, most of which live further south, in the Middle East or around the Mediterranean Sea (see Chapter 7).
xxi However, one of these, the Egyptian goose, was introduced here, and the other two, Egyptian vulture and Egyptian nightjar, are very rare vagrants with just two accepted records of each.
xxii Some might reasonably argue that ‘American’ is synonymous with the USA, but I believe that in the case of bird names it refers to the continent of North America, not the country. After recent taxonomic changes, ‘American’ is found in the name of eight species on the British List: American wigeon, bittern, coot, golden plover, herring gull, kestrel, robin and redstart. The recent addition of Chinese pond heron to the British List, thanks to a record in Kent in 2014, means there are now five ‘British birds’ named after nation-states.
xxiii To add to the confusion and complexity of the situation, there is now a third species present, with an even bigger bill, called the parrot crossbill.
xxiv Because eider ducks live at such cold northerly latitudes, and mainly hunt for food at sea, their down has a unique structure that traps warm air better than any other material – natural or synthetic. It is also produced in very small quantities: while tens of thousands of tonnes of goose down are sold worldwide every year, the entire annual global production of eider down could fit onto a single truck.
xxv Whether he did this out of a desire to protect this vulnerable wild creature, or from a less altruistic desire to keep all the down for himself, is not known.
xxvi The Times, 26 April 1950. But the march of the eiderdown could not be stopped, even by such determined ornithological pedantry.
xxvii Many years later, Conran recalled that he had first come across it on a visit to Scandinavia: ‘I had been in Sweden in the 1950s and was given a duvet to sleep under. I probably had a girl with me and I thought this was all part of the mood of the time – liberated sex and easy living.’ A shrewd businessman, Conran understood that Britain’s hard-pressed housewives would be less interested in the erotic possibilities of his new product, and more keen on the practical benefits. So he marketed the duvet as ‘the ten-second bed’: so much easier to make than the traditional version. It worked. Nowadays, with well over ten million duvets sold in Britain every year, virtually everybody sleeps beneath one.
xxviii The use of the name of the duck for this attractive colour appears to be very recent: the first OED reference is as late as 1923.
xxix Roughly translated, this means, ‘If you see one rook, it’s a crow; if you see lots of crows, they’re rooks’.
xxx Even Shakespeare was caught up in the confusion between the two species: Macbeth features the memorable but puzzling line, ‘Light thickens, and the Crow Makes Wing to th’ Rookie Wood…’
xxxi And which followed in the footsteps of Penguin and Pelican Books.
xxxii The Bard’s best-known line about kites is Autolycus’s cautionary comment in The Winter’s Tale: ‘When the kite builds, look to lesser linen.’ This refers to the kite’s unusual custom of stealing items of underwear to decorate its nest, earning it a deserved reputation as a kleptomaniac.
xxxiii Incidentally, the widespread belief that the place names beginning with ‘Cran-’ actually refer to herons is given short shrift by Eilert Ekwall, author of the authoritative Concise Oxford Dictionary of English Place-names (Oxford, 1936; Fourth Edition 1959), who writes: ‘There is no reason to assume any other meaning for the word than “crane”, such as “heron”. The two birds are always kept well apart in early records.’ I agree with him.
xxxiv By what seems to be pure coincidence – but is perhaps related to the recent comebacks made by both species – an indie rock band from Edinburgh formed in 2012 call themselves Kite and the Crane. Appropriately, perhaps, they specialise in telling stories, using rich harmonies and soaring vocals – just like their avian namesakes.
xxxv Subbuteo is Latin for ‘small buzzard’. This is technically inaccurate as, despite their superficial similarity, falcons and buzzards are not related to one another. But it was nevertheless good enough for the founding father of the science of taxonomy, Linnaeus (see Chapter 3).
xxxvi The conservationist Sir Peter Scott, son of Scott of the Antarctic, named his son Falcon and one of his daughters Dafila (then the generic name for the pintail duck).
xxxvii Cardiff City are nicknamed the Bluebirds (after the celebrated North American songbird) because they play in blue. In 2012 their new owner, the Malaysian businessman Vincent Tan, controversially switched the colour of their strip to red – a lucky colour in the Far East. Less than three years later, after protests from fans, he was forced to change it back to blue, in line with the club’s avian nickname.
xxxviii Sheffield Wednesday are known as the Owls, but this has no ornithological connection – it comes from the name of a local area of the city, Owlerton.
xxxix In an interview in 1962 for the New Yorker magazine, Fleming claimed that when he wrote Casino Royale, ‘I wanted Bond to be an extremely dull, uninteresting man … when I was casting around for a name for my protagonist I thought, by God, [James Bond] is the dullest name I ever heard.’
xl Ian Fleming did eventually make peace with the real-life Bond and his wife, giving them a first edition of his 1964 novel You Only Live Twice, with the inscription: ‘To the real James Bond, from the thief of his identity’. A few months later, Fleming died, aged just fifty-six, from heart disease caused by his industrial consumption of cigarettes and alcohol. The cleaner-living James Bond survived another quarter of a century, dying in his home town of Philadelphia in 1989. Many years later, the signed copy of You Only Live Twice sold at auction for $84,000 (£56,000).
7
TOMORROW NEVER KNOWS
The Future of Bird Names
Names and attributes must be accommodated to the essence of things, and not the essence to the names, since things come f
irst and names afterwards.
Galileo Galilei
1: Bird Names at a Crossroads
As dawn was about to break over Kibbutz Lotan, just outside the Red Sea resort of Eilat, we heard the strange, metronomic call of the scops owl – our first species of the day. Sixteen hours later, our 139th and last species was the night heron, as we watched a flock passing high overhead in the rapidly darkening sky.
By then, we were exhausted. We’d driven almost 250 miles through this arid, sun-drenched land, and seen a dozen species of warbler, ten birds of prey, half-a-dozen kinds of wheatear and more than a score of different waders. We’d found exotic birds, including wrynecks, bee-eaters and hoopoes, and more familiar ones, such as swallows, house martins and great tits.
But on this day, 1 April 2014, they all ranked equally. This was because we were taking part in that most curious of ornithological pastimes: a twenty-four-hour bird race, in which different teams try to see or hear as many species of bird as possible during the course of a single day. Our three-man team consisted of me, David Lindo (aka The Urban Birder) and Tim Appleton (founder of the British Birdwatching Fair).
As an international birding occasion, Champions of the Flyway takes some beating. A dozen teams from all over the world had converged on the Red Sea resort of Eilat to take part in this marathon event. That was the fun part; the serious purpose was to raise awareness of the plight of migrant birds, and funds to help save them from the many threats they face on their travels.i
And what travels these are. The vast majority of migrant birds in the world breed in the temperate or Arctic latitudes of the northern hemisphere, fly south in autumn to spend the winter below the Equator, and then head back north in spring to raise a family once again. They do so for one simple reason: light. In summer, the farther north you go, the more hours of daylight there are; and this – together with warmer temperatures – produces a glut of insects on which these birds can feed their hungry offspring.
