by Stephen Moss
These migratory birds follow three major global routes: known as the Africa-Eurasia, East Asia-Australasia and the Americas flyways, which between them witness the global travels of billions of birds each spring and autumn.
Israel is slap-bang in the middle of the Africa-Eurasia flyway. Each year tens of millions of birds, of more than 300 different species, pass through the narrow strip of land that divides the Middle East from Africa, flooding down towards their winter quarters south of the Sahara in autumn, and heading back north to breed in the temperate regions of Europe and northern Asia in spring.
We have known about this biannual spectacle since the dawn of civilisation. In the Old Testament Book of Jeremiah, written in the sixth century BC, the prophet clearly refers to the spring arrival of birds in the Holy Land: ‘Yea, the stork in the heaven knoweth her appointed times; and the turtle [dove] and the crane and the swallow observe the time of their coming.’
For decades, this migratory crossroads has attracted birders from all over the world, and this now-annual event has been no exception. At least a dozen nationalities were represented here: the Brits rubbing shoulders with Americans, Danes with Dutchmen, and, most tellingly of all, a joint Israeli-Palestinian team, who used their expert local knowledge to win the race, racking up an extraordinary tally of 169 species.
It was only afterwards that something struck me about the people taking part: not only did they all speak English, but throughout the contest they also used English bird names. This was even though their native languages included Hebrew, Arabic, Dutch, Finnish and German.
There were, it’s true, a few concessions made by the Brits to our international colleagues: the use of ‘northern wheatear’ and ‘barn swallow’, for example, to distinguish our familiar species (known in the UK simply as the wheatear and swallow) from their more exotic relatives. But otherwise, the names corresponded to those you might hear back home in Britain, along with a handful of species whose English names reflect their limited Middle Eastern range, such as the Sinai rosefinch, Dead Sea sparrow and Palestine sunbird.ii
The use of English bird names amongst birders of different nationalities is not confined to Israel. Wherever in the world I have travelled to watch birds, I hear these names spoken. Sometimes, as in India, Sri Lanka, Kenya and Botswana, this is because these countries were once part of the British Empire, and so English is still widely used in everyday speech. But I have also heard English bird names in Spain and Argentina, Morocco and Mexico, Poland and Sweden – and spoken by Spanish, French, Dutch, German, Swedish and Finnish birders all over the world.
In one respect, this simply reflects the fact that birding originated as a pastime in Britain, before spreading around the globe. But this growth in the popularity of birdwatching has also gone hand-in-hand with a far more important phenomenon: the inexorable rise of the English language.
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English is the dominant language of the Internet, Hollywood movies and pop music. It is used by Interpol and the international airline industry, and dominates the worlds of television and information technology. English appears on billboards and in viral videos, in adverts and in scientific papers – wherever and whenever the writer wants to reach the widest possible audience. And the endless, twenty-four-hour buzz of social media – the new religion of the twenty-first century – is predominantly conducted in English.iii
More than a third of a billion people now speak English as their first language: in Britain of course, but also in North America, South Africa, Australia and New Zealand. Yet this is dwarfed by the huge number of speakers who use English as their second (or even third or fourth) language – an estimated 600 million people around the world.iv When we add the tens of millions of people who have a working knowledge of English in their everyday lives, then English can justifiably claim to be the global lingua franca for the twenty-first century and beyond.v
It is ironic that, at a time when the days of the British Empire are long gone, and when Britain is rapidly withdrawing from the world stage, the English language is not only still so dominant, but increasingly so – although this is largely down to the continuing global power of the USA.
Looking back one-and-a-half millennia, to when those Anglo-Saxon invaders first crossed the North Sea and brought their strange Germanic tongue to our shores, the notion that English would have eventually risen to be the world’s main language would have seemed unthinkable. But as the saying goes, ‘a language is a dialect that has met with success’, and English certainly fits that bill.
And so – with a little help from the Vikings and Normans, Chaucer and Shakespeare, and generations of explorers, empire-builders, moviemakers, songwriters and computer geeks – we have now reached that stage. English is well and truly here to stay.
As we have seen, English isn’t just the global lingua franca – it is also the lingua franca of birding across the world. But despite the overwhelming dominance of English in this field, it certainly doesn’t mean that bird names are universally accepted wherever you go. For a start, there’s the perennial problem of what Oscar Wilde (or George Bernard Shaw, opinion being divided as to who originated the phrase) called ‘two nations separated by a common language’: Britain and the USA.
Look through any North American field guide and you’ll come across some strange and unfamiliar names: common loon, brant, parasitic jaeger, eared grebe, red phalarope, horned lark and Lapland longspur. For an unwary British birder visiting America for the first time, this can cause confusion; until, that is, you realise that these are actually very familiar species: great northern diver, brent goose, Arctic skua, black-necked grebe, grey phalarope, shore lark and Lapland bunting respectively. Despite decades of wrangling, the British and Americans simply won’t agree on which names should take precedence.
From time to time, some authors have taken the plunge and attempted to sort out the situation. But this has only led to even greater confusion, as when the editors of the Collins Bird Guide (to the birds of Britain and Europe)1 plumped for some rather strange, hybrid names, including ‘great northern loon’ and ‘parasitic skua’ (which by the time of the second edition had already reverted to Arctic skua).vi The fact that they tried to make a compromise and failed simply highlighted the problem: Brits will continue to refer to divers and skuas, and Yanks to loons and jaegers, for many years to come.
A similar, but more colonially sensitive, situation has arisen in Africa. Here the legacy of empires – the Dutch as well as the British – led to a schism between the English names used in East Africa and those, mainly derived from Afrikaans, used in South Africa.
Again, a quick comparative look through field guides for the two regions can be very confusing. Surely that strikingly blue, pheasant-like bird with the russet wings and yellow face is the same species as this one; yet in the East African guide it is called Ross’s turaco, while in the South African book it appears as Ross’s lourie. Of course they are the same species, as confirmed by both their shared eponym and their identical scientific name (Musophaga rossae).vii The name ‘lourie’, from the Afrikaans, first surfaces in South Africa in the late eighteenth century, while in 1822 the visiting English ornithologist W. J. Burchell mentions the confusion already arising between the two alternative names, noting that ‘In the aviary, I saw the Touracoo, called Loeri by the colonists.’
Likewise, in each guide we find plates featuring a series of plump, long-legged birds: one labelled as ‘bustards’ (East Africa), and the other as ‘korhaans’ (South Africa); while a group of strange waders resembling our own (misnamed) stone-curlew are shown as thick-knees in the East African guide and dikkops (meaning ‘thick-head’) in the South African one. Once again, they are the same family.
But gradually, as birding becomes more and more global, the Afrikaans-based South African names are beginning to give way to the more widely used (and English-based) East African ones. The latest edition of the main field guide to southern Africa lists turacos and thick-knees (with the
South African names in brackets), but confusingly still keeps ‘korhaan’ for some of the smaller species of bustard.2
Keeping up with these changes in bird names, with decisions made unilaterally by authors in each region, presents a perennial problem not just for travelling birders, but also for the international ornithological community, who need to avoid confusion in scientific papers and when communicating with colleagues in different countries. So when, in 2006, two US ornithologists produced a slim volume entitled Birds of the World: Recommended English Names,3 many people heaved a sigh of relief.
Backed by the International Ornithological Congress – the United Nations of the bird world – Frank Gill and Minturn Wright (who in his day job is, appropriately, a lawyer) attempted to produce a consensus view on the world’s bird names. The back-cover blurb summed up their aims and intentions: ‘This book provides the first standardised English-language nomenclature for all living birds of the world … based on the rules and principles developed by leading ornithologists worldwide.’
It was a good and timely idea, and in the absence of something more definitive it is the best we have, at least in a volume conveniently small enough to be taken on your travels. But it still had to deal with minor issues (such as the US/UK difference between ‘gray’ and ‘grey’) as well as the thornier problems. These of course included the perennial issue of loons vs divers (they chose loons) and skuas vs jaegers, where they compromised, favouring skua for the two larger species (great and pomarine) and jaeger for the smaller duo (Arctic and long-tailed).
But the biggest problem faced by anyone who tries to standardise the English names of birds is that – just like the rest of our language – these are not fixed, but fluid. Most importantly, change doesn’t happen because of top-down decrees, but through the normal processes of the evolution of the English language, from which, as we have seen, even some of our longest-established bird names are not immune.
The paradox of standardising the English names of birds is this: although in the short term it may make communication easier – especially between two different groups of English-speaking peoples, such as the Americans and British – it also runs the risk of losing the original reasons why the birds were named.
So although the eponymous bird names we celebrated in Chapter 5 may appear anachronistic, and although many other names we use are at best illogical and at worst downright misleading, if we change them, we lose the stories of their origin; we lose the complex connections between language, history and the real world; and we perhaps also lose a little of the contingency, contradiction and whimsy that make us human. And as we shall see, when the world’s birdlife is facing greater threats than ever before, we cannot afford to forget these profound and ancient links between humanity and birds.
2: Titmice and Ring-Doves
The English language is constantly shifting, but slowly and gradually: it is only after a change in meaning has occurred and been widely accepted that we realise it has happened.viii
Recent examples include ‘decimated’, which used to mean ‘cut down by one-tenth’, but is now widely used as a synonym for devastated; ‘enormity’, originally ‘a great tragedy’, but now simply ‘a huge event’; and ‘disinterested’, now more or less synonymous with ‘uninterested’, rather than the original sense of unbiased. By adopting these new meanings, we effectively lose the original sense of each word. In many people’s view, this risks diminishing the English language.
But as linguists have long pointed out, to try to resist such changes in spoken English is to fight against a tidal wave of actual usage. New words are being appropriated or invented all the time. Sometimes this is a deliberate act, as with the adoption of ‘hygge’ from Swedish, or the invention of ‘Brexiteer’ and ‘chatbot’.ix Others are coined accidentally, as when Sarah Palin used the word ‘refudiate’ (instead of ‘refuse’ or ‘repudiate’), or George W. Bush said ‘misunderestimate’ (whose meaning is, as usual with the former President’s sayings, wonderfully vague).4
But whether a completely new word has been coined, or an established word has changed in meaning, the pedants must simply grin and bear it. Otherwise, I suppose, we would all be speaking the language of Chaucer or Shakespeare.
Bird names change over time in much the same way. We have already seen how during the twentieth century ‘redbreast’ became robin, ‘golden-crested wren’ was simplified to goldcrest and, much further back in time, ‘gowk’ was displaced by cuckoo and ‘ouzel’ by blackbird.
Leafing through a list of bird names in a 1923 issue of the British Ornithologists’ Union journal Ibis, we find almost a hundred names that are no longer in general use. Many of these changes are the result of minor tweaks, such as the removal of hyphens in compound names such as ‘sky-lark’, ‘sheld-duck’, ‘bean-goose’, ‘oyster-catcher’, ‘black-grouse’ and ‘marsh-harrier’.x Other changes, though, are more radical. A modern birder might struggle to work out the identity of ‘Richardson’s and Buffon’s skuas’ (now Arctic and long-tailed), while ‘buff-backed heron’ (cattle egret) has also long fallen out of fashion.
Some species have simply gained a descriptive epithet: thus at some point ‘heron’ became grey heron, and ‘kite’ turned into red kite, to distinguish them from their rarer relatives, the purple heron and black kite. Names that were in the process of changing are shown in the 1923 list as alternatives: such as ‘wild duck or mallard’, and ‘ring-dove or wood-pigeon’.
One of the most striking changes in usage is the switch in the name of some of our most familiar garden birds, from ‘titmouse’ to ‘tit’. The use of the older name – which dates back to the fourteenth century, and as we have seen simply means ‘small creature’ – lasted longer than we might imagine. So even though the shorter and more convenient term ‘tit’ has been in widespread use since the 1700s, a book published as recently as 1975 was still called The Titmice of the British Isles.5
However, just four years later a Collins New Naturalist volume, written by the Oxford scientist Christopher Perrins, rejoiced in the rather saucy title British Tits.6 This was apparently confirmed only after a lengthy correspondence between the author and the publishers, who were afraid the ambiguity might offend the delicate sensibilities of their readers.
With all these changes to bird names taking place gradually, over almost a hundred years, they have been accepted into general usage and, over time, become the norm. But in the final decade of the twentieth century, a radical proposal was made to change a significant minority of English bird names. Unlike previous changes, however, its proponents aimed to make it happen not gradually and organically, but virtually overnight…
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It was as if Moses had come down from the mountain, breathing fire and fury, and carrying the stone tablets on which were carved the Ten Commandments. But this time the pronouncements did not deal with such minor transgressions as murder, adultery or coveting thy neighbour’s ass. Instead, they condemned what to many was a far more pressing and significant subject: a proposed series of radical changes to the English names of birds.
The speaker was Ian Wallace, a man widely regarded as the godfather of modern birding. With his flowing white locks and beard, he certainly looked the part of an Old Testament prophet. More importantly, he commanded both affection and respect from his audience – as well he might, for through the sheer force of his personality, expressed through his lively writings and quirky illustrations, he has influenced successive generations of birders from the 1950s to the present.xi
Never one to duck controversy, Wallace had seized an opportunity to speak in a debate before the great and the good of the bird world. This took place at a conference jointly organised by the British Trust for Ornithology and Birding World magazine, held at Swanwick in Derbyshire in March 1993, and aptly named ‘Pride and Prejudice’.
Wallace’s words, combined with his animated and energetic delivery, suggested an imminent apocalypse of Biblical proportions. Hands waving, voice ri
sing in volume and pitch with every sentence, he railed against a new proposal that wholesale changes should be made to the names of the birds of the Western Palearctic – the zoogeographical region comprising Britain, Europe, North Africa and the Middle East.
Following Wallace’s oration his opponent, the highly respected ornithologist Tim Inskipp, did his best. He put forward some excellent arguments, founded mostly in the urgent need to remove confusion amongst birders and ornithologists from different nations around the world. But in the face of Wallace’s whirlwind, he simply had no chance. When a show of hands for or against the changes was taken at the conclusion of the debate, it was overwhelmingly in favour of respecting the status quo.
Ironically, given the result of the debate, few birders and ornithologists could deny that many of our bird names were indeed completely illogical. Why blackcap and whitethroat, and not ‘black-capped warbler’ and ‘white-throated warbler’, for example (as MacGillivray had attempted to rename them nearly two centuries earlier)? Why, as we have already seen, were British and American names for the same species or family sometimes different? And most of all, how, in this post-imperial world, could we possibly defend our continued use of single names for ‘our’ swallow, cuckoo, wheatear, kingfisher, jay and wren, when each is just one of dozens of species in their respective families found across the globe?
These were the driving forces behind the call for change. That was why a few months earlier, in the June 1992 edition of the influential monthly magazine British Birds, Tim Inskipp and Tim Sharrock had published a short but detailed paper setting out the reasons for the proposed changes, and a list of suggested new names.
These fell into three main categories. First, there were those birds for which the American and English names were significantly different. These had been discussed in detail three years earlier, at the 1990 International Ornithological Congress in New Zealand.
