Mrs Moreau's Warbler

by Stephen Moss

  Modern guides have now changed yet again, and although they keep the old sequence for the majority of birds, they now usually start with wildfowl (ducks, geese and swans) and gamebirds (pheasants, partridges, grouse etc.). This can make it hard for those from an earlier generation to find these species rapidly in the book when out in the field.

  If taxonomy continues to change every year or two, publishers will inevitably struggle to keep up, so we face potential chaos. No wonder that several authors, including the expat Briton Richard Crossley (who lives in New Jersey and has developed a series of pioneering and innovative booksxxvii), have called for a new, fixed and consistent sequence to be used in all field guides. This would be established independently of any further taxonomic changes, and instead would be based on simple categories such as ‘seabirds’, ‘waterbirds’ and ‘land birds’. At a time when even the scientific names of some birds are changing,xxviii anything that leads to greater stability and consistency is surely to be welcomed. And as we have seen, it broadly fits the latest conclusions regarding avian phylogeny.

  Ironically this proposal is much the same as the system found in what is widely regarded as the very first portable bird book written in English, Thomas Bewick’s A History of British Birds, published in two volumes (Land Birds and Water Birds) in 1797 and 1804.23 This just shows that if we wait long enough, the way we look at birds really does turn full circle.

  5: New Birds, New Names

  From time to time, a pioneering ornithologist actually does discover a bird that is completely unknown to science. So it was that in 1991, the British ornithologist Paul Salaman found a new species of vireo – a small, olive-and-yellow, insectivorous Neotropical bird superficially similar to a warbler – in the Chocó department of western Colombia.24

  That it took so long for the bird to be discovered is hardly surprising, when you consider that the cloud-forest where it lives is not only remote, tricky to access and often blanketed in mist, but was also a hotspot in the long-running conflict between the Colombian government and the FARC guerrilla movement.

  As we have noted, newly discovered (and newly split) species are often named after the region where they were found, and this species was indeed given the name Chocó vireo. Afterwards it might have sunk back into obscurity, were it not that its scientific name was then auctioned off to the highest bidder by Salaman, through the UK-based global conservation organisation BirdLife International. So it was that in 1996, for the surprisingly modest sum of $70,000, the Chocó vireo was granted the scientific name Vireo masteri.25

  The name commemorated Dr Bernard Master, a retired doctor and lifelong birder from Ohio, who on New Year’s Day 2010, after searching for three weeks, finally got to see the species that bears his name. As a dedicated ‘world lister’, whose aim is to see every single one of the world’s bird species, Master was naturally delighted at having finally caught up with his eponymous bird.

  When it was first announced that the species’ Latin name was being sold to the highest bidder, the response ranged from outrage to laughter. Birdwatch magazine ran a competition to suggest other potential candidates for corporate sponsorship, which included such witty entries as ‘Dulux roller’ and ‘Kellogg’s corncrake’, and the winner, the rather less wholesome ‘Durex shag’.

  Others were less amused at what they regarded as the thin end of the wedge. Would we eventually see birds being auctioned off to whichever multinational corporation could stump up the most money, allowing them to ‘greenwash’ their misdeeds by appearing to care about conservation? The influential World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) was especially vocal in its opposition, but has since been proved wrong: many species names have been ‘sold’ in the past two decades, including a new species of barbet in Peru, which reportedly raised over $300,000 for conservation.

  And the good news is that the Chocó vireo has also been discovered at several other locations, including across the border in north-west Ecuador – as predicted by Paul Salaman.26

  But let us push the moral of this tale further: despite what purists may think, should we not perhaps be following this idea to its logical conclusion, and naming more and more of the world’s endangered species after anyone – individual or company – prepared to donate enough hard cash to save them?xxix

  Why shouldn’t the global corporations who claim to want a sustainable future actually put their hands in their pockets and donate proper amounts of money to bird and wildlife conservation – and in exchange have a species named after them? Or should that be re-named? For example, the Hood (or Española) mockingbird, found only on a single island in the Galápagos, already boasts the scientific name Mimus macdonaldi. However, this is not after the ubiquitous burger-retailer, but to commemorate the confederate soldier and naturalist Colonel Marshall McDonald [sic] who, oddly, specialised not in birds, but fish. Maybe we should approach his multinational near-namesake and ask them to make a suitable offer.

  As we noted in Chapter 5, some of the people after whom birds were named were not necessarily the most deserving: Lady Amherst may, for example, have been a remarkable woman, but her ornithological credentials were pretty much non-existent. Likewise, Thekla Brehm, whose only claim to fame is that, when she died in 1857 at the tender age of twenty-four, her grieving father gave her name to a newly discovered species of lark, which had been shot in Spain by her elder brothers.

  And then of course there are the deserving, among whom I would count the woman after whom one of the world’s most obscure and elusive birds was named: Winifred Moreau. In an era when the couple’s extensive ornithological research was automatically attributed for the most part to Reg Moreau, it is rather wonderful that her name lives on in her eponymous warbler, a testament to her contribution to the world of ornithology – and also to the strength of Reg and Winnie Moreau’s marriage.

  Fifty years after I first came across this bird in the pages of Birds of the World, the search for Mrs Moreau’s legacy led me to travel five thousand miles to the Uluguru Mountains in the heart of East Africa, and trek several thousand feet up a forest track, where I hoped to finally come upon the bird whose name provides the title of this book.

  Notes

  1 Lars Svensson, Killian Mullarney and Dan Zetterstrom, Collins Bird Guide (2nd edition, London, 2009).

  2 Ian Sinclair, Phil Hockey and Warwick Tarboton, SASOL Birds of Southern Africa (3rd edition, Cape Town, 2002).

  3 Frank Gill and Minturn Wright, Birds of the World: Recommended English Names (London, 2006).

  4 For more examples, see Simon Horobin, How English Became English (Oxford, 2016).

  5 John A. G. Barnes, The Titmice of the British Isles (London, 1975).

  6 Christopher Perrins, British Tits (London, 1979).

  7 Simon Dowell, British Birds vol. 85 (1992) p. 620.

  8 I. M. Lewis, British Birds vol. 85 (1992) p. 620.

  9 Dr Martin Williams, Simon Stirrup, Dave Hatton and Dan Duff. Not BB is still available online at: http://www.drmartinwilliams.com/not-bb/not-bb-iii.html.

  10 Author in conversation with Pamela Rasmussen.

  11 http://robins-chaos.blogspot.co.uk/2010/01/politically-incorrect-duck-or-long.html (2010).

  12 In The Oxford Book of British Bird Names, op. cit.

  13 Charles G. Sibley and Burt L. Monroe, Distribution and Taxonomy of Birds of the World (New Haven, 1990), and Charles G. Sibley and Jon E. Ahlquist, Phylogeny and Classification of Birds: A Study in Molecular Evolution (New Haven, 1990).

  14 For a very helpful discussion, see G. W. H. Davidson, ‘Scientific Controversy over Avian Taxonomic Changes, based on DNA Hybridisation’, The Raffles Bulletin of Zoology 46 (2), 1998.

  15 See, for example, his article ‘On the Phylogeny and Classification of Living Birds’, reproduced here: http://digilander.libero.it/avifauna/classificazione/sequence5.htm. Burt Monroe died in 1994, aged sixty-three; Jon Ahlquist (born 1944) is still alive.

  16 ‘A comprehensive phylogeny of birds (Aves) using targete
d next-generation DNA sequencing’, by Prum et al. http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v526/n7574/full/nature15697.html.

  17 Professor Daniel Osorio, University of Sussex, in litt.

  18 For a really clear pictorial and diagrammatic guide to the relationships between birds on a species and family level, check out OneZoom http://www.onezoom.org/. More detailed findings can be seen at http://birdtree.org/ (A Global Phylogeny of Birds). Alternatively, see the paper by Erich D. Jarvis et al: ‘Whole-genome analyses resolve early branches in the tree of life of modern bird’, in Science 346, 1320 (2014).

  19 See http://www.ornitaxa.com/SM/SMOrg/sibley3.html.

  20 See http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0166307.

  21 Handbook of the Birds of the World: Special Volume – New Species (Barcelona, 2013).

  22 https://www.bou.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/British-List-12-Dec-2016.pdf.

  23 Thomas Bewick, A History of British Birds (Newcastle, 1797 and 1804).

  24 See Threatened Birds of the World by BirdLife International (Barcelona and Cambridge, 2000).

  25 For an entertaining account of its discovery and naming, see David Turner, Was Beethoven a Birdwatcher? (Chichester, 2011).

  26 D. M. Brinkhuizen and A. Solano-Ugalde, ‘Range extension of Chocó Vireo Vireo masteri in Ecuador, with a description of the species’ song’, Cotinga 34: 73–77 (2012).

  i The money raised by sponsorship – more than $60,000 in the first year, and far more since – has gone to support conservation projects in Israel, Turkey and Georgia.

  ii At a brief stop for refreshments we also came across a flock of wolf-whistling Tristram’s starlings, named after the Victorian bird collector Henry Baker Tristram (whom we met in Chapter 5) – a timely reminder of our previous colonial presence in the region.

  iii English is also gradually creeping into areas once dominated by other languages. In India’s Bollywood film industry, for example, Hindi and Urdu are giving way to the use of English, along with a hybrid of Hindi and English known disparagingly as ‘Hinglish’.

  iv More than the combined total of native speakers of Spanish, Arabic, Hindi and Russian, the next four languages in descending order of popularity.

  v However, in terms of raw numbers English isn’t actually the world’s top language. Roughly 1.3 billion people – more than one in six of the entire world population – speak Mandarin Chinese. But we are entitled to take that figure with a large pinch of salt. For although 900 million native Mandarin speakers comfortably outrank those for whom English is their first language, when it comes to its status as a second language, English wins hands down.

  vi They also preferred the American horned lark and red phalarope (but helpfully added ‘shore lark’ and ‘grey phalarope’ in brackets), yet left Lapland bunting, black-necked grebe and brent goose unchanged.

  vii Incidentally, this bird is named not after the Arctic explorer James Clark Ross (featured in Chapter 5), but for the wife of the governor of St Helena, Lady Eliza Ross.

  viii For example, some time during the early twentieth century the meaning of the word ‘hopefully’ changed from its original sense of ‘in a hopeful manner’, as in ‘to travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive’ (a saying originally attributed to the Victorian author and explorer Robert Louis Stevenson) to the modern meaning, ‘it is to be hoped’.

  ix Just some of the Oxford Dictionaries’ new words for 2016: https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/word-of-the-year/word-of-the-year-2016

  x This reflects wider changes in the English language, in which hyphenated words have a tendency to be replaced by single words – as in ‘bookshelf’ and ‘suitcase’; and the more recent trend towards ‘portmanteau words’, made from two abbreviated words yoked together, such as ‘sitcom’, ‘Britpop’ and the much-overused ‘Brexit’.

  xi One reviewer said of Wallace’s captivating memoirs Beguiled by Birds: ‘It makes you want to bring Ian home, feed him, open a bottle of something – preferably Scottish in origin – wind him up and then sit back as he regales you with stories all night’ (Gordon Hamlett, Bird Watching magazine).

  xii One that really riled the purists was the proposed change from red grouse to the potentially confusing ‘willow ptarmigan’ (and consequently changing ptarmigan to ‘rock ptarmigan’, as it is known in North America).

  xiii There are many other birds for which there is at least one other species bearing the same name: shelduck, teal, wigeon, pintail, shoveler, pochard, scaup, eider, golden-eye, fulmar, capercaillie, quail, gannet, shag, cormorant, bittern, osprey, buzzard, sparrowhawk, goshawk, kestrel, quail, coot, moorhen, lapwing, dotterel, turnstone, oystercatcher, curlew, whimbrel, redshank, greenshank, knot, snipe, woodcock, avocet, kittiwake, guillemot, puffin, wryneck, skylark, stonechat, redstart, nightingale, robin, blackbird, whitethroat, chiffchaff, goldcrest, treecreeper, jackdaw, raven, chough, jay, magpie, chaffinch, linnet, greenfinch, goldfinch, bullfinch, crossbill and serin.

  xiv Including church owl, white owl, screech owl (also, confusingly, the name of two dozen or more Neotropical species in the genus Megascops), screaming owl and hissing owl, respectively referring to the bird’s home, pallid colour and strange, nocturnal call.

  xv The official English name for this duck is still the ‘hottentot teal’.

  xvi Another potentially tricky name, ‘negrofinch’, has been quietly changed to ‘nigrita’, again to avoid giving offence.

  xvii The prothonotary warbler itself has a bright yellow plumage, and is so named because papal officials in the Vatican wore uniforms of this colour. When US President Harry S. Truman was introduced to one such official, he is said to have asked, ‘What the hell is a prothonotary?’

  xviii In his 1609 comedy Epicene, or the Silent Woman, to refer to Sir John Daw, a rather ridiculous character.

  xix All species of bird (and indeed any other organism) belong to a particular family, which may contain anything from several hundred species to just one. In turn, each family is combined with others to create an order. So, for example, the house sparrow Passer domesticus belongs to the family Passeridae, which in turn is part of the much larger order the Passeriformes.

  xx In Ever Since Darwin (1977), the US biologist Stephen Jay Gould referred to ‘the fuzziness of all supposedly absolute taxonomic distinctions’, while the Dutch author Kees van Deemter has gone even further: ‘Species and subspecies are but a convenient fiction’ (In Praise of Vagueness, 2010).

  xxi As Bret M. Whitney and Mario Cohn-Haft point out, in the Special Volume of Handbook of the Birds of the World (Barcelona, 2013), conservationists are now beginning to recognise subspecies and dubious species in their official plans, in order to preserve the building blocks of biodiversity before they disappear.

  xxii In his journal A hand-list of the genera and species of birds, Vol. 5 (London, 1909). Despite spending most of his life in the museum, Sharpe has several species named after him, including a rosefinch and a starling. He also had ten daughters.

  xxiii Named after a Briton, William Bullock (see Chapter 5).

  xxiv A similar situation occurred with myrtle and Audubon’s warblers, which are considered by some authorities to be two separate species, and by others to be one, known (rather unimaginatively) as the yellow-rumped warbler.

  xxv The volume also includes the Rubeho warbler, previously considered to be an isolated population of Mrs Moreau’s warbler, and found in an adjacent mountain range, but now regarded as a separate species. Ironically, this means that Mrs Moreau’s warbler is under even greater threat.

  xxvi Although owls are often popularly referred to as raptors, the term is usually confined to day-flying birds of prey such as eagles, hawks, kites, harriers, buzzards and falcons.

  xxvii Such as Richard Crossley and Dominic Couzens, The Crossley Guide: Britain and Ireland (Princeton, 2014). The innovation lies in using a series of many different photos from different angles and perspectives, to create what he believes is a more real
istic view of the bird.

  xxviii For example, as has already been noted, blue tit has gone from the genus Parus into a new genus, Cyanistes, while black-headed gull, formerly in the genus Larus (along with most British gulls), now has the scientific name Chroicocephalus ridibundus.

  xxix This is already starting to happen: the World Land Trust has recently launched its ‘Name an Orchid’ campaign, supported by Sir David Attenborough, in which people are invited to give the name of themselves or a loved-one to newly-discovered orchid species from Ecuador: http://www.worldlandtrust.org/name-an-orchid.

  EPILOGUE

  Winifred’s Warbler

  If the names are lost, the knowledge also disappears.

  Johann Christian Fabricius, Philosophia Entomologica (1778)

  Dawn breaks over the Uluguru Mountains in eastern Tanzania, as we rise and prepare for the day ahead. I am about to embark on the final leg of my quest to see a very special bird. Our local guides, Elia and James, are quietly confident; I only wish I could share their optimism.

  The journey here has been a long and eventful one. A few days ago, I flew almost five thousand miles, with my companions Kevin and Graeme, from the UK to Dar-es-Salaam. There we met our leader Roy, who drove us in his battered Land Cruiser from the hot, fetid lowlands around the Tanzanian capital into the Eastern Arc Mountains, where we pitched camp by a fast-flowing stream.

  Known as ‘Africa’s Galápagos’, because millions of years of ecological isolation have led to a huge diversity of endemic plants and animals, this is the only place on the planet where the species we are searching for can be found. Now we are about to set off on a trek to one of the highest mountains in this remarkable range, a peak the locals call Kilangala. Here I hope to finally catch up with the bird in question: Mrs Moreau’s warbler – now also known, rather less formally, as Winifred’s warbler.