DIVIDED BY A COMMON LANGUAGE

As Kieran points out in his feature, what we call a Great Northern Diver is known as a Common Loon in the USA. That’s because they really are ‘common’ there, even being found on the lake in New York’s Central Park at times. The word loon is thought to come from AngloSaxon and/or Old Norse words meaning lame, clumsy and awkward, although there’s also a chance that it derives from the word ‘lament’, because of the plaintive quality of the species’ call. Whatever the case, it’s rather more evocative than ‘ diver’, which after all could apply to a lot of birds.

There are other examples of how birds are differently named on the other side of the Atlantic. Smaller skuas are known as jaegers over there (from the German word for ‘hunter’), with the Arctic Skua becoming the Parasitic Jaeger. ‘ Skua’ is derived from a Faroese word originally applied to the Great Skua. Which, just to make things more confusing, we sometimes call Bonxie, from a Shetland word of Norse origin.

The Rough-legged Buzzard is the Rough-legged Hawk (all Buteo- type raptors are called hawks in the USA), with ‘buzzard’ instead sometimes being applied to the Turkey Vulture. Sounds confusing, but back in Elizabethan times (when British people first started settling in North America), ‘buzzard’ would have been applied to any large, carrion-eating bird.

You occasionally see it claimed that American prudishness is behind them using ‘chickadee’ rather than ‘tit’, but in fact Americans do sometimes use ‘titmice’, the older name for birds of this family, derived from the Anglo-Saxon name for the birds – ‘mase’ – and ‘tit’, meaning something small.