Who killed Cock Robin? An early birdwatcher
IN 1661, well-born Francis Willughby committed a murder. This endlessly inquisitive father of modern ornithology waited beneath a tree, gun in hand. An unfamiliar bird wheeled towards its lofty nest — ‘pow!’ — the creature fell, to be finished off with a wrung neck.
Back at home, Willughby started to dissect. Thus, the handsome Honey-buzzard (otherwise known as ‘Willughby’s Buzzard’) was identified and added to his list of species.
Many will shudder at that story. But Professor Tim Birkhead, a passionate ornithologist, issues a warning against modern sentimentality: ‘There is no ornithology without specimens.’
In the 17th century, scientists had no option but to kill in the pursuit of knowledge.
In this engrossing biography of ‘the first true ornithologist’, Birkhead takes us on an imaginative journey to the time of Charles II, when there was no classification of animals, birds and plants; when men such as Willughby often endured great hardship in order to make ground-breaking discoveries. His results were published (in 1676) as Willughby’s Ornithology, four years after his death at the age of 36.
It’s difficult to imagine the extraordinary energy of men such as Willughby.
Birkhead has himself spent 40 years studying birds and ‘I take for granted the fact that I can recognise most species’.
But this is due to the insatiable curiosity of those great ‘seekers’ of history, who noticed tiny details of a bird’s plumage and painstakingly set their discoveries down.
It won’t come as any surprise to learn that Britain’s Christmas card favourite, the robin, was also commonly called ‘ruddock’ and ‘redbreast’. In Mrs Moreau’s Warbler, a lively account of how birds got their names, naturalist Stephen Moss points out that people prefer old names handed down the ages to the official names decided by committee.
A bird may be tagged in many different ways: the barn owl has more than 30 folk names, which Moss sees as evidence of ‘the richness, complexity and downright quixotic quality that marks them out as part of our culture’.
Here is a plethora of wonderful stories: Moss uses detective work, folklore and experience to explain why the Dartford warbler is never seen in Dartford, and why the Wheatear was called ‘white-arse’ by the Anglo-Saxons.
The warbler of the title owes its moniker to a love story — that of Reg and Winnie Moreau, a civil servant and a nanny who met in Egypt in the Twenties. Moreau’s masterpiece on bird migration was finally published 50 years later. In it, he acknowledged the contribution of his ‘darling, diminutive wife’, after whom he named a hitherto unknown warbler.
Inevitably, there is a note of foreboding: ‘Having chosen to make their lives alongside us . . . they are now facing serious — and, in some cases, possibly terminal — declines.’
What of the corncrake, destroyed by industrialised farming? Where can the barn owl go when barns become chi-chi homes?
The men who once hunted birds for science at least had a purpose.
Our ‘advanced’ societies are killing them just as ruthlessly, through wanton carelessness.