Blackcap, redstart, yellowhammer: what’s in a bird’s name?
It’s easy to assume, with bird names, that we know what they mean, and often that assumption is quite correct. Woodpeckers peck wood, beeeaters feed on bees, and whitethroats are indeed white around the neck.
Other names seem almost wilfully obscure: what on Earth does the name puffin mean? Or hobby? Why are turtle doves named after reptiles? And don’t get me started on some of the more bizarre bird names found around the world – from oleaginous hemispingus to zitting cisticola, leaflove to hardhead, and bananaquit to bearded mountaineer.
Yet, as I discovered when I was researching my new book on the origins of bird names, if you dig deep enough, you unearth all sorts of fascinating stories about what the names mean, where they came from and, especially, the men and women who created them.
The origin of some names may, at first, seem obvious, yet are not quite as straightforward as they appear. Take the simplest of all English bird names: blackbird. It’s a bird, and it’s black. Isn’t that all we need to know?
But what about the crow, rook, raven and jackdaw? All of these would have been very familiar to our ancestors, and all appear – at least from a distance – to be black in colour. So why was just one species singled out as the “blackbird”?
The reason for this apparent anomaly is that, until the late medieval period, birds were not called “birds” at all, but fowls – as in Chaucer’s poem The Parliament of Fowls. The word bird (originally the AngloSaxon brid), referred only to young fowls, or chicks. Then, sometime around the time Chaucer was writing, this meaning began to shift. From then on, although “fowl” was still used for larger birds such as members of the crow family, “bird” became the norm for all smaller birds, including the blackbird. So, at the time it was named, this really was the only truly “black bird”.
Many of our oldest bird names – including raven, rook and crow – are onomatopoeic: they imitate the sound made by the bird itself. Cuckoo, chiffchaff and kittiwake are other well-known examples. Far less obvious ones include nightjar (from the “churring” sound made by this nocturnal bird), bittern (from its deep, booming call), and the aforementioned turtle dove. “Turtle” is a corruption of the bird’s soft “tur-tur” call, so has nothing to do with the aquatic reptile.
Other ancient bird names relate to a bird’s appearance: its size, colour, shape or distinctive markings. Again, some are obvious: such as great spotted woodpecker, blackcap, long-tailed tit and collared dove.
But with others it takes some linguistic detective work to uncover their true meaning. Take three familiar birds: the yellowhammer, redstart and wheatear. All three names superficially make sense, yet as soon as you look more closely, they become problematic. After all, the yellowhammer doesn’t have an especially loud or percussive song, redstarts are not noticeably jumpy, and I’ve certainly never seen a wheatear in a field of wheat.
The reason these names appear puzzling is down to one of the most important events in British history: the Norman Conquest. Perhaps the greatest change that resulted from this invasion was in our everyday language: within a century or so, Anglo-Saxon had merged with Norman French to create a new, hybrid tongue known as Middle English – the precursor to the way we speak today.
But as the old language fell into disuse, some of its words no longer made any sense. So, by a process called false etymology, people made up new versions, which sounded plausible, even if their original meaning had been lost. One famous non-avian example, the name “dandelion”, is in fact a corruption of the French dent de lion (meaning lion’s tooth, referring to the shape of the plant’s leaves).
The same happened with bird names. Thus, the Anglo-Saxon “yellow ammer” (from the German word for a bunting) became yellowhammer; “red steort” (meaning red tail) turned into redstart; and “wheteres” – literally white arse, changed into wheatear. Norman French also had a major influence on the names of ducks (mallard and wigeon), game birds (pheasant and partridge), and raptors (peregrine and hobby).
What these all have in common is that they were important to the Norman nobility – either as food, or for hunting and sport – so their French names took precedence over the older, English ones. Hobby, for example, comes from the Old French verb hober – meaning to jump about – and refers to this falcon’s dashing, acrobatic flight.
The name hobby also played a role in the naming of the table-top football game Subbuteo. The story goes that when the game’s inventor, Peter Adolph, tried to register his idea at the patent office, he wanted to call it Hobby. When a jobsworth official objected, he cleverly substituted the Latin name of his favourite bird, Falco subbuteo, instead.
From the 18th century onwards, existing names were codified by professional ornithologists who also coined new ones, such as blacktailed godwit or white-fronted goose. A trend also arose for naming birds after people: sometimes those who had discovered the species, such as George Montagu (Montagu’s amp;#xa0;harrier).
But birds were also named after polar explorers James Clark Ross and Sir John Franklin (Ross’s and Franklin’s gulls), the political radical Thomas Bewick (Bewick’s swan), and the vicar of Selborne, Gilbert White (White’s thrush). As is to be expected, given the patriarchal nature of society at the time, only a handful are named after women.
One notable exception is the woman who gave her name to my book: Winifred Moreau, who during the 1930s studied the endemic birds of Tanzania’s Uluguru mountains, with her ornithologist husband, Reg, and after whom one of the world’s rarest birds – Mrs Moreau’s warbler – is named.
The naming of birds is ultimately a purely human impulse: the birds themselves are, of course, completely unaware of what we choose to call them. Yet, without the wondrous variety of ornithological names, I believe that our world would be a far poorer place.
Ultimately, the names we have bestowed on birds down the ages reflect key aspects of our own lives: our primitive superstitions, myths and legends, invasions and conquests, changes in language, rigorous scientific observation, our love of sound, colour and pattern, and a sense of place.
Last, but certainly not least, some reflect the extraordinary achievements of the men and women after whom they were called – including, of course, Winifred Moreau.
Mrs Moreau’s Warbler: How Birds Got Their Names, byStephen Moss, is published by Guardian Faber on 3 May