by Stephen Moss
So next time you hear the croaking call of the raven, remember that the name we use for this huge and fearsome corvid is not all that different from what our prehistoric ancestors might have called it, as they stared up into a cold, grey sky and watched these huge black birds passing overhead. For me, that revelation is, in equal measure, both astonishing and comforting.
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How did I come to write this book? It began with the influence of my late mother, Kay Moss, who in spite of her rather limited formal education passed on to me her deep and abiding love of the English language, and also encouraged me in my lifelong passion for birds. Together, these have made me endlessly curious about the origin of bird names.
I can still recall sitting in my grammar-school playground some time during the mid-1970s with my friend Daniel,v testing each other on the scientific names of British birds. In those days I certainly knew my Anthus pratensis from my Prunella modularis, and my Crex crex from my Coccothraustes coccothraustes, even if I struggle to remember some of them now.vi
In the early 1980s, when I was studying English at Cambridge, I made a special study of the bird poetry of John Clare (see Chapter 4). Later on, as I pursued a career as a writer and TV producer, I began to take a closer interest in the cultural side of our relationship with birds. This culminated in the BBC 4 television series and accompanying book Birds Britannia.9 Subtitled ‘How the British Fell in Love with Birds’, this examined the profound and longstanding connection between the British and our birdlife, expressed through both popular and high culture.
While making that series I interviewed my friend and fellow birder David Lindo (aka ‘The Urban Birder’). Like me, David acquired his fascination with birds at a very early age, and in a similar suburban setting (he in Wembley, me in Shepperton), during the late 1960s and early 1970s.
Like most young birders in those days, David knew no one else who shared his interest, and so resorted to making up his own names for the species he saw. Sparrows were ‘baby birds’, starlings ‘mummy birds’ and blackbirds ‘daddy birds’. We may smile, but that early desire to name and categorise shows that we have an instinct to give names to the living things we see around us, even in early childhood.
When it comes to naming birds there is also – and I may be touching on a controversial subject here – some difference between the sexes. Broadly speaking, most male birders have an urge to put a name to every bird they see or hear, often interrupting ordinary day-to-day conversations to do so (in what the TV presenter and keen birder Mike Dilger calls ‘birding Tourette’s’). This can result in a perhaps unhealthy obsession with keeping lists: of birds seen in your garden, on your local patch, in your home city or county, in the UK and ultimately around the world.vii
Women, on the other hand, often take a more holistic (and perhaps less stressful) approach – preferring to take a deeper interest in what the bird is doing, and why, rather than always needing to label it. Of course, not all men are obsessive listers and not all women are fascinated by bird behaviour, but there is more than a grain of truth in this distinction.
I hope that Mrs Moreau’s Warbler will appeal to both groups equally. Anyone interested in detail can find out how many of our birds got their names; while those who prefer the big-picture view can better understand the sweep of history and how it shaped the names we call our birds today.
And if you still prefer to give your own names to the birds, then may I refer you to the performance-poet A. F. Harrold,10 whose splendid verse ‘Among The Ornithologists’ mixes wonder, imagination and confusion in equal measure to produce a cornucopia of evocative names. These beguile and inspire us – as all good bird names should:
Like the Fool at Court I can see the truth, speak a true name:
This one I’ll call the Fifth Day of Christmas Bird for its eye’s gold ring,
Here’s the Nervous Bugger who’s always a step ahead, twittering,
I’ll call this one the Golden Glimpse as I miss it sitting still again,
But here’s the Puffed-Up Lover Bird, strutting grey and wooing.
A stately Snaked-neck Bird makes its slow way along the stream.
A Single Drop of Blood in the Darkest Night Bird paddles out of a dream
And under the river bank, and as I wonder what it’s doing
I see the Surprising Single Snowfall In The Night Bird, twig in beak,
build an unruly, unshapely, unhandsome home of a nest
and think it’s doing fine. And look! A Blue Sphere With A Yellow Vest
cocks a momentary eye at me, but then declines to speak.
For all I know it’s just named me inside its tiny brain
Or left me unlabelled, unpinned down, free to be anything I claim.viii
Most of all, this book is a tribute to the pioneering and far-sighted men and women who named our birds. Many of these people are anonymous: our distant ancestors, whose curiosity about the natural world led them to try to create order by giving names to the creatures they saw. Others are long dead, but not forgotten: their names live on in the plethora of eponymous bird names, mostly coined during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but some – such as Mrs Moreau’s warbler – devised more recently.
It is these heroes and heroines who are the centre of this book; they, and the myriad variety of more than ten thousand different kinds of birds, in every corner of the globe, which bear the names they bestowed on them.
Stephen Moss
Mark, Somerset
May 2017
Notes
1 Michel Desfayes, A Thesaurus of Bird Names, Musée cantonal d’histoire naturelle (Paris, 1998).
2 John Wright, The Naming of the Shrew (London, 2014).
3 http://aishwaryashivapareek.com/post/104398138332/does-a-cat-know-he-is-a-cat-does-a-dog-know-he-is
4 Joanne Harris, Runemarks (London, 2007).
5 Matthew Woodring Stover, Caine’s Law (London, 2012).
6 John Fowles, The Tree. This has recently been republished by Little Toller Books (Dorset, 2016), with a perceptive introduction by the author William Fiennes.
7 W. B. Lockwood, The Oxford Book of British Bird Names (London, 1984).
8 ibid.
9 BBC 4 (2009) and (London, 2011).
10 A. F. Harrold, ‘Among The Ornithologists’, in Of Birds & Bees (Reading, 2008).
i Referring to yellowhammer, common tern, lapwing and Dartford warbler respectively.
ii Carol Kaesuk Yoon, Naming Nature (New York and London, 2009). ‘Good caveman taxonomy’ applied to plants, too. Knowing which plant was good to eat, and which might be poisonous, would also have been vital. Later, this working knowledge of plant names, and their various therapeutic uses, would develop into the earliest form of medicine.
iii In his Introduction to a short work, Animal. Vegetable. Mineral. (London, 2016), the nature writer Tim Dee has expanded on this theme: ‘Go to your window in the morning, open your curtains and think how not one blackbird you might see knows that it is a blackbird; not one tree cares that it is an oak, an ash, or a lime. Not one; and yet the blackbird lives as a blackbird not as a blackcap; the ash is an ash and not an alder. We are right to tell the difference because difference tells.’
iv It’s important to note that, as Lockwood points out, only when an ornithologist has specifically coined a name can we date its creation precisely. In other cases, even though we may be able to discover the first recorded mention of the name in print (for example, by looking it up in the Oxford English Dictionary), we have no idea how far back the usage of the name may go.
v Now Professor Daniel Osorio of Sussex University, one of the world experts on the way birds and other organisms perceive colour, and still a dear friend.
vi Meadow pipit, dunnock, corncrake and hawfinch respectively.
vii In case you’re wondering, I keep all of those lists, which currently (spring 2017) stand at 84, 97, 214, 374 and 2,627 species respectively.
viii I guess that the birds ar
e, respectively, blackbird, pied wagtail, goldcrest, wood pigeon, mute swan, moorhen, coot and blue tit – but you may prefer your own versions!
PROLOGUE
Mrs Moreau’s Warbler
Winifred’s warbler (Scepomycter winifredae), also known as Mrs Moreau’s warbler, is a species of bird in the Cisticolidae family … endemic to montane forest in the Uluguru Mountains in Tanzania. It is threatened by habitat loss.
WIKIPEDIA ENTRY: ‘Mrs Moreau’s Warbler’
When I think back to the year 1970, lists of names often come to mind. John, Paul, George and Ringo, whose band, the Beatles, broke up in April of that year. Lovell, Haise and Swigert, who in that same month, against all the odds, guided their stricken spacecraft Apollo 13 back to Earth. Jairzinho, Tostão, Rivellino and the incomparable Pelé, Brazil’s formidable forward line, who thrashed Italy 4-1 to win the World Cup, thus forever defining football as ‘the beautiful game’.
All these people – and their incredible achievements – made a lasting impression on me. But there was one other name that would shape my life even more profoundly: that belonging to the wife of a now long-forgotten ornithologist.
I was ten years old, and had been obsessed with birds for as long as I could remember. To encourage my interest, for four shillings a week (the pre-decimal equivalent of 20p), my mother subscribed to a weekly ‘partwork’ of magazines, with the beguiling title Birds of the World.
Every Saturday morning, I would wait eagerly for the paperboy to drop the latest issue through our letterbox, and then spend the rest of the day absorbed in its contents – the full-colour photographs, the text packed with fascinating facts about the world’s birds and their extraordinary lifestyles.
Even in nine large-format volumes, Birds of the World could only cover a fraction of the 8,600 or so different kinds of bird known to exist at that time. But in a concession to completeness, its editor John Gooders had decided to include a full list of every single species. So it was that, some time in late 1970, on page 2,110 of Volume VII, part 3, I came across the name of the bird that gave this book its title: Mrs Moreau’s warbler.
Something about the strangeness of the name struck me, even then. I already knew – or could guess – that birds could be called after their colour or their size, their habits or their habitat, the sound they made, or the place where they came from. Some, I also realised, were named after people: even at this early stage in my ornithological education I had heard of Leach’s petrel, Montagu’s harrier and Bewick’s swan.
But ‘Mrs Moreau’s warbler’? How on earth had this species acquired such an unusual name? A clue lay in the words in italics beneath: Scepomycter winifredae. Even at this early age, I was able to deduce that the bird had been named after a woman called Winifred Moreau.
Nowadays, of course, I can simply Google the name and click on the brief but informative Wikipedia entry. But no such easy shortcuts to knowledge were available back in the dark ages of my childhood. And my mum was calling me downstairs for tea. So I put down the magazine and, for the moment at least, forgot all about Mrs Moreau’s warbler.
Yet as the years went by, and my interest in bird names grew, my thoughts kept returning to this obscure little bird, the woman after whom it was named, and her husband, one of the greatest ornithologists of the twentieth century.
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Reginald Ernest Moreau – known to his friends and colleagues simply as ‘Reg’ – was born in 1897. The Moreausi were a typically respectable, middle-class family, living an unremarkable existence in the Surrey town of Kingston-upon-Thames.
Then one day, when Reg was about ten years old, their quiet, comfortable lives were shattered. Returning home from work, his stockbroker father was struck by the open door of a passing train. Although Mr Moreau senior survived the accident, he became a manic-depressive and was never able to work again. As a result of their straitened circumstances, the family moved out of town to a more modest property in rural Surrey. There, during long bicycle trips around the local countryside, Reg developed his lifelong interest in birds.
In 1914, the year the First World War broke out, the seventeen-year-old Reg left school and took an exam to enter the Civil Service. He just managed to scrape through, in ninety-ninth place out of a hundred, and ended up in the Army Audit Office in Aldershot. Then, however, he fell ill with rheumatoid arthritis. The family doctor prescribed a complete change, and Reg applied for a posting abroad, to Egypt’s capital Cairo.
He took to colonial life immediately, as his son David recalled many years later:
Once in Egypt, he began to behave like the Indiana Jones character that he had clearly always wanted to be. Adopting a bush hat, khaki shirts and shorts … he began making long journeys by ancient car, rail and on foot into the surrounding desert. He took to flies, protesting camels, leather water bottles and Bedouin as if Kingston-on-Thames [sic] had never existed.1
Reg Moreau spent much of the next thirty years or so living and working in Africa. He became an expert in the study of bird migration: the epic, twice-yearly journeys made by hundreds of millions of birds, as they travel between the northern latitudes of Eurasia and the vast continent of Africa.
In his final years, by then living in the quiet Oxfordshire village of Berrick Salome, he brought together his lifetime’s work into a book, The Palearctic-African Bird Migration Systems. This was published in 1972, but sadly Reg did not live to see it in print, having died, aged seventy-three, on 30 May 1970.
Despite the less-than-snappy title, the book was a masterpiece, distilling decades of hard-won knowledge and experience into clear, precise prose. Even now, almost fifty years after it was published, it is full of insights into the incredible journeys made by migrating birds.
As Reg Moreau lay on his deathbed, in the spring of 1970, he had time to write a short page of acknowledgements, which began with heartfelt thanks to his wife Winifred: ‘This book would never have been written but for the devotion of my darling diminutive wife, known to generations of ornithologists as Winnie.’
A touching tribute, certainly. Yet Winnie Moreau contributed far more to their relationship than simple devotion. She was also a leading ornithologist in her own right, and an equal partner with Reg in their field trips and discussions; so much so that perhaps, in a less chauvinistic era, she might have been given a joint credit for the book.
Winnie and Reg first met on a fine spring day in the early 1920s, in a chance encounter that would radically shape the course of their lives. At the time, she was picking wild flowers and he was watching migrant birds. But this meeting did not take place on some windswept English headland, but under clear blue skies near the port city of Alexandria, where Winnie – a vicar’s daughter from Cumberland – was working as a nanny.
More than forty years later, in 1966, Reg recalled that first meeting:
Here one March afternoon, where the steppe was still bright with flowers and was twinkling with short-toed larks and wheatears, I came across a small person picking scarlet ranunculuses… She was knowledgeable in birds. Improbably we met twice more, for an hour or two, before she returned to England. We were married in Cumberland in June 1924.
After the wedding, they returned to Egypt. Four years later, they moved to Amani, a hill station in the scenically beautiful and biologically fascinating Usambara Mountains of north-east Tanganyika (now Tanzania), where Reg had taken up a new post in the accounts department of a biological research station.
But while auditing may have been his profession, his main passion – shared by his wife – was ornithology. Fired up by their new and exotic surroundings, Reg and Winnie embarked on a long-term study of the birds around their new home. As well as the long-distance migrants that would form the subject of his book, they also focused on the sedentary ‘Eastern Arc endemics’: a unique group of very localised species, found nowhere else in the world but here.
In 1938, a year before the outbreak of the Second World War, Reg and Winnie embarked on an expedition to
the Uluguru mountain range, several days’ journey south of the Usambaras. There, high in the montane forest, they discovered an obscure and endangered songbird which, in a perhaps surprising act of marital devotion, he named Scepomycter winifredae – Mrs Moreau’s warbler.
I say surprising, because in the few rather grainy, black-and-white photographs of him that survive, the short, stout, bald and bespectacled Reg bears more than a passing resemblance to Captain Mainwaring from Dad’s Army. But beneath that stern-looking exterior he was a sociable and fun-loving man. And he clearly had a romantic streak, as the naming of this obscure little bird after his wife proves.
When Reg Moreau died in 1970 his obituaries were uniformly warm and positive. He was remembered as ‘a squat, square figure [with] … a rugged face, a heavy square jaw, thick glasses, and just a fringe of curly hair which he brushed upwards’. His rather unusual dress sense was also mentioned: ‘[He was] adorned frequently in the summer with a transparent green eyeshade, and more often than not, if the weather was warm, with huge knees and strong shoes protruding from a pair of shorts.’
But most of all, Reg Moreau was regarded a key influence on both professional and amateur ornithologists. As my friend and mentor James Ferguson-Lees recalled just before his death, he was always keen to share his vast knowledge and experience, yet also prepared to listen to other people’s thoughts and opinions. ‘Reg was a remarkable man – a great enthusiast about birds and bird migration – like a God to us youngsters!’ii
Winnie, though, remained tantalisingly vague, the dutiful wife hovering in the background. Although six years older than Reg, she survived for another eleven years, dying in 1981, in her ninetieth year.