by Stephen Moss
Sound is not the only way birds communicate, of course. Many species use their brightly coloured plumage and visual displays to do so. These include the extraordinary courtship dances of the multi-coloured birds of paradise, the strutting parade of the male peacock and, closer to home, the display of the black grouse – these are just three of the best known examples among many in the bird world.
But communicating by sound has three major advantages over vision. First, it is more consistent, working in poor light or even total darkness, or when the bird is hidden in a woodland, hedgerow or dense reed bed. Sound also carries further than vision: the bittern’s low, booming call can be heard several kilometres away. And sound has another major advantage: when a bird is calling or singing it does not always need to show itself, meaning that it can hide from predators, whereas during a visual performance it makes itself vulnerable to attack.
During the breeding season, male birds – and in the northern hemisphere these are usually the only ones that sing – need to defend a territory against their rivals. At the same time, they must attract and keep a female, otherwise all their efforts will have been in vain. That is why on a fine spring day, from long before dawn until after dusk, a songbird will sing his heart out, at a time when he could be doing all kinds of other essential tasks, such as building a nest or finding food.
Few other kinds of behaviour in nature are quite so persistent; and none perform two such critically important functions. The performance-poet A. F. Harrold summed up this dual purpose with admirable clarity and brevity in his verse, ‘Dawn Chorus’:
From hedgerow, telephone wire,
aerial and tree
sings out a double-edged request
fuck off or fuck me.7
But it’s not just why birds sing that is important; we also need to understand how they do so. The way they form sounds is fundamentally different to the way we do, because of their very different anatomy.
Human beings make sounds by using our lungs to pump air through our larynx and vocal cords, which fine-tune pitch and tone. We then use our lips and tongue to articulate these sounds to make specific words and phrases.
When a bird sings or calls, it uses an organ called a syrinx.xiii This is the avian equivalent of our larynx, but with one crucial difference. The human larynx is situated at the top of the trachea (or windpipe), but a bird’s syrinx is much lower down, at the junction of the two bronchi, the passages that carry air in and out of the lungs. This means that the bird can mix two sources of sound, simultaneously producing two different songs at the same time – in what the ornithologist C. H. Greenewalt dubbed the ‘two-voice’ phenomenon.xiv
That is perhaps why we feel so inadequate when we hear a master songster like the nightingale or song thrush. We admire birds partly because we find them so difficult to imitate – with the possible exception of a handful of species that make far simpler sounds, such as the cuckoo. And when we try to represent their sounds in our own language, for example to form the names of birds, we struggle to do so, with different people hearing each sound – and then trying to vocalise it – in their own individual manner.
There is also variation in the way people speak any language over time, as we have seen, and so the way we use bird sounds to form names has also varied considerably. Today, when we hear a wood pigeon make its monotonous yet strangely soothing sound, we represent it with the word ‘coo’. But according to the linguist W. B. Lockwood our ancestors heard exactly the same sound quite differently, representing it as ‘doove’, from which we get the modern name ‘dove’.xv Although it may not be immediately obvious, this is just one example of how the call of a bird can end up as its name, through the power of onomatopoeia.xvi
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There are many others. Take the crow family. Globally there are about 120 different species of crow, only eight of which live in Britain. Four of these are mainly black – the carrion crow, jackdaw, rook and raven – while the other four are more striking and varied in appearance: the chough, with its bright red bill and feet, the grey-and-black hooded crow, the black-and-white magpie and the multi-coloured jay.
At first sight – or perhaps I should say first hearing – the only onomatopoeic name appears to be jackdaw, whose name mimics the ‘chack, chack’ sound the birds make as flocks fly overhead to roost at dusk on a cold winter’s day, looking like scraps of black bin-bags caught by the wind.xvii Yet the other three mainly black species, the raven, rook and carrion crow, are also named after their distinctive sounds.
Each name reflects a version of their harsh cries: just try saying them out loud in the tone of the bird and that becomes far clearer. Given the familiarity of these species, which thrived alongside the early settlers as they ploughed the earth to grow crops, and their superficially similar, mainly black plumage, it is not surprising that they were called after their sound rather than their appearance.
The names raven, rook and crow can all be found in Old English,xviii which in turn, as we have seen, derived from earlier Germanic languages, the ancestors of modern-day German, Dutch and Scandinavian tongues as well as English. So we might reasonably expect the names we use today for these members of the crow family to be found in other northern European tongues – and we’d be absolutely right. A quick glance at the Scandinavian and Dutch languages soon confirms the links between these birds’ names, and their common origin in the sounds made by each species. Rook is råka in Swedish, råge in Danish and roek in Dutch, while the crow is kråka, krage and kraai, and the raven is korp, ravn and raaf. And we know that because they are so similar in all these languages, they must be very ancient indeed – going back for thousands of years.
Imagine those early hunters, clad in animal skins and carrying primitive spears, glancing up as a raven passed overhead. They would have heard that deep, penetrating cry: a sound so resonant you can feel it passing into the core of your body. Is it too fanciful to assume that one man, inspired by this extraordinary sound, was tempted to imitate the calling bird, and was then copied in turn by his companions? From there it is but a short step to the bird’s call becoming its name, and then persisting – with minor changes – to this very day..
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But what of the chough, another member of the crow family? Unlike the other ‘black’ crows, choughs are easy to distinguish, with their glossy blue-black plumage, comically red legs and a long, crimson, de-curved bill, which they poke into the short turf on clifftops to find their invertebrate food.
Take a walk along a Welsh coastal headland, and you may hear the chough’s cries being swept away by the fierce wind: a strong, resonant ‘chow, chow’ sound. How ‘chow’ became ‘chough’ is due to one of the English language’s most troublesome suffixes. In the English language the suffix ‘ough’ can be pronounced in at least ten, and arguably twelve, different ways: as in the words cough, rough, plough, through, though, thought, thorough, hough (an alternative spelling of ‘hock’), slough (pronounced ‘slew’ in American English, and meaning a marshy lake), lough (a word used in Ireland, also for a lake, or loch),xix hiccough and Middlesbrough.
Given this profusion of different ways of pronouncing those four letters, which so confuses the poor learner of English (whether a native child or foreign adult), it is reasonable to surmise that the name of the chough was originally pronounced ‘chow’ (to rhyme with plough). Some time later, it must have changed to ‘chuff’ (to rhyme with rough), the pronunciation we still use today.xx
5: The Sound Approach
Neither the cuckoo nor those various kinds of crow could be said to have a tuneful voice. Indeed, paradoxically, it is the very simplicity of their sounds that explains why they were originally adopted as the bird’s name. Birds with complex, varied songs, such as the blackbird, robin and nightingale, are rarely given onomatopoeic names; those that have simple, repetitive and above all memorable songs, like the cuckoo and chiffchaff, are.
But for many other groups and species of bird, the link between the s
ound and the name is not so clear. Who would have thought, for instance, that the names rail, crake, kite, smew, bittern and knot all have an onomatopoeic origin? In each case the link between name and sound has become corrupted and changed over time, so that the original connection is not always evident.
With other names, that link with the bird’s sound is still there, but may take a little delving to uncover it. Nightjar is, like many English bird names, an amalgamation of two words: the first being obvious, as these curious birds are indeed nocturnal, the second less so. ‘Jar’ is in fact a corruption of the word ‘churr’, representing the bird’s weird rattling call, which echoes across moors and heaths at dusk on spring and summer evenings, and which to the untrained ear sounds more mechanical than avian in origin.
Before so many of our heaths and commons were destroyed by the onset of modern agriculture, the nightjar would have been a far more familiar bird than it is today. Hence it has a plethora of now obsolete folk names, many of which confuse the bird (deliberately, perhaps, because of its nocturnal habits) with another creature of the night, such as ‘churn owl’, ‘goat owl’ and, my favourite, ‘fern owl’.xxi
Another name for the nightjar, which was still included in the very first bird book I ever owned, The Observer’s Book of Birds, is ‘goatsucker’. This curious name derives from the notion that nightjars were supposed to feed under the cover of darkness on the milk of goats. Like so many other old wives’ tales, there is not a shred of evidence for this; however, given that these mysterious birds may have been attracted to paddocks containing domestic livestock because of the concentration of insects found there at dusk, it is perhaps just about understandable.xxii
Getting back to onomatopoeic names, I can’t resist including a name that my two younger sons still find hilarious, even in their teenage years: hoopoe. The hoopoe – pronounced ‘hoo-poo’, which explains my boys’ amusement – is one of Europe’s most striking and unmistakable birds: a boldly patterned black, white and pinkish-orange bird with a prominent crest and appallingly insanitary nesting habits. My friend Marek Borkowski, who lives in the middle of the Biebrza Marshes in Poland, has hoopoes nesting in his garden, and tells me that on hot summer days the stench from their nest inside a tree-hole is almost unbearable.
In fact, though, the name ‘hoopoe’ derives from the bird’s call, a pair of echoing, staccato notes, which carries over a surprisingly long distance. It’s not a sound we hear very often in Britain, where the species is a scarce visitor and very occasional breeder, but if you visit a patch of rough farmland in southern or eastern Europe during the spring or early summer you have a good chance of hearing it.
The sound-based origin of the hoopoe’s name becomes clearer when we discover that its scientific name is Upupa epops, which is doubly onomatopoeic. Richard Holme, writing in the late seventeenth century, referred to ‘A Upupa … [which] is in our country speech called a Whoophoo, or Whopee, or Hoopoe, and Howpe’.xxiii
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The birds that make the most complex sounds are, as you might expect, songbirds: the various species and families that make up roughly half of the world’s 10,700 or so bird species. But because their songs are so elaborate, they do not often lend themselves to onomatopoeic names.
The exceptions are those whose songs or calls are suitably simple and memorable, such as the metronomic, constantly repeated two-note song of the chiffchaff. Heard on a fine spring day, the chiffchaff is far easier to recognise and remember than the more complex song of its cousin the willow warbler, which pours out a silvery series of notes descending the scale with a rather wistful, plaintive tone.
But how we translate even simple birdsongs into names varies across different languages. And just as French cockerels say ‘cocorico’, Dutch ones go ‘kukeleku’ and Chinese say ‘goh-geh-goh-goh’ (whereas as we British know, they are actually saying ‘cock-a-doodle-doo’), so other nations disagree about exactly what sound the chiffchaffxxiv is making. Germans call the species Zilpzalp, the Dutch tjiftjaf, while the Finns (whose Finno-Ugric language bears no resemblance to other major European tongues, apart from Hungarian and Estonian) prefer the rather splendid tiltaltti.
Other bird names based on sound include, appropriately, ‘chat’, as in those two charismatic little birds of moor and heath, the stonechat and whinchat. Listening to a stonechat’s call, which sounds like two pebbles being knocked together, we might understandably conclude that this is the origin of its name. But as is so often the case with bird names, things are not quite so straightforward.
In fact, the name ‘stone chack’ was originally given to the wheatear, the stonechat’s larger cousin, because of that bird’s habit of perching on prominent stones in its moorland breeding territory, while uttering a lip-smacking call. Only as recently as the late eighteenth century was it applied to the stonechat – first as ‘stone chatterer’, then ‘stone chatt’, and finally as the name we use today.
This may appear rather messy and confusing, but that is the nature of bird names. Most were not decided by an elite group of experts, but emerged organically when ordinary folk, living in different parts of the country, chose their own names for the birds they came across. And thank goodness they did, for otherwise we might have to rely on professional ornithologists to name our birds, which would no doubt have produced far less varied and imaginative results.xxv
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To discover other names based on the calls of songbirds takes a little more digging, as over time the original sound has often been obscured by shifts in spelling and pronunciation.
It may not be immediately obvious, but the name ‘finch’ is another example of onomatopoeia. It comes from the commonest member of the family in Britain – our third most numerous breeding species after the wren and robin – the chaffinch.
Looking at a male chaffinch, with his splendid pink breast, dove-grey head and white flashes on his wings, you might assume that such a bird would have been named after its colourful and striking appearance. Yet the word ‘finch’ actually derives from the Old English ‘finc’, from the bird’s rather monotonous call, usually represented today as ‘pink’. Perhaps because the chaffinch is so ubiquitous, this name was later applied to other species such as the goldfinch and greenfinch, and thus to the family as a whole. While the goldfinch and greenfinch clearly took the prefix of their names from their appearance, the ‘chaff’ part of the chaffinch’s name comes from its preference for feeding on grain amongst the chaff produced by the threshing process.
The original sound made by the chaffinch has now been largely lost in the English version of the name. But it is far more apparent in the modern Dutch vink, the German fink and the various Scandinavian languages (fink or finke), suggesting that the original name is even older than we might think, going back well before the birth of Christ. And we can still detect it in several English folk names for the species, all of which are more obviously based on its sound, such as ‘pink’, ‘chink’, ‘twink’, ‘tink’ and ‘spink’.xxvi
One characteristic of the chaffinch is that different birds in different parts of the country have distinct local accents. Thus whereas those around my home in Somerset end their song with a fairly standard flourish, on a visit to the Scottish city of Dundee I discovered, to my amusement, that they finish with what sounds remarkably like ‘ginger-beer’ – leading local children to dub the chaffinch the ‘ginger-beer bird’.
The chaffinch’s propensity to vary its song from region to region is not a new discovery. Writing in 1600, in his translation of an older French text, ‘practitioner in physicke’ Richard Surflet observed: ‘The spinke is a very beautifull and melodious birde, but all spinkes haue not one and the same tunes.’
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Not all birds called after the sound they make have onomatopoeic names. Warblers do not all warble, but the name is apt enough to have been used for two totally unrelated families, one in the Old World (Sylviidae), and one in the New World (Parulidae).xxvii
Given the
importance of song when we try to identify these often skulking birds, it is perhaps surprising that, apart from the chiffchaff, only two European warblers have been named after their sound. The best known of these is the grasshopper warbler, an elusive streaky brown bird that announces its presence via its reeling song, which sounds like a cross between an insect and an angler letting out a fishing-reel at speed.xxviii The other is the melodious warbler, a large yellow-and-green species found in western Europe, which regularly turns up in southern Britain on autumn migration. It does indeed have an attractive song, although to my ears it is no more tuneful than, say, the blackcap or garden warbler.xxix
The song thrush, too, is named after its persistent and repetitive melody, which can be heard in our parks, gardens and hedgerows from January through to June. Yet it is not universally popular: although many people (including myself) love the song thrush’s chatty tone, others (including my wife Suzanne) find it rather tedious. As with any form of music, an appreciation of birdsong is clearly a matter of personal taste.
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Of all the birds named after their sound few have a greater claim to the title of the world’s greatest songster than the nightingale. The male’s extraordinary outpouring of notes and phrases, emerging from the densest thicket at full volume on a spring evening, really has to be heard to be believed.
Although it may not be immediately obvious, the nightingale’s name is also a reference to its sound: the ‘gale’ element derives from a Germanic word meaning ‘songstress’. This is also found in the modern German, Dutch and Scandinavian names for the bird, Nachtigall, nachtegaal and nattergal – all of which mean ‘night singer’ – and all of which are, as can be seen by their similarity to one another, very ancient indeed.