Mrs Moreau's Warbler

by Stephen Moss

  But given the virtually blank slate from which he was working, William Turner did remarkably well to begin the long process of unravelling the complexities of the multiple names given to Britain’s birds. He died peacefully in London in 1568, secure in the knowledge that not only had his once radical religious beliefs now entered the mainstream of English society, but he had also made substantial advances in our knowledge and understanding of English bird names.

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  During the following hundred years or so, progress in the naming of birds almost ground to a halt – perhaps because Englishmen and women had other things on their minds during these turbulent times. First, there was the transition from the last of the Tudors, Elizabeth, to the Stuart kingship of James I and his unfortunate son Charles I. Then came the period leading up to and after the English Civil War during the 1640s and 1650s, during which one king was beheaded and another deposed, and Britain was briefly run as a republic by Lord Protector Oliver Cromwell. As the title of a book by historian Christopher Hill puts it, this really was a time when ‘the world turned upside down’.

  Not until the decade following the Restoration of the English monarchy, under Charles II in 1660, was any real progress made towards giving official, widely accepted names to the remainder of Britain’s birds. The impetus for this came from two men from very different social classes, who nevertheless shared a passion for all things ornithological: John Ray and Francis Willughby.

  John Ray (1627–1705) came from humble beginnings. He was a village blacksmith’s son from Essex, who has been described as ‘solitary, modest, principled, persistent… The last of the heroes whose work gradually shifted the study of plants away from superstition and towards science’.ix

  Ray’s life changed dramatically at the age of sixteen, when he won a bursary to study at Cambridge. He remained at Cambridge as a fellow, and later taught Francis Willughby (1635–72), a handsome young country gentleman whose family seat, Middleton Hall in Warwickshire, is now the site of an RSPB nature reserve. Despite their very different backgrounds, the two men soon discovered that they shared a mutual interest – the new science of ornithology – following which they became firm friends and trusted colleagues.

  After touring Britain and Europe to watch and study wildlife, they returned home with ambitious plans to publish a masterwork summarising their observations and conclusions. But in 1672, at the age of just thirty-six, Willughby caught pleurisy and died. Grief-stricken at his friend’s passing, Ray wrote that Willughby’s death was ‘to the infinite and unspeakable loss and grief of myself, his friends, and all good men’. In tribute, he pledged to publish their joint work posthumously, and soon afterwards did so, first in Latin (1676) and then in English (1678).

  Willughby’s Ornithology, as it is usually called,x was the first volume devoted entirely to birds to be written in English. As a result, it had an enormous influence on later ornithologists and writers. Ray’s modesty in ascribing authorship solely to his late friend is typical of the man hailed by James Fisher as ‘the greatest of all field naturalists’.

  Some bird names appear for the very first time in Willughby’s Ornithology, yet we know the species themselves were recorded far earlier. One example is the name crossbill, whose name refers to the way the upper mandible of the beak crosses over the lower one.

  Crossbills are neither exclusively resident nor migratory, but nomadic in their habits, wandering long distances after the end of the breeding season in search of the conifers on whose cones they feed. In some years, large flocks of crossbills arrive in Britain from continental Europe, turning up in locations where they have not previously been seen. When they do, they can be easily identified, thanks to that unique physiological feature commemorated in their name.

  So although the name ‘crossbill’ does not appear in written form until Willughby’s Ornithology, we know that they occurred in Britain more than 400 years earlier – all because of a sharp-eyed Benedictine monk and historian named Matthew Paris.

  Sometime in the autumn of 1251, Paris observed a flock of unfamiliar birds feeding in the grounds of his monastery at St Albans in Hertfordshire: ‘About the fruit season there appeared, in the orchards chiefly, some remarkable birds, which had never been seen in England, somewhat larger than larks…’ This could have referred to any number of fruit-eating species, including redwings and fieldfares; but the clincher to the species’ identity comes in the next line: ‘The beaks of these birds were crossed, so that by this means they opened the fruit as if with pincers or a knife.’

  This observation is accompanied by a line drawing in the book’s margin, which clearly shows a crossbill feeding on a large seed, using the specialised bill unique to this group of birds. This is also the first known reference to its unusual migratory habits, and reminds us that long before the great explosion in learning from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries, led by men like Ray and Willughby, perceptive individual observers like Matthew Paris had been gradually adding to our accumulated knowledge of Britain’s birds.

  Ray and Willughby finally brought to an end the obsession with classical observers such as Aristotle and Pliny who, although they made some remarkable observations for their time, had also made serious mistakes. Aristotle, for instance, had believed that the redstart turned into the robin during the winter months, and that swallows hibernated under water (a belief that endured surprisingly late, well into the eighteenth century, and was even given credence by Gilbert White).

  By discarding many of the classical world’s false assumptions, which had so hindered the progress of modern ornithology, Ray and Willughby opened the door to a new, more rigorous and scientific, approach to bird study.

  One of their simplest yet most revolutionary methods was to classify birds first according to habitat (Land and Water Birds), and then further subdivide these into smaller categories, such as birds that swim, and those that wade; or birds with hooked bills, and those without. In so doing, Ray and Willughby managed to produce a classification that, with a few exceptions, looks remarkably like the one we still use today.

  They also sorted out various areas of confusion. As we have seen, until this time, the same name might be used for two completely different and unrelated species. One such was the word ‘shoveler’. We might reasonably assume that any reference to a shoveler (or its variants, ‘shoveller’ and ‘shovelard’) would refer to the familiar and colourful duck of that name, which uses its specialised, shovel-shaped beak to filter tiny items of food from the surface of the water. Yet until the late seventeenth century the name applied to a very different species: the bird we now call a spoonbill. As its name suggests, the spoonbill also has a peculiarly spatula-shaped bill, which like the shoveler it uses when feeding.

  This long-legged waterbird was once common in England, found in the vast, soggy wetland known as the Great Fen that covered much of East Anglia. But some time during this period, as the fens were drained for farming and settlement, and the birds were hunted for food, the spoonbill disappeared as a British breeding species.

  As late as 1796, one observer, Captain J. G. Stedman, could still write that ‘the shoveler, or spoon-bill … is about the size of a goose’. But by then, as the species became less and less familiar, the name shoveler had been transferred to the large, colourful duck with a similarly shaped bill. The first reference to this comes from John Ray, in 1674. Four years later, in Willughby’s Ornithology, Ray confirmed the new name spoonbill (from an older term, ‘spoon-billed heron’), with the explanation: ‘The Bill … is of the likeness of a Spoon…’ – which indeed it is.

  The confusion between the names spoonbill and shoveler is far from the only one to emerge from this key period in our history, when the names given to different species were in constant flux. Contestants in pub quizzes are easily misled by the answer to the apparently simple question: which British seabird has the scientific name Puffinus puffinus? To most people’s surprise, it is not the puffin, but the Manx shearwater.
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  The origin of the name ‘puffin’ is a mystery; it has been suggested that it might derive from a Cornish word (perhaps via another Celtic language, Breton), but this cannot be confirmed. What we do know is that it originally referred to the young Manx shearwater.

  Like puffins, shearwaters nest in underground burrows on remote offshore islands such as Lundy and Skomer.xi For centuries, sailors would stop off at their breeding colonies to harvest the plump chicks, whose bodies have a very high fat content. These would then be salted for food to sustain the mariners on their long sea voyages, when fresh meat would be scarce.

  Later this was turned into a thriving and profitable trade, no doubt helped by the convenient classification of shearwaters as fish, which could therefore be eaten during the period of Lent, when meat was forbidden. As Thomas Moffett observed in the late sixteenth century, this custom was sanctioned at the highest level of the Catholic Church: ‘Puffins, whom I may call the feathered fishes, are accounted even by the holy fatherhood of Cardinals to be no flesh but rather fish.’7

  At this time the bird we now call the puffin was known as the ‘sea parrot’, because of its large, colourful beak. But some time during the seventeenth or eighteenth centuries, confusion arose between the two species. This presumably occurred because both nest in burrows, and the young superficially resemble one another, being grey, plump and rather fluffy (and in the case of the puffin chick, lacking the distinctive bill it develops in adulthood). So the common name transferred from one species to the other; yet the Manx shearwater retains the scientific name Puffinus puffinus to this day.

  The puffin’s generic name, Fratercula, comes from the Latin word meaning ‘friar’, which one commentator has suggested arose ‘perhaps as a reference to the bird’s habit, when rising from the sea, of clasping its feet as though in prayer’.8 The name was coined by the Swiss ornithologist Conrad Gessner. Writing to his English friend John Caius,xii he joked that ‘If you imagine that this bird was white, and that you then put on a black cloak with a cowl, you could give this bird the name of “little friar of the sea” (Fratercula arctica).’ The name stuck.

  The origin of the name of another seabird, the storm petrel, has given rise to another confusing myth. W. B. Lockwood noted that when feeding, these tiny birds (barely larger than a house martin) tap the water with their feet as they fly low over the surface of the sea. He suggested that this ‘pitter-patter’ action led to the name, though the OED again demurs, suggesting that although the origins are now long lost, it may come from the sounds these bird make while mating, or even their smell.

  The explorer and naturalist William Dampier, writing in 1703, went a step further, forging an entirely spurious link with the New Testament account of St Peter miraculously walking on the waves: ‘As they fly … they pat the Water alternately with their Feet, as if they walkt upon it; tho’ still upon the Wing. And from hence the Seamen give them the name of Petrels, in allusion to St Peter’s walking upon the Lake of Gennesareth.’9

  This story has taken root in many other European cultures, as can be seen from the folk names Petersvogel (German), Søren-Peder (Norwegian), and ave de San Pedro (Spanish), all of which assume the same entirely spurious Biblical connection.

  But perhaps the most intriguing mystery surrounds the name ‘scoter’. Scoters are a group of sea ducks found across the higher latitudes of the northern hemisphere. All have one thing in common: they are predominantly black in colour. It is this characteristic that might explain the origin of their peculiar name, which like so many others was first noted by John Ray in the late seventeenth century, when he referred to ‘the black Diver or Scoter: Anas niger’.

  The theory goes like this. In other European languages, and in the English folk name ‘black diver’, the scoter is named after its appearance. Thus in German, Russente translates as ‘soot duck’, while the Dutch zwarte zee-eend means ‘black sea duck’. It is hardly far-fetched to suggest that this species was originally known in English as a ‘sooter’, and that sometime during this period the name was mistranscribed as scoter. Sadly we shall never know if this is correct: the word ‘sooter’ used in reference to the bird’s name has never been found.

  In his book Lapwings, Loons and Lousy Jacks10 Ray Reedman offers an alternative explanation: that ‘scoter’ may derive from the phrase ‘sea-coot’. This name has in the past been used for several birds with a predominantly black plumage, including the cormorant, guillemot, scoter and American coot, but its supposed link with the name scoter is pure conjecture.

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  Ray and Willughby were not only well travelled, but well-read too, so were keenly aware of the work of earlier writers. These included the sixteenth-century Swiss ornithologist Conrad Gessner, brilliantly described by Anna Pavord as ‘a one-man search engine, a sixteenth-century Google’.11

  One of Ray’s rare errors came about through a mistranslation of Gessner’s name for the species we know today as the waxwing. Gessner had named this bird the Bohemian jay, because of its superficial resemblance to that species, and also its irregular autumnal wanderings south and west from its Scandinavian breeding grounds in search of the berries on which it feeds. Unfortunately, Ray mistranslated ‘Bohemian jay’ as ‘Bohemian chatterer’, which, as Lockwood notes, ‘is especially unfortunate seeing that the waxwing is a very silent bird’ (though it does sometimes call in flight, making a tinkling call rather like a 1980s Trimphone).

  A now obsolete name for the waxwing, the ‘silk-tail’, refers to the bird’s smooth, silky plumage, and also finds an echo in its current scientific name, Bombycilla garrulus – which translates as ‘noisy silk-tail’ (another confusing reference to the bird’s sound). The modern name ‘waxwing’ was not coined until 1817, which strikes me as surprisingly late in the day, given that those strange red markings on the bird’s wings really do look like the wax once used to seal up envelopes.

  Another misleading name, this time chosen by Willughby, for one of our most enigmatic birds of prey, is honey buzzard. He chose the name when he discovered combs of wasps in the bird’s nest, and a century later Thomas Pennant adopted it as the official English name for the species.

  But both Willughby and Pennant were mistaken: honey buzzards do not feed on the sweet and sticky honey; what they are actually after are the juicy grubs hidden away in the cells of the comb. The species’ scientific name – apivorus, meaning ‘bee-eating’ – is much closer to the mark, as is the Dutch name wespendief (meaning ‘wasp thief’), a reference to the way the bird steals the comb away from those pesky insects, in order to consume the grubs at its leisure.xiii

  Overall, though, despite these few errors, Ray and Willughby set the course for the major advances in the standardisation of bird names, which would continue apace in the coming century.

  4: A Little Latin

  Meanwhile, a second linguistic revolution was occurring – not in English names, but in Latin ones.xiv And while this may at first appear to be an arcane and scholarly by-way in our story of the origin of English bird names, nothing could be further from the truth.

  For like other great sea-changes in history – from the invention of printing to the advent of the Internet – the system known by the tongue-twisting phrase ‘binomial nomenclature’ changed the world, by allowing knowledge and understanding of living things to progress internationally without being held back by linguistic complexity and confusion, as had been the case until then.

  This approach, which would eventually create the system of classification still used by scientists around the world today, was pioneered by a Swedish scientist widely known by the Latinised version of his name, Carl Linnaeus.

  Linnaeus has been memorably described as ‘Sweden’s most important contribution to world culture until Abba’.12 Born in a small southern Swedish town in 1707, he came from relatively humble beginnings: his father was a Lutheran pastor of peasant stock. But he went on to become one of the most famous men of his time, acclaimed as the ‘father of modern ta
xonomy’. The Swiss-born French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau put it more simply: ‘tell him I know of no greater man on Earth’.

  Later scientists and writers – along with amateur naturalists and birders – also owe Linnaeus an enormous debt of gratitude. As one saying goes: ‘God created the world, Linnaeus put it in order.’xv

  So how did Linnaeus achieve such universal admiration and praise? He did so by simplifying the existing, and ludicrously cumbersome, method of naming species, and introducing a system we still use today to classify every single one of the world’s millions of living organisms.

  Before Linnaeus, plants and animals, including birds, were usually classified using an ornate and increasingly unwieldy system, which formed the Latin name from complex descriptions, sometimes many words long. Thus the common plant hoary plantain, whose current Latin name is Plantago media, was lumbered with the ludicrous epithet Plantago foliis ovato-lanceolatus pubescentibus, spica cylindrica, scapo tereti (which roughly translates as ‘plantain with pubescent ovate-lanceolated leaves, a cylindrical spike and a terete scape’).

  Nor did birds escape this fate: the shoveler, now Anas clypeata, laboured under the seven-word phrase Anas platyrhynchos altera sive clypeata Germanis dicta, which the ornithologist Professor Tim Birkhead translates as ‘another duck with a broad bill, or, according to the Germans, with a shield-like gorget’.13 Not only was this far too complicated for general use, it also confuses the modern reader by its reference to Anas platyrhynchos – the Latin name for the mallard.

  At a single stroke, Linnaeus did away with such unnecessary complication. With the publication of his masterwork Systema Naturae, produced during the middle decades of the eighteenth century, he set in motion the modern science of taxonomy. At its heart was a new method of classification: the concept of binomial nomenclature.

  As the phrase suggests, binomial nomenclature uses two words to do the job that had previously required whole phrases. The first name of the two is the genus (or grouping) to which the organism belongs; the second the specific (or species) name. Taken together, the binomial distinguishes that species from any other. Thus we have Passer domesticus (house sparrow), Troglodytes troglodytes (wren) and Turdus merula (blackbird).xvi