Mrs Moreau's Warbler

by Stephen Moss

  First, in 1797, his unmarried elder brother James died suddenly, leaving George the family estates. There was just one condition: he must live in one of the houses on the estate with his wife. But by then, Montagu had already separated from Ann, and begun a secret affair with the wife of a London merchant, Mrs Eliza Dorville. The news of their clandestine relationship soon became public, causing outrage in polite Georgian society.

  About this time Elizabeth, Lady Holland, a noted society hostess, encountered Montagu at a dinner party. She was clearly not impressed, as she waspishly confided to her journal:

  Colonel Montagu I saw but once … and after dinner he gave the natural history of every bird that flies and every fish that swims. He is a man of bad temper, nor does it sound creditable to him that none of his officers speak to him, and they are on the eve of bringing him to Court-martial.

  Soon after this inauspicious encounter, court-martial proceedings were indeed begun against Montagu. This was ostensibly because of insulting remarks he was supposed to have made to the wives of his fellow-officers, but he was surely not helped by his scandalous liaison with Eliza Dorville. On 15 October 1799 the tribunal found him guilty, and expelled him from the militia. His military career was over.

  Worse was to come. Following the court-martial, Montagu became embroiled in a bitter dispute with his eldest son over the inheritance, which eventually led to the loss of most of the family estates. But with every cloud comes the proverbial silver lining. For George Montagu, it was the freedom to indulge in his twin passions: the love of his mistress and his burgeoning career as a naturalist.

  He and Eliza fled westwards, settling at Knowle House, just outside the village of Kingsbridge on the South Devon coast. There, he pursued the study and classification of birds, and she – described by him as ‘my friend in science’ – provided illustrations of them. His masterwork, the two-volume Ornithological Dictionary; or Alphabetical Synopsis of British Birds, was first published in 1802, with several revised editions after his death. A later ornithologist, Elliot Coues, described this as ‘one of the most notable of treatises on British birds … which has held its place at a thousand elbows for three-quarters of a century’.

  The reason the Ornithological Dictionary is so important to our story is that – like all good dictionaries – it is both clear and comprehensive. There are long entries on each species, which in taut, closely spaced prose describe the bird and its appearance, plumage details, habitat, habits and other points of interest. But there are also dozens of one-line definitions, most of which give the alternative name for a species together with its official one, as in this series of entries:

  CHURCH OWL – A name for the Barn Owl.

  CHURN OWL – A name for the Nightjar.

  CINEREOUS GODWIT – A name for the Greenshank.

  CINEREOUS SHRIKE – A name for the Butcher-bird [red-backed shrike].

  For anyone trying to fathom the confusing morass of alternative folk names of Britain’s birds at the time, the book was a godsend. But it was far more than the dry reference work suggested by its title – for, having worked out which species was being referred to, the reader could then obtain a clear summary of the latest knowledge about that particular bird.

  A flavour of Montagu’s writing can be seen in the opening lines of the entry on the hoopoe, which then as now was a scarce but regular visitor to southern Britain:

  The weight of this beautiful bird is about three ounces; length twelve inches; the bill is black, two inches and a half long, slender, and curved; irides hazel; the crown of the head is furnished with a crest composed of a double row of dull orange-coloured feathers, tipped with black, lengthening from the forehead backwards, the longest of which is above two inches.

  This is precision writing at its best: the prose of a man who has looked really closely at the bird he is writing about. In referring to the hoopoe as ‘beautiful’ he even, rather uncharacteristically, allows himself a personal comment.

  With its combination of forensic accuracy and extraordinary attention to detail, Montagu’s Ornithological Dictionary set the standard for the bird books that would follow during the Victorian era, such as the seminal multi-volume works by William Yarrell (1837–43) and William MacGillivray (1837–52).xi

  But Montagu did not simply replicate and catalogue the work of others; he made many crucial discoveries of his own. As well as his eponymous harrier, near his Devon home he also discovered the cirl bunting, a species known from continental Europe but not recorded before in Britain.

  The cirl bunting is a handsome yet rather curious-looking bird, which looks as if it has been assembled from different parts of other, more familiar species. Superficially similar to its cousin the yellowhammer, with a yellowish head, it also sports a streaky back like a reed bunting or dunnock, olive-green underparts like a greenfinch, and a black mask and throat like a house sparrow.

  Montagu first came across cirl buntings near his home in the freezing winter of 1800, finding them ‘not uncommon amongst flocks of yellow hammers and chaffinches.’ Whether the species was there all along, and just needed someone of his skill and experience to notice it, is a moot point; some have suggested that it had only recently colonised England from across the Channel, though it seems far more likely that it had hitherto simply been overlooked. But as with so many other species, it was Montagu who cleared up any doubts as to its status as a British bird, unable to resist a dig at his fellow-ornithologists for their apparently poor observational skills: ‘It is remarkable that so common a bird as the Cirl-Bunting seems to be in the west of England, should have so long escaped the notice of British naturalists.’

  He himself had no doubt that the species had been present for some time. As he notes in the closing lines of his entry, even when the weather turned so cold during that bitter winter of 1800, the birds stayed put, suggesting that the species was not newly arrived from warmer climes, but had always been living there.

  In the 200 years or so since Montagu made his momentous discovery, the cirl bunting’s fortunes have waxed and waned. Until the middle of the twentieth century it could be found (albeit locally) across much of southern Britain, but after a rapid and precipitous decline the species retreated to the southern tip of Devon, close to where Montagu had first discovered it, and numbers fell to little more than a hundred pairs. The cirl bunting appeared to be on its way out as a British breeding bird.

  Thanks to the efforts of the RSPB and local farmers, however, this curious yet attractive little bird has since made a dramatic comeback. Although, because of its highly sedentary nature and very specific habitat requirements, it is still largely confined to Devon, there are now almost 1,000 breeding pairs in the county. The species has also been successfully reintroduced to Cornwall, in what is thought to be the only example of the successful reintroduction of a songbird in the whole of Europe. I’m sure Montagu would have approved.xii

  Sadly, George Montagu’s later life was beset by tragedy. Three of his four sons were killed in the wars against France, and he never became reconciled with his surviving eldest son, leaving him out of his will. He and Eliza did have three children of their own – Henry, Isabella and Georgiana – and his two daughters with Ann also survived him. But it’s not hard to imagine that one reason this proud, intense and reputedly difficult man may have thrown himself into his work was as one way of mitigating the terrible loss of his sons, and perhaps also assuaging his guilt at deserting them.

  On 20 June 1815, just two days after the Duke of Wellington’s famous victory over Napoleon at the Battle of Waterloo, the life of George Montagu came to a premature and painful end. A few days earlier, while building work was being carried out on his home in south Devon, he had inadvertently trodden on a rusty nail. Tetanus ensued, and he died in a high fever, aged sixty-two.

  Later students of birds had good reason to thank George Montagu, for the Ornithological Dictionary was the first systematic attempt to list all the birds found in Britain. It hel
ped to kick-start the still young science of ornithology, and was widely used for at least a century after his death. And of course we still commemorate him – albeit often unwittingly – when a birder sights the rare and beautiful raptor and shouts excitedly to his companions: ‘I’ve got a Monty’s!’

  For me, Montagu also represents a man who, despite all his many troubles, led a life well lived, eventually managing to fulfil the ambition to ‘ride his hobby into distant parts’ – albeit only as far as south Devon. Perhaps I also feel a personal connection with a man who, after a mid-life crisis, headed down to the West Country with the woman he loved, to begin a new and fulfilling life devoted to writing about birds.

  *

  The species named after George Montagu, Montagu’s harrier, is one of a handful of regularly occurring British birds, and many more around the rest of the world, named after people. In the next chapter, I shall examine the golden age of eponymous bird names, during which many of the more obscure species that had not yet been given a common English name finally earned one. It was an era marked by mutual backscratching and backstabbing, as men (and a few women) competed with one another to have a new species of bird named after them – and by doing so, win everlasting fame.

  Notes

  1 John Latham, A General History of Birds (Winchester, 1821–8). This built on his earlier work, A General Synopsis of Birds (London 1781–1801), and its later summary, Index Ornithologicus (London, 1790–1801).

  2 Charles Swainson, The Folk-Lore and Provincial Names of British Birds (London, 1885).

  3 Charles Swainson quoted in W. H. Mullens and H. Kirke Swann, A Bibliography of British Ornithology from the earliest times to the end of 1912 (London, 1917).

  4 Quoted in A Bibliography of British Ornithology.

  5 Robert Hughes, The Fatal Shore (London, 1996).

  6 ibid.

  7 ibid.

  8 Ian Fraser and Jeannie Gray, Australian Bird Names: A Complete Guide (Collingwood, 2013).

  9 See Robin Jackson, A Guide to Scots Bird Names (revised edition, Aboyne 2013), and also Francesca Greenoak, British Birds: their Folklore, Names and Literature (London, 1997).

  10 Stephen Moss, ‘The Bird Poetry of John Clare’ (unpublished dissertation, Cambridge, 1981).

  11 Quoted in the Introduction to Robinson’s 1982 anthology John Clare’s Birds, co-authored with the ornithologist Richard Fitter (Oxford, 1982).

  12 James Fisher, op. cit.

  i Even those who come from Dartford have never thought of the place with much affection. In 2010, the comedian Mark Steel returned to his home town to perform a live show for BBC Radio 4. He was not very flattering, but the locals were even less so: one audience member said that if Dartford were a three-course meal it would be ‘McDonald’s, KFC and a kebab’. Writing at the turn of the nineteenth century, William Cobbett made an equally barbed comment: ‘After you leave Dartford, [the county of Kent] becomes excellent.’

  ii Today, Dartford has long been joined to the urban sprawl of London – though officially, at least, it remains in the county of Kent. Bexleyheath, as it has now become, lies on the other side of the border, in Greater London, having been sucked into the metropolis following boundary changes in 1965.

  iii Now Sylvia undata.

  iv Under current taxonomic rules there are thirteen: Balearic shearwater, Spanish imperial eagle, Caucasian snowcock, rock partridge, red-legged partridge, Marmora’s warbler, Balearic warbler, crested tit, Corsican nuthatch, Scottish crossbill, parrot crossbill, citril finch and Corsican citril finch. However, as more and more species are ‘split’ (see Chapter 7) there may well be more – though nothing like as many as can be found in Australia.

  v Also sometimes spelt as betcherrygah, betshiregah, bougirigard and budgeragar.

  vi The lyrebird also managed to acquire a wide range of alternative names, including ‘pheasant’, ‘paradise-bird’ and ‘peacock-wren’ – the latter aptly described by Fraser and Gray as ‘surely one of the most creative or desperate of the many compound names coined in Australia’.

  vii Clare was equally contemptuous of Keats’s lack of first-hand knowledge of the natural world, pointing out that his more famous rival ‘often described nature as she appeared to his fancies and not as he would have described her had he witnessed the things he describes…’

  viii Clare’s use of folk names is not some rustic affectation, as can be seen from the sonnet ‘The Fern Owl’s Nest’, in which this alternative name for the nightjar is integral to the experience evoked by the poem:

  The weary woodman rocking home beneath

  His tightly banded faggot wonders oft

  While crossing over the furze-crowded heath

  To hear the fern owl’s cry that whews aloft

  In circling whirls and often by his head

  Wizzes as quick as thought…

  ix Willow warbler, song thrush, meadow pipit, hen harrier, great spotted and lesser spotted woodpeckers, respectively.

  x For Canada goose, knot and ferruginous duck.

  xi For more on William MacGillivray, the man described as ‘Scotland’s forgotten genius in the field of natural history’, see Chapter 5.

  xii If you’re wondering about the meaning of the word ‘cirl’, John Latham coined it in 1783, as a direct translation of Linnaeus’s scientific name Emberiza cirlus, which we still use today. It comes from the Bolognese dialect of northern Italy, and may derive from an obsolete verb zirlare, meaning ‘to whistle like a thrush’. This would make cirl bunting another example of an onomatopoeic name hidden beneath layers of translation. It also means that neither of the two commonly used pronunciations – ‘curl’ and ‘sirl’ – is correct, as in Italian the combination of letters ‘ci’ is pronounced as ‘ch’. So next time you come across the bird, confuse your companions by calling it a ‘chirl bunting’.

  5

  EPONYMS AND EXPLORATION

  Bird Names go Global

  Remember, they only name things after you when you’re dead or really old.

  Barbara Bush

  1: The Museum Man

  As the drizzle continued to fall, soaking the rocks, grass and my clothes, I began to regret my earlier enthusiasm for our nocturnal expedition. It was a damp and uncomfortable August night, and a film crew and I were perched on slippery rocks at the top of Hirta, the largest island of the St Kilda archipelago. Our mission: to record the sounds of Leach’s petrels returning to their nests.

  For several hours, all we could see were mysterious shapes looming out of the murk, caught momentarily in the beams of our torches before disappearing into the darkness. These were Leach’s petrels, though I could only be sure because of their extraordinary calls, which sounded like an amusement arcade machine suffering from radio interference: a constant outpouring of squeaks, clicks and yelps that, had I not known what was making them, would have chilled my blood.

  Of all Britain’s breeding birds, Leach’s petrel is one of the hardest to see. That’s not because it is especially rare – there are roughly fifty thousand pairs, far more than the UK population of coots, cormorants or grey herons – but because it chooses to nest on a few far-flung islands off north-west Scotland. Even here, in places such as North Rona, the Flannan Isles and St Kilda, this tiny seabird is almost impossible to find, as it only returns to its breeding colonies after dark, to avoid being attacked by predatory gulls.

  When Leach’s petrels have finished breeding, they head straight out over the open ocean. They then spend the autumn and winter on the high seas, rarely venturing close to shore unless forced to do so by strong gales. So it is perhaps not surprising that this species was not formally described and named until 1820, the year after the birth of Queen Victoria, and long after the vast majority of Britain’s breeding birds had already been discovered.

  The story of how Leach’s petrel acquired its name embodies the changes occurring during this era, and touches on the life of one of the most eccentric men ever to be commemorated in the name of
a British bird: Dr William Elford Leach.

  Born in 1790, William Leach was for eight years the Assistant Keeper of Birds at what is now the Natural History Museum, though in later life he became better known as a specialist in insects and crustaceans.

  A man of small and delicate build, Leach lived in two small rooms in the museum itself, decorated with an array of skulls and stuffed bats, which he dubbed the ‘skullery and battery’. To his colleagues’ amusement he kept fit by vaulting over the back of a stuffed zebra in the middle of his office. But beneath his unconventionality, Leach had a sharp and enquiring mind, and in between these gymnastic sessions he kept a keen eye out for new specimens to add to the museum’s growing collection.

  Attending a major auction of bird skins and eggs in May 1819, Leach found his attention caught by Lot 78, which came with an intriguing description: ‘An undescribed petrel with a forked tail, taken at St Kilda in 1818; the only one known (with egg)’. Bidding was brisk, but Leach managed to purchase the petrel and its egg for £5 15 shillings, equivalent to about £420 at today’s prices.i

  A year after the auction, the Dutch ornithologist Coenraad Temminck (after whom Temminck’s stint is named) visited Leach at the British Museum and examined the specimen. He named it in honour of his host: Procellaria leachii – Leach’s petrel. Although the species now has a different scientific name, Oceanodroma leucorhoa (which roughly translates as ‘white-rumped ocean-runner’), the original English name still stands.

  Leach was undoubtedly flattered by having this newly discovered seabird named after him. But he may also have been slightly embarrassed, because he must have known the species was not a completely new discovery. In fact, it had already been found by another ornithologist: William Bullock – the man who sold Leach the specimen in the first place. Yet although Bullock had obtained the specimen of the petrel on one of his many collecting trips, and must surely have realised it was new to science, he had – either through carelessness or indifference – neglected to give it a name.