Mrs Moreau's Warbler

by Stephen Moss

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  So what of the only other regular British breeding bird to be named after a person: Cetti’s warbler? It is one of five species of warbler whose names sound like the defensive line-up of an Italian football team: Bonelli, Cetti, Savi and Marmora, with Moltoni on the bench. Perhaps they’ll play against a tight German midfield of Pallas, Radde and Ruppell. Or maybe they’ll come up against the English forward line of Hume, Blyth and Sykes. This virtual soccer team comprises the men after whom no fewer than thirteen species of warbler on the British List are named (Pallas and Bonelli have bagged two species each).

  Unlike the small, relentlessly active and difficult-to-identify birds that now bear their names, most of which are best told apart by their songs, these men were a pretty diverse bunch. Although by definition they were all amateur or professional ornithologists, for the most part they had other professions and callings, too. Francesco Cetti was a Jesuit priest and mathematician; Alberto della Marmora rose to become a general; Gustav Radde was an apothecary (equivalent to a modern-day pharmacist); Colonel William Henry Sykes was an army officer and later MP for Aberdeen; and Allan Octavian Hume – dubbed ‘The Father of Indian Ornithology’ – served as a colonial administrator in the Indian Raj.

  As with the majority of people who have given their names to birds, all but three of the eleven were most active during the nineteenth century, the unofficial Age of Ornithological Discovery. Only Francesco Cetti (1726–78) and Peter Simon Pallas (1741–1811) lived earlier, while Professor Edgardo Moltoni was born at the tail end of the nineteenth century in 1896, and died in 1980.xii

  The circumstances under which these eponymous ornithologists discovered their species were often quite random. On 22 September 1856, while exploring the remote Transbaikalia region of south-east Russia, the German explorer and naturalist Gustav Radde came across a bulky-looking leaf-warbler. Greenish-brown and with a distinctive pale stripe above its eye, it was hiding in the unlikely surroundings of a kitchen garden in a town with the tongue-twisting name of Kulussutajevsk.

  Having finally managed to get reasonable views of the bird, Radde confidently declared it to be a new species: Phylloscopus schwarzi, named after his friend and fellow-Prussian Ludwig Schwarz, the astronomer to the expedition. Two decades later, in 1881, another pioneering explorer of this region, the Yorkshireman steel manufacturer and inveterate traveller Henry Seebohm, gave the species its vernacular name, Radde’s bush-warbler, later simplified to the one we use today.xiii

  Savi’s warbler – named after Paolo Savi, another academic who taught at the University of Pisa – was one of the last of Western Europe’s breeding birds to be identified, less than 200 years ago. In 1824, when Savi was examining a small, nondescript bird he had shot some years earlier in Italy, he finally realised that he had discovered a species new to science.

  Ironically, the first example had been originally found not in Italy but at Limpenhoe, a village along the Yare Valley in Norfolk, but was misidentified – by none other than Coenraad Temminck – as a Cetti’s warbler. A decade or so later, the Norfolk bird was correctly re-identified as a Savi’s, and the rather tatty specimen remains in Norwich’s Castle Museum to this day.

  I can still remember my excitement on seeing Cetti’s and Savi’s warblers at Stodmarsh in Kent back in the mid-1970s. They had recently colonised Britain, and were beginning to establish thriving populations in south-east England. To be honest, I hardly saw them at all, as both are so elusive that I barely glimpsed either species for longer than a couple of seconds.

  I did, however, hear them and, though these two unstreaked, brown warblers may look superficially similar, it is hard to imagine two more strikingly different songs. Savi’s warbler – like its cousin the grasshopper warbler – produces a low, insistent, buzzing sound, more like some kind of cricket than a bird, or like a fishing reel being rapidly unwound. This seems to melt into the evening soundscape, making it hard to pick out amongst the various chirping and buzzing insects, especially at a distance. The same definitely cannot be said of Cetti’s warbler, which has one of the loudest and most distinctive songs of any British bird. As writer and self-confessed ‘bad birdwatcher’ Simon Barnes has noted, there are several mnemonics that mimic its rhythm: including the unforgettable: ‘Me – Cetti? If you don’t like it … FUCK OFF!’

  The Greta Garbo of birds, this small, grey and chestnut brown warbler spends its whole life hiding away in dense vegetation alongside water, and is hardly ever seen for more than a moment or two. But when you hear an explosion of notes emerge from a dense thicket of brambles, the identity of the singer is never in question.

  These days this is a familiar sound throughout much of southern Britain, now that Cetti’s warbler has firmly established itself as a breeding resident – unlike most other warblers, which migrate south in autumn, Cetti’s stays put all year round. Walking around my local patch on the Somerset Levels, I hear its familiar song in every single month of the year. But until spring 2015, when a Savi’s warbler unexpectedly turned up near my home, I hadn’t heard one singing in Britain for almost forty years.

  When I first saw Savi’s warbler back in the 1970s I – and most other observers – assumed it would soon establish itself as a regular British breeding bird. But for some unknown reason, although it is a common breeder in the Netherlands and northern France, Savi’s warbler remains only a sporadic visitor on this side of the Channel. Perhaps the one I heard in Somerset will be in the vanguard of a new invasion and, like its cousin Cetti’s warbler, this elusive species will finally establish itself as a truly British bird, adding a second Italian eponym to the list of our regular breeding species.

  3: Into the North

  When we think of the great polar explorers, the same names usually come to mind: Scott, Amundsen and Shackleton in the south, and Peary and Nansen in the north. James Clark Ross is not as well-known as any of these legendary men, and yet arguably he did more to pave the way for their achievements than any other early explorer.

  Today, James Ross is commemorated in the name of one of the most beautiful and mysterious of all Arctic birds: Ross’s gull. Ross’s gull gives the lie to the widely held belief that gulls are ugly, boring, and all look the same. Unlike its larger, bulkier and more cantankerous relatives, it is a graceful, delicate creature, wafting buoyantly over the sea ice towards a passing ship like a visiting angel.

  During the brief arctic summer, when Ross’s gulls gather to breed on the rapidly thawing tundra, their normally snow-white breast acquires a delicate pinkish tinge, almost as if the bird is blushing at its newfound sexual potency. But few people have ever seen a Ross’s gull in all its rosy glory. Indeed, given that this species lives in some of the remotest regions of the planet, very few people have seen one at all. James Fisher called Ross’s gull ‘one of the most mysterious birds in the world’,6 and although more than sixty years have passed since he wrote those words, this enigmatic creature is still one of the most sought-after of all the Arctic birds that occasionally wander south to Britain.

  When I was a teenage birder, back in the mid-1970s, this shadowy bird was barely on my radar. But a chance encounter in the summer of 1974 changed all that. A young Ross’s gull turned up on the Dorset coast, near the holiday resort of Christchurch – a sighting described at the time as ‘the most remarkable ornithological event of the year’.7

  My school friend Daniel and I were camping nearby in the New Forest and, having heard about the bird’s presence, cycled as fast as we could to where it had been seen. After failing to see the bird on the first day, we returned two days later. Finally we were rewarded, with a minute or so’s sighting of this Arctic wanderer, as it drifted past us and eventually out of sight.

  More than forty years on, I can still remember the sheer thrill of encountering this legendary bird in such bizarre circumstances: next to a beach at the height of the summer holidays, surrounded by families sunbathing and making sandcastles. There and then I resolved to find out more ab
out this mysterious species – and about the man whose name it bears. So who exactly was James Clark Ross, and what connection did he have with his eponymous gull?

  Like many of his fellow Victorian explorers, James Ross’s life story reads like something out of the Boy’s Own Paper. Born in 1800, he originally went to sea as a twelve-year-old ship’s lad, on a vessel captained by his uncle, John Ross – himself a distinguished polar explorer and decorated veteran of the Napoleonic Wars.

  During the next few years, the expedition’s ships travelled back and forth through the Arctic seas, on an ultimately unsuccessful search for the legendary North-West Passage. For these early nineteenth-century explorers, the obsessive quest for this sea route from the Atlantic to the Pacific was the equivalent of later generations climbing Mount Everest or landing on the moon, and in its time perhaps even harder to achieve. For although the Vikings had sailed their longboats far into this land of ice-floes, bitter winds and violent seas, no-one had ever managed to find their way through to the other side – and on to the lucrative trade markets of Asia. It was a quest that would ultimately provide new insights into the geography and natural history of this remote and forbidding region, yet one that would also cost the lives of many brave men.

  One young explorer determined to make his name by discovering the fabled North-West Passage – or die trying – was James Clark Ross. By the time he reached his early twenties, Ross had already risen to the rank of midshipman (an officer cadet, one of the junior ranks). More importantly for our story, he had also assumed the mantle of the expedition naturalist, and was keen to acquire interesting new specimens.

  So when on a fine, cold day in June 1823, Ross spotted an unusual-looking gull flying alongside the ship close to the Melville Peninsula in the northern reaches of Arctic Canada, he was determined to get a closer look. As he approached, and realised that it was something different, he raised his musket and blasted the unfortunate seabird to kingdom come.

  The ship’s captain William Parry recorded the event for posterity in the expedition’s journal:

  Mr Ross had procured a specimen of gull having a black ring round its neck, and which in its present plumage, we could not find described. This bird was alone when killed but flying at no great distance from a flock of [Arctic] tern, which latter it somewhat resembles in size as well as in its red legs; but is on closer inspection easily distinguished by its beak and tail, as well as by a beautiful tint of most delicate rose-colour on its breast.8

  When the expedition returned home later that year, having once again failed to discover the North-West Passage, Captain Parry presented the distinguished zoologist John Richardson with the bird and mammal specimens the crew had collected during the voyage. Richardson examined the mystery gull, and rightly concluded that it was indeed a species new to science. He named it the ‘cuneate-tailed gull’ (from the unusual wedge-shaped tail), and gave it the scientific name Larus rossi,xiv after its young discoverer.

  And there things might have stood, were it not for what might be charitably called a mix-up or, less generously, an attempt by a fellow ornithologist, William MacGillivray, to grab all the credit for himself. Rather like William Leach a few years earlier, MacGillivray does not come out of the affair with much credit.

  MacGillivray was not a man who you would think needed to resort to underhand tactics to cement his position. Later on in life, through his magisterial five-volume History of British Birds, published over fifteen years from 1837-52, he would make huge advances in establishing the study of birds as a respectable and proper science. He also gave names to several new species, including the harrier that, following the example of the French ornithologists, he named after George Montagu.

  Ironically, for such a key figure in the naming of birds, MacGillivray himself only has a single species named after him: MacGillivray’s warbler, a scarce songbird that breeds in the forests of western USA and Canada, and spends the winter in Central America. Not only did MacGillivray never see the species that bears his name, he never even visited the continent where it lives. He owed the dubious honour to his long friendship with the legendary North American bird artist John James Audubon, whom he had helped to write the text to his monumental work The Birds of America.xv

  Despite – or perhaps because of – his fame, MacGillivray was a troubled and difficult man, with a notoriously abrasive personality. This may have been because he had been born with the stigma of illegitimacy, so always saw himself as an outsider. He seemed to challenge himself at every opportunity: at just twelve years old he began his studies at Aberdeen University. Whether through genuine poverty or simple bloody-mindedness – or possibly a combination of the two – he would walk home to the Hebridean Isle of Harris at the end of each academic year: a distance of 180 miles.

  Later on, he outdid even that feat of endurance. Deciding it would help his fledgling career as an ornithologist if he visited the British Museum’s bird collections in London, he elected to walk there (via a circuitous route in order to see more of England), tramping more than 800 miles in all weathers.

  In later life, his temper was legendary, as the American bird collector Elliot Coues later noted:

  MacGillivray appears to have been of an irritable, highly sensitized temperament, fired with enthusiasm and ambition, yet contending … with poverty, ill-health, and a perhaps not well-founded, though not therefore the less acutely felt, sense of neglect; thus ceaselessly nerved to accomplish, yet as continually haunted with the dread of failure.9

  Nor was MacGillivray very tolerant of other people’s weaknesses, as Coues went on to explain:

  He never hesitated to differ sharply with any one, or to express his own views pointedly … he scarcely disguised his contempt for triflers, blockheads, pedants, compilers, and theorizers.10

  Whether MacGillivray thought John Richardson fell into any of these categories we cannot be sure; though given that Richardson was later knighted for his contributions to polar exploration and science, that is perhaps unlikely.

  John Richardson had named Ross’s specimen at a public meeting in Edinburgh (where both he and MacGillivray worked), so might have reasonably assumed that the species’ name was now firmly established. But for some reason he neglected to confirm the new name in print until more than a year later, in an appendix to Parry’s journal of Ross’s voyage.

  In the meantime, MacGillivray had also examined the specimen, and before Parry’s journal appeared, published its name as ‘Ross’s rosy gull’ (Larus roseus). Because MacGillivray’s chosen name was the first to appear in print, under the strict rules of scientific nomenclature it took priority, and he took the credit. So to Richardson’s frustration his original (albeit rather cumbersome) name was relegated to the footnotes of ornithological history. Meanwhile, at the age of just twenty-four, James Ross had become the youngest person ever to be commemorated in the name of a British bird, an honour he still holds.

  In later life, James Ross continued to make pioneering and hazardous expeditions to the High Arctic. His finest achievement, the discovery of Ross’s gull notwithstanding, was reaching the Magnetic North Pole in June 1831, a discovery that allowed sailors to fix their position more easily, wherever they were in the world’s oceans, and which undoubtedly helped to save many lives in the years that followed. He also explored the southern oceans, circumnavigating the whole of Antarctica, where his voyages are commemorated in place names such as the Ross Sea, Ross Island and the Ross Ice Shelf.

  Another of Ross’s fellow polar explorers, Edward Sabine, also had a species of gull named after him. Although Sabine was twelve years older than Ross, the two nevertheless became lifelong friends after they met on one of those early expeditions to search for the North-West Passage. During one of these, on 25 July 1818, Sabine and Ross sighted a series of rocky islands 20 miles offshore, and trekked off across the sea ice to investigate. On arrival, the two men noticed some unusual gulls breeding alongside Arctic terns, sporting forked tails, dark grey heads and
black bills with canary-yellow tips. True to form, they took aim and shot them, later sending the skins back to London via a passing whaling ship. These ended up in the hands of Edward’s elder brother Joseph, who presented them to the members of the Linnaean Society, and named them in honour of his brother: Larus sabini – Sabine’s gull.

  Eventually Ross returned to Britain and was knighted for his achievements. Having reached his early forties, he finally settled down with his new wife Anne, their marriage producing four children. But the call of the Arctic proved too strong, and in the late 1840s he made his last voyage north. On his return, he continued to work as the leading authority on polar navigation, dying at his Buckinghamshire estate in 1862, the same age as the century.

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  A few years after Ross saw his gull for the very first time, another new species of gull was discovered on an Arctic voyage. Franklin’s gull superficially resembles our own familiar black-headed gull, but has a darker grey back, a fully black (rather than brown) head, a white eye ring and a bright red bill and legs, making it appear altogether more becoming than its commoner relative – as if it were wearing make-up.

  The gull was named after the man who arguably ranks at the very top of the hall of fame of polar explorers: Sir John Franklin. But unlike Ross, Franklin’s distinguished career as a soldier, explorer and politician did not end in comfortable retirement back home in the English countryside. Instead he would suffer extraordinary hardship, tragedy, and a slow and painful death in the remote and frozen Arctic.

  Even before he headed northwards, John Franklin’s life was marked by extraordinary feats of endurance and suffering. Having joined the Royal Navy at the age of thirteen, he sailed to Australia on a voyage aiming to circumnavigate that vast and unknown land. But his vessel was wrecked, and he and the crew – most of them suffering from scurvy – found themselves marooned on a coral reef for several weeks before they were finally rescued.