by Stephen Moss
In a long, active and quite remarkable life, Max Nicholson was instrumental in either founding or reforming many of today’s leading conservation organisations, including the RSPB, BTO (British Trust for Ornithology), Natural England and, perhaps most crucially of all, the WWF (World Wide Fund for Nature). He also ran the Battle of the Atlantic shipping convoys during the Second World War and, as a senior civil servant, was at Winston Churchill’s right hand at the historic Second World War conference with Stalin and Roosevelt at Yalta.i
Even before Nicholson’s birth, however, what he memorably called ‘the Victorian leprosy of collecting’ was starting to give way to a more benevolent approach to bird study. This new, and very different, way of relating to the natural world would be achieved by looking through binoculars, rather than down the barrel of a gun. Developments in technology meant that optics were rapidly displacing firearms, and the time when an unusual bird needed to be shot to confirm its identity was finally coming to an end. The profession of taxidermy, so popular during the Victorian age, would soon become (quite literally) a dying art.
The turning point came in 1901, the year the old queen was finally laid to rest, with the publication of a book by Edmund Selous, simply entitled Bird Watching.1 Remarkable though it may now seem, this is the first recorded use of this phrase in the English language, at the start of a century that would end with birding – as it is now called – having become one of the most popular leisure activities in Britain.
Since Selous’s book appeared, what we know about Britain’s birds has increased exponentially. Much of this has been achieved through a dedicated cohort of ‘amateur’ (albeit highly skilled) birders who, even today, provide much of the raw data and field observations used by professional scientists, via surveys conducted by organisations such as the BTO. But from the turn of the last century, in Britain at least, amateurs and professionals alike turned their focus onto known, named species, rather than unknown, unnamed ones.
Changes to bird names remained the province of a small group of men who had the time, energy and inclination to sit on official committees. Top of the tree was the British Ornithologists’ Union (BOU), an august body whose pronouncements on matters ornithological were handed down like tablets of stone to the masses below.
The BOU still makes the final decisions on the official ‘British List’, now standing at over 600 species,ii and also adjudicates on the names we call these different species – or perhaps, I should say, the names we are supposed to use. For as we have already seen, bird names have long proved stubbornly resistant to what the mandarins of British ornithology have decreed that we should call them, even to the present day.
Take one of our commonest and most familiar birds, the robin. As late as 1952, the BOU insisted on calling this species by the official name ‘redbreast’, even though the name ‘robin’ had been widely used since at least the seventeenth century, and probably for far longer. Astonishingly, ‘robin’ was not formally adopted by the BOU as the official name for Erithacus rubecula until the next checklist was published, in 1971.iii
During the course of the twentieth century, an interest in birds – and indeed all of nature – also became far more egalitarian. Once purely the preserve of a small and elite group of professional ornithologists, it was beginning to be enjoyed by people at every level of society.
Typical of the new breed of birdwatchers was the Cheshire-based ornithologist T. A. (Thomas) Coward. Although the elaborately moustachioed Coward was the middle-class son of a religious minister and businessman, he carefully cultivated a ‘man-of-the-people’ image, with his flat cap, pipe and bicycle. And despite their superficial differences in social class and appearance, both he and Max Nicholson (who came from the Anglo-Irish landed gentry) shared the same mission: to popularise the hobby and pastime of watching birds to the broadest possible audience.
As a working journalist, Coward did this initially as a contributor to the Manchester Guardian’s ‘Country Diary’ column, which he wrote for many years until his death in 1933. But he is best known today for what could arguably described as the first modern ‘field guide’: a handy, portable aid to enable the small but growing cohort of birdwatchers to identify the species they were seeing.
The Birds of the British Isles and Their Eggs, published in two stout volumes in 1919 (a third, containing background information on bird behaviour, was added in 1926), was ideal. The leather-bound, gilt-embossed books were small enough to fit into a coat or jacket pocket, but packed with enough detail to enable the quick and easy identification of unfamiliar birds. Indeed, they were so ahead of their time that they were still being used by post-war birdwatchers such as Bill Oddie and Ian Wallace well into the 1950s.
Being a forward-looking birdwatcher, you might expect Coward to have jettisoned the old names and embraced the new ones. And apart from a few exceptions, such as calling tits ‘titmice’, and giving equal weight to ‘green plover’ alongside lapwing, that’s exactly what he did. Browsing its pages, we find that the names are more or less the same as in a modern field guide, and certainly far more familiar than those found in most Victorian bird books.
But there is one notable exception. On page 233 of Coward’s first volume, sandwiched between the wheatear and the dipper, there is ‘Hedge-Sparrow’. Younger readers may be puzzled by this name, though anyone over fifty years old will surely find it familiar. It refers to the species we now call the dunnock, the only member of the accentor family to occur regularly in Britain.
The name ‘hedge sparrow’ (with or without the hyphen) has a long and distinguished pedigree, having first been recorded by the Tudor priest and tutor John Palsgrave (as ‘hedge sparowe’) in 1530. By the early nineteenth century, however, professional ornithologists preferred the more taxonomically correct ‘hedge accentor’, to distinguish this species from the house and tree sparrows, which are in a completely different family. But despite persistent moves to have this adopted as the official English name, it never caught on, probably because the name ‘accentor’ is clearly one invented by scientists rather than by ordinary folk, and sounds somehow ‘foreign’.iv
Yet still the hedge sparrow’s clearly unsuitable name continued to be the subject of debate. Writing in 1895, the pioneering bird protectionist W. H. Hudson observed:
Most people know that a sparrow is a hard-billed bird of the finch family, and that the subject of this notice is not a sparrow, except in name… ‘How absurd, then, to go on calling it a sparrow!’ certain ornithologists have said from time to time, and have renamed it the hedge-accentor. But as Professor Newton has said … a name which has been part and parcel of our language for centuries, and which Shakespeare used,v ‘is hardly likely to be dropped, even at the bidding of the wisest, so long as the English language lasts’. Now, as the English tongue promises to last a long time, it seems safest to retain the old and in one sense, incorrect name.2
The name ‘hedge sparrow’ did indeed prove remarkably persistent, as Hudson had predicted. Long after goldcrest had replaced ‘golden-crested wren’, and willow warbler had supplanted the equally inaccurate ‘willow-wren’, it remained the standard name for Prunella modularis. Even in Phyllis Barclay-Smith’s slim volume Garden Birds, published in 1945,3 she referred to the ‘hedge-sparrow’; indeed, she did not mention the name dunnock at all.
But moves were afoot to rename this shy and retiring little bird. Ever the iconoclast, in his 1951 Collins New Naturalist volume Birds and Men4 Max Nicholson called for seven changes in the names of common birds. Despite his elevated status, and legendary skills of persuasion, no fewer than six of the seven, including the proposal to change song thrush to ‘throstle’, never got off the ground.vi
However, his final suggestion – to rename the hedge sparrow as the dunnock – was ultimately taken up. As he wrote, in his characteristically no-nonsense style: ‘Dunnocks do no harm to us, but have in return been exposed to the undeserved insult and injury of being miscalled hedge-sparrows by people
too stupid to see the absurdity of such a name, or too timid and conventional to revert to the older, briefer and better one.’
As Nicholson was at pains to stress, ‘dunnock’ has a longer pedigree than the name it supplanted, the first recorded reference coming almost half a century earlier than ‘hedge-sparrow’, in 1483. It even appeared in Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, in which the character Hareton Earnshaw is, after his mother’s death in childbirth and his grieving father’s descent into alcoholism, ‘cast out like an unfledged dunnock’. This is, of course, a reference to the cuckoo’s habit of laying its egg in a dunnock’s nest, whereby after hatching the cuckoo chick then ejects any dunnock offspring from its new home.
Nicholson also pointed out that the yoking of this harmless species with the house sparrow – in those days a major agricultural pest – had led to the inadvertent destruction of dunnocks’ nests by members of ‘sparrow clubs’, who were paid a small bounty for every house sparrow they killed, or whose nest they destroyed.
His sheer persistence, together with the perennial confusion caused by the linking of this species with the unrelated tree and house sparrows, eventually won the day. By the time of the BOU’s 1971 book-length publication The Status of Birds in Britain and Ireland, the official name had finally been changed to dunnock.
As Max Nicholson confidently predicted, the time ‘when the whole company of British bird-watchers will call a dunnock a dunnock’ has now arrived. Well, almost. For even today, more than sixty years after he first made his proposal to change the name, some older observers still continue to refer to the little bird creeping around their rockery or garden lawn as the ‘hedge sparrow’. A small but significant triumph, perhaps, for the forces of the common man (and woman) against the ornithological Establishment.
*
Hedge sparrow is just one of many examples of a persistent trend running through our bird names: naming a bird after where it lives. Or perhaps it is more accurate to say, where it is meant to live. For even among many of the names we use today, many of these habitat-based epithets are at best questionable, and at worst downright misleading.
Take two closely related species, the marsh and willow tits. Few other British birds are so badly named, for the marsh tit’s preferred habitat is not wetlands, but deciduous woodlands, parks and large rural gardens. Willow tits, on the other hand, prefer damp, marshy areas, often nesting close to streams and rivers, or alongside disused gravel pits.vii
The story of how these two species acquired their ill-fitting monikers is a salutary reminder of the ingrained ‘messiness’ of English bird names, however much some tidy-minded people might wish to sort out what we call our birds, so that each species has the name most appropriate to its sound, appearance, habitat or status.
2: Tit-Willow and Willow Tit
On a tree by a river a little tom-tit
Sang ‘Willow, tit-willow, tit-willow’
And I said to him, ‘Dicky-bird, why do you sit
Singing ‘Willow, tit-willow, tit-willow’
‘Is it weakness of intellect, birdie?’ I cried
‘Or a rather tough worm in your little inside?’
With a shake of his poor little head, he replied
‘Oh, willow, tit-willow, tit-willow!’
The opening lines of ‘Tit-Willow’, from Gilbert and Sullivan’s 1885 comic opera The Mikado, are still sung today in theatres and church halls up and down the country. When W. S. Gilbert wrote these lyrics, he may have simply chosen the name ‘tit-willow’ because of its euphonious beauty. But as birders have long been aware, when the phrase is inverted it turns into the name of one of our scarcest breeding birds: the willow tit.
Yet ironically, at the time these quintessentially English lyrics were written, the willow tit was not thought to be a British bird at all. It was an unfamiliar foreign species, whose range stretched from France and Scandinavia in the west, to Siberia and Japan (the setting for The Mikado) in the east. For the small band of Britons who were interested in birds, from casual bird-spotters to serious ornithologists, the willow tit might as well have been on another planet.
Then, in 1897 – twelve years after the first performance of The Mikado at London’s Savoy Theatre – two German ornithologists made a dramatic discovery; one that would send shock waves through the higher echelons of British ornithology. While examining a drawer containing the skins of marsh tits at the British Museum of Natural History, Ernst Hartert and Otto Kleinschmidt came across two unusual specimens, which they immediately realised were not what they seemed.
The two Germans noted subtle anomalies in plumage features, including a pale panel on the wing, a sooty (rather than glossy) black cap and a rather bull-necked appearance. Taken together, these led them to conclude that these birds were not marsh tits at all, but willow tits. A quick check of their provenance revealed that they had been shot in Hampstead in north London, and so they became the very first record of the willow tit in Britain.viii
A year later, the news was published in the journal the Zoologist, under the intriguing title ‘A hitherto overlooked British Bird’. And overlooked it most certainly had been. For unlike new additions to the British List today – which are mostly global wanderers from Asia or North America that are discovered on some remote, windswept offshore island – the willow tits were here all along. They had been hiding, as it were, in plain sight.
Imagine the embarrassment and shame felt by the members of Britain’s ornithological establishment, who had hitherto assumed a lordly superiority over their continental rivals. Now that two Germans had made such a momentous discovery right under their noses, some of our most senior bird experts had to eat humble pie.
Yet to be fair on the embarrassed Brits, the observant Germans had managed to unravel one of the trickiest identification puzzles posed by any regularly occurring British birds. Willow and marsh tits are so similar that, even today, experienced birders using top-of-the-range optical equipment often find it difficult, even impossible, to tell them apart.
Although the two species do show subtle plumage differences, the most reliable method of knowing whether a particular bird is a marsh or willow tit is by listening for their distinctive calls. Whereas the willow tit makes a nasal sound, repeating three or four notes in rapid succession, the marsh tit delivers a short, explosive call, rather like a sneeze.
Even after the discovery of willow tits in Britain, the controversy over the species’ true status continued. Sceptics claimed that it was merely a race of the marsh tit, or even that the so-called new specimens were merely the juvenile plumage of that species. But in the first issue of the long-running journal British Birds, published in 1907, Walter Rothschild (the bird collector from the famous banking dynasty) comprehensively refuted these arguments, taking a swipe at his critics as he did so: ‘Most of our older ornithologists have failed, or rather refused, to see the differences between the English Marsh and Willow Tits, and again, in this instance, the old proverb, “None so blind as those that will not see,” has abundantly justified itself.’5
He went on to nail his argument in favour of the marsh and willow tits being separate species by pointing out a truism that forms the basis of modern systematics: that ‘no two races or subspecies of the same bird [i.e. species] can live side by side; they must either inhabit different geographical areas or be found at different vertical heights.’6 But willow and marsh tits were indeed living alongside one another throughout much of Britain: conclusive proof that they were indeed two different species. And so the willow tit gained the distinction of being the last ‘undiscovered breeding bird’ to be added to the British List, from those 1897 specimens, at least until the separation of the common and Scottish crossbills in the 1980s – but more on that story later.
However, it turns out that over half a century earlier there had been a missed opportunity to discover the willow tit in Britain. All it would have taken was for a curious reader to have questioned an assertion by William Yarrell in a
supplement to his popular three-volume work A History of British Birds, published in 1845. For in the entry for marsh tit, Yarrell wrote: ‘Colonel Montaguix says he has seen the Marsh Tit excavating the decayed part of such trees.’7
As Mark Cocker points out in Birds Britannica,8 this ‘describes with great accuracy the willow tit’s burrowing technique’ – for, uniquely amongst our songbirds, the willow tit excavates its own nest-hole in the manner of a woodpecker. Had any of Yarrell’s readers been familiar with the two species from travels in continental Europe, they would have immediately realised that the birds seen by Montagu must have been not marsh, but willow tits. As it was, a further fifty-two years would pass before the species was eventually discovered in Britain – by the Germans.x
3: Reed Warblers and Roasted Larks
Warblers are one of those groups of birds that beginner birders find very tricky to identify – the classic ‘little brown (or olive, yellow or green) jobs’. So it’s perhaps not surprising that plumage features are rarely used to tell one species apart from another – with the exception, as already noted, of the distinctive blackcap and whitethroat. And while song is often used to identify them, only the chiffchaff and grasshopper warbler have sound-based names.
But when it comes to birds named after habitats, the warbler family has few rivals. Of the thirteen regular British breeding species, no fewer than six are named after the places where they live: reed, sedge, marsh, wood, willow and garden warblers.
Some of these names are perfectly correct: reed warblers do live in reed beds, from which their chuntering, repetitive song echoes from mid-April when they arrive back from Africa, through to the end of the breeding season in late June. Wood warblers are also aptly named: these lemon-green sprites are denizens of the oak woods of the north and west of Britain, where they sing their delightful song during the spring and early summer, high in the dense canopy of leaves. Likewise the marsh warbler: this now very rare British breeding bird does indeed live in wetlands, usually nesting in dense patches of nettles, willowherb and meadowsweet right alongside the water.xi