by Stephen Moss
But the other three habitat-based names are woefully inaccurate. Sedge warblers don’t nest in sedges, preferring small bushes in the heart of reed beds; garden warblers are rarely found in gardens, unlike their commoner cousin the blackcap; and willow warblers are not especially attracted to willows, but can be found in a wide range of woodland habitats.xii
Many birds named after their habitat, like the warblers, belong to families where several species look and sound the same as one another, so there are few distinguishing calls or plumage features that we can use to tell them apart. The pipits – small, brownish songbirds that look superficially similar, and sound even more so – are a classic example.
Britain is home to four species: meadow, tree, rock and water pipits.xiii Rock pipits do live on rocky coasts (the only European songbird to have colonised this constantly changing habitat, where they forage for insects along the tideline), while water pipits are indeed usually found in freshwater wetlands. Meadow and tree pipits are less easy to separate by habitat, but can also be told apart by their behaviour: whereas meadow pipits parachute all the way down to the ground after delivering their song, tree pipits tend to return to their original perch – as you might expect, on the branch of a tree.
The larks, too, are well named: woodlarks often breed in young forestry plantations with open heath nearby; shore larks (a scarce winter visitor to eastern Britain) are usually found along or near the coast; and what more appropriate name could there be for the skylark? No other bird spends quite so long simply hanging in the air on a fine summer’s day, delivering that extraordinary outpouring of musical notes for what seems like hours on end.
And yet although ‘skylark’ sounds like a name that has been with us since time immemorial, it was actually coined fairly recently. In 1678 John Ray referred to ‘the common or Skie-lark’; before then this quintessential sound of summer was simply known as the ‘lark’ (from a now long-forgotten Germanic word meaning ‘songster’).xiv
Larks were commonly kept as cagebirds – often cruelly blinded, as it was falsely believed this would make them sing more sweetly – and were also killed for the pot. The bestselling Book of Household Management, written by the Victorian domestic goddess Mrs Beeton, included a recipe for lark pie, with the immortal instruction to ‘roll the larks in flour, and stuff them.’xv
We no longer eat larks, but the ubiquity of this familiar rural species has led to its virtually unrivalled prominence in our language and culture (matched only by that other much-admired songster, the nightingale). Following Shelley’s famous ode to a ‘Blithe Spirit’, a later poet, George Meredith, was also inspired by the skylark’s song. His verse ‘The Lark Ascending’ is perhaps the best-known bird poem in the English language, and was later the inspiration for one of our best-loved pieces of music, by the twentieth-century composer Ralph Vaughan Williams.
He rises and begins to round,
He drops the silver chain of sound
Of many links without a break,
In chirrup, whistle, slur and shake,
All intervolv’d and spreading wide,
Like water-dimples down a tide
Where ripple ripple overcurls
And eddy into eddy whirls…
Many people who have never even seen or heard a skylark (which, given its rapid decline over the past fifty years is probably quite a few), may nevertheless refer to the bird in phrases such as ‘up with the lark’, ‘sing like a lark’ and ‘larking about’.xvi The idea of ‘having a lark’ – meaning to have fun – is thought to derive from nineteenth-century naval slang, when sailors might mess about high in the rigging of a ship – just as a lark hangs like a dust-speck up in the sky.xvii
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Given our long and close relationship with birds, it’s hardly surprising that some of our most familiar species are named after an artificial ‘habitat’, such as an agricultural crop or human habitation. These include the corncrake and corn bunting, house sparrow and house martin, barn owl and barn swallow (the official name for our familiar swallow).
As I look down this list, I am immediately struck by the fact that most of these species are in trouble. Having chosen to make their lives alongside us, and having prospered for centuries, they are now facing serious – and in some cases possibly terminal – declines.
The corncrake and the corn bunting are both named after our main arable crops, corn being a synonym for any staple grain, including wheat, barley or oats. But they have both suffered massively from the post-war move from traditional, mixed farming to more intensive and industrialised modern agriculture.
As we saw in the writings of John Clare, in the early nineteenth century the corncrake – or as he called it, the land rail – was a familiar ‘summer noise among the meadow hay’. Yet by the latter part of Queen Victoria’s reign, the corncrake’s days as a widespread British breeding bird were already numbered.
In the north, the Highland Clearances, and the resulting replacement of arable crops by sheep, led to a steep decline in the bird’s population in the Scottish Highlands. Farther south, in lowland Scotland, Wales and England, mechanised mowing was beginning to displace scything by hand. This spelt disaster for this shy and elusive bird, which is very reluctant to abandon its eggs and chicks, even when under threat. Because of its exemplary parenting, not only were many young corncrakes killed but the adults perished too, caught up in the relentless blades of the mowing machines.
As mechanised harvesting spread north and west, so the corncrake began to disappear from much of the countryside. At the start of the Second World War, the species was still common in Ireland and the Northern and Western Isles of Scotland, but had vanished from large swathes of England and Wales. By the time of the first BTO Atlas, for which fieldwork took place from 1968 to 1972, the corncrake was virtually absent from the British mainland, having retreated to the islands of the Outer Hebrides, where traditional farming methods still persisted.9
In recent years, thanks to concerted efforts from conservationists and farmers, the corncrake has made a modest comeback. Meanwhile, a scheme to re-introduce the species into lowland England, on the Nene Washes near Peterborough, has been a partial success. But the days when the corncrake was as familiar as the skylark are long gone, and are unlikely ever to return.xviii
Other birds that have thrown in their lot with humans are also in trouble. Barn owls and barn swallows both struggle to find suitable places to nest, as so many rural barns and other farm buildings have been converted into homes. And although house martins and house sparrows are still found across much of Britain and Ireland (in about 90% of all 10-km squares) both species have suffered major falls in abundance in recent years, with the biggest declines, ironically, in our towns and cities. This is down to a complex combination of factors, including loss of nest sites, a lack of food and, in the case of the house sparrow, possibly also the effects of air pollution on this very sedentary bird.
For the house martin, it is tempting to wonder where this charismatic little member of the swallow family would have bred before we built houses. I have seen them nesting in crevices in sea-cliffs on the coast of Wales, which must have been their original habitat. They also still nest in crevices in the crags of Malham Cove in North Yorkshire, where they have suffered in recent years from disturbance by climbers scaling the famous cliffs.
But for centuries now, house martins have preferred to build their cup-shaped nests, patiently constructed from hundreds of tiny balls of mud, on the sides of our homes. So it comes as no surprise that the folk names for this species reflect its deep connection with our own lives. They include ‘eaves swallow’ and ‘house swallow’, the latter the same as the German folk name Hausschwalbe (far more appropriate than the official name Mehlschwalbe, which rather oddly translates as ‘flour swallow’).
Another folk name is ‘window swallow’ – a direct translation of the French hirondelle de fenêtre – which reflects the way house martins often look as if they are going to fly s
traight through our bedroom windows, before veering off at the very last moment.xix
Many centuries ago, this motley group of species chose to throw in their lot with us. They made their nests on our homes and in our outbuildings, and fed in the fields where we grew our crops. In the process, they became some of our most familiar and best-loved birds. Today, though, they face an uncertain future, with global climate change now adding to the problems already brought about by intensive agriculture, pollution and habitat loss. It does not feel too extreme to say that we have betrayed them.
4: Canada Geese and Crossbills
As well as many birds being named after their habitat, some also feature a geographical region or place in their names. And as with habitat, in a tidy, organised world these would be entirely logical: Iceland gulls would breed mainly in Iceland (they don’t), and Canada geese in Canada (they do, but having been introduced to Britain there are now an awful lot breeding here too). But given the haphazard way in which birds have acquired their names, you may not be surprised that the vast majority of geographical names are rarely accurate, or even particularly helpful.
Sometimes this is because the description covers such a vague area, as is the case with the Arctic tern, great northern diver and northern wheatear.xx Other names are more specific, but just as unhelpful.
The Mediterranean gull is a smart cousin of the more familiar black-headed variety, with a jet-black head and blood-red bill. Once its name was reasonably accurate: until about half a century ago this was a globally rare bird, found mainly in southern Europe and western Asia, with a significant part of the world population wintering around the Med. In those days the Mediterranean gull was so rare that in 1960 the eminent Dutch ornithologist Karel Voous described it as ‘an unmistakable relict … probably in the course of becoming completely extinct’.10
Yet very soon after Voous made that doom-laden prediction, the species’ fortunes began to turn. Like other members of its family, the Mediterranean gull is an opportunistic feeder, and from the 1960s onwards was able to take advantage of the exponential increase in surplus food created by our increasingly wasteful consumer society. Numbers started to increase, and its range began to expand to the north and west.
In 1968 a Mediterranean gull paired with a black-headed gull at a colony in Hampshire and successfully bred; following which several pure-bred pairs of the species became established, so that by the turn of the millennium there were at least 500 breeding pairs in Britain, including a huge colony in Poole Harbour. The global population of this handsome bird is now estimated at between 230,000 and 660,000 pairs,11 and today its future is well and truly secure.
The same cannot be said for probably the most globally threatened bird regularly seen in Britain, which also has a connection with the Mediterranean Sea: the Balearic shearwater. Like other members of its family, this svelte seabird hugs the waves on narrow, stiff wings. It is named after that trio of holiday islands in the western Mediterranean – Mallorca, Menorca and Ibiza – the only places on the planet where it breeds. Today, there are thought to be just 10,000 individuals of this enigmatic species in the world, some of which can be seen as they fly past our southern coasts each year on their post-breeding wanderings, in late summer and early autumn.
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Surprisingly few British birds are named after countries. Indeed, the nation with the most birds named after it on the official British List (with three species) is Egypt – no doubt reflecting our long colonial connection with that North African nation.xxi The only other British bird named after a nation-state is the aforementioned Canada goose.xxii
Three other regularly occurring British birds are named after islands or regions. They are the Manx shearwater, named after its breeding colony on the Isle of Man; Slavonian grebe, named either after the region of that name in Croatia, or more likely from Scalovia (also spelt Sclavonia), a part of Prussia, now in modern-day Lithuania; and the Lapland bunting, which is found across a wide swathe of northern Europe, Asia and North America.
As for birds named after the United Kingdom’s own nations, the Scottish crossbill, an enigmatic bird which (if it truly exists) is Britain’s only truly endemic species, is found here and nowhere else in the world. As we saw in Chapter 3, crossbills sport a unique feature in the form of crossed mandibles, enabling them to extract the papery seeds from pinecones, a food source not readily available to any other species of bird.
Over time, ornithologists observing crossbills in the Caledonian pine forests of the Scottish Highlands began to suspect that there were two discrete populations there, each with a subtly different bill size and shape. This allowed each cohort of birds to exploit two different kinds of food: one feeding mostly on the seeds from larch and spruce cones, the other on a more mixed diet including the cones of Scots pine.
As early as 1975, the ornithologist Alan Knox tentatively suggested that these might represent two separate species, whose divergent diets had led to a permanent change in their bill size. This would, he reasoned, keep their populations ecologically separate, allowing them to live alongside one another in the same forests without interbreeding. Five years later, the British Ornithologists’ Union boldly declared that there were indeed two species: the common (or red) crossbill, found across a wide swathe of the northern hemisphere, and the Scottish crossbill, found only in a small area of the Scottish Highlands and therefore an endemic British bird.xxiii
Having ‘lost’ the red grouse a few years earlier, when the gamebird previously considered to be Britain’s only unique species was downgraded to a mere subspecies of the far more widespread willow grouse, the Scots were delighted to have a new endemic species. But as with all complex taxonomic decisions, not everyone agreed with the change. Some observers accused the BOU of jumping the gun, fuelled perhaps by a jingoistic desire to announce the discovery of a genuine British endemic.
That controversy has not fully died down, even though research by the RSPB has recently shown that the Scottish crossbills do indeed have larger bills, and also make a different sound – publicised gleefully in the press as the birds having a ‘Scottish accent’. Taken together, these two factors would indeed allow the Scottish crossbills to maintain reproductive isolation from their cousins, even when the two different species are living and breeding cheek-by-jowl with one another in the same place.
Thus, more than a century after the last ‘new’ British breeding bird, the willow tit, was discovered hiding in our midst, it has been supplanted by the Scottish crossbill – as distinctively Caledonian as single malt whisky, sporrans and Andy Murray.
So could there be any more ‘cryptic species’ awaiting discovery, somewhere in Britain? Astonishingly, given how well we think we know our birds, there may well be, but it will take a revolution in genetics for us to find out (see Chapter 7).
5: Eiderdowns, Cranes and Kites
I was once told a (possibly apocryphal) tale about a young boy being taken on a visit to the Farne Islands, the thriving seabird colony off the coast of Northumberland.
Just as the boat was leaving the harbour, the youngster spotted a small flock of eider ducks. Most were nut-brown females, with their delicately vermiculated plumage, looking as if someone had painstakingly drawn wavy lines across their wings and body, and etched even finer markings on their head. They were accompanied by a smaller group of males: boldly marked in slabs of black and white, with a strange greenish patch like a birthmark on the side of their necks, and a rosy flush across their breasts.
As the boy watched, to his delight the males began displaying to their mates, each throwing his head back onto his mantle like an over-enthusiastic gymnast. All the while, they were uttering one of the most bizarre sounds in the bird world: a call memorably described by Bill Oddie as sounding like a cross between a shocked old lady and the late Frankie Howerd.
The boy excitedly grabbed his father’s arm as he struggled to remember the name of this striking bird. Overwhelmed with excitement, he finally managed to e
xclaim, ‘Look daddy … it’s … it’s … a duvet duck!’
The great Dr Johnson would surely have been amused by the boy’s etymological error. For in an essay in the Idler magazine from January 1759, this pioneering lexicographer made the very first published reference to the word ‘duvet’: ‘There are now to be sold … some Duvets for bed-coverings, of down.’
The name ‘eider’ (meaning ‘down bird’) comes originally from the Icelandic, and the bird’s modern French name is eider à duvet. ‘Duvet’ also means ‘down’, and refers to the small, incredibly soft feathers that female wildfowl pluck from their breasts, to line their nests and keep the eggs snug and warm. Eider ducks produce large amounts of particularly soft and thermally efficient down, which has traditionally been harvested for human use.xxiv
The eider is a common and familiar breeding bird along the coasts of north-west Europe. So it is likely that our prehistoric ancestors, many of whom lived close to the sea, were the first people to begin harvesting the birds’ down to keep themselves warm. But the first named individual to do so lived much later, in the seventh century ad, on the remote and chilly Holy Island in Northumberland.
Cut off from the mainland twice a day by the tides, Holy Island – also known as Lindisfarne – was at that time home to a small and isolated community of monks. Amongst them was a man named Cuthbert, who later rose to become the Bishop of Lindisfarne. After his death in AD 687 Cuthbert was canonised, and is now widely regarded as the patron saint of the north of England.