by Stephen Moss
Holy Island was – and still is – home to a thriving population of eider ducks, which hide their nests away deep in the heather and bracken above the tideline to avoid being preyed on by gulls. Medieval legend has it that Cuthbert cultivated a special relationship with the eiders, harvesting their down and in turn looking after them by passing laws against the taking of their eggs – the first recorded instance of a nesting bird being given official protection, anywhere in the world.xxv
Today, St Cuthbert is still honoured in the local name for the eider, which is known as ‘Cuthbert’s duck’, sometimes affectionately shortened to ‘Cuddy’s duck’, in memory of this far-sighted and benevolent holy man.
But what of the eiderdown itself? The idea of making and marketing a quilted bed cover stuffed with duck down was first brought to Britain from Germany by an English diplomat, Paul Rycaut, in 1689 – almost exactly a thousand years after Cuthbert’s death. Rycaut sent his friends large bags filled with eider down, instructing them that ‘the coverlet must be quilted high and in large panes, or otherwise it will not be warme.’12
Some ideas perhaps arise too early for their own good. The British public, it seemed, was not yet ready for this strange European invention, either because it was too expensive, or more likely because they preferred the masochistic practice of sleeping beneath scratchy, flea-ridden woollen blankets.
Gradually, though, things began to change. In 1841, The Times included an advert for an ‘eiderdown quilt, or duvet’, and by 1859, the novelist Wilkie Collins could write of ‘a sweet little eider-down quilt, as light as roses’. By the 1950s the eiderdown had become the standard form of bed covering, placed on top of a layer of sheets and blankets to add an extra layer of warmth. But as a stern letter to the Times reveals, not everyone approved of the use of this portmanteau word, especially when the filling came from a lesser form of wildfowl: ‘I ask you … to lend your pen to scotching the unwarrantable term “eiderdown” when applied to the ordinary goose-down quilt.’xxvi
Yet even as this was being written, the days of the traditional eiderdown were numbered. After several false starts, it took the vision of one man, the legendary retail entrepreneur Terence Conran, to consign the eiderdown to the history-books. In 1964, when Conran opened his first Habitat store on London’s trendy King’s Road, one of the most popular items on sale was the ‘continental quilt’ – the product we now know as a duvet.xxvii
*
The eiderdown is just one of many examples of the way bird names have entered our language as similes and metaphors. We may refer to a greedy eater as a ‘gannet’, a mad person as ‘cuckoo’, or say someone is ‘as bald as a coot’. But how often do we give a moment’s thought to the origin of these words and phrases, or how they first came into our day-to-day speech?
Sometimes, of course, the link is pure coincidence: when someone is said to ‘grouse’ (meaning complain), there is no obvious link with the bird of that name; nor does the verb ‘to quail’ appear to have any connection with our smallest gamebird, unless it refers to its legendary shyness. The chess piece known as the rook has nothing to do with that member of the crow family, and the fungal disease thrush is likewise unrelated to the bird.
But there are many genuine connections between the meaning of a word and its origin as a bird’s name. These include ‘sniper’, meaning a hidden marksman, a nod to the difficulty of shooting this fast-flying wader; and the colour ‘teal’, a deep, rich shade of bluish-green which comes from the patches on either side of the male teal’s head.xxviii
The origin and meaning of another familiar word containing a bird’s name, scarecrow, seems obvious – but delve a little deeper, and confusion reigns. When the word was first coined, around the middle of the sixteenth century, it referred to a young boy employed to frighten the birds away from the newly sown seed in a farmer’s field, by throwing stones and making a loud noise. Perhaps because small boys tended to get bored and wander off, farmers soon began to use a substitute: a cross-shaped structure hung with clothes and a hat, which was supposed to resemble a human being.
But which species are we actually talking about here? For carrion crows – the commonest species across most of the UK – are frequently confused with rooks. Both are all black, though the rook does have a distinctive greyish-white patch around its beak, and a smaller, more angular head. They also sound subtly different, with the rook’s call being less harsh – as the nature writer Dominic Couzens explains, it sounds like a crow that has been on an anger-management course.
One proverbial way of separating the two species is referred to in an old Norfolk rhyme:
When thass a rook, thass a crow,
And when thass crows, thass rooks.xxix
This relies on the fact that while crows are usually (though not always) solitary, rooks are more sociable birds, generally found in flocks. And while we tend to be suspicious of the all-black, rather sinister-looking crow, we take a more benevolent attitude towards rooks. This is perhaps because our relationship with them goes back many thousands of years, as the late Derek Goodwin, an ornithologist who made a special study of the crow family, pointed out: ‘The rook is often thought of as one of the most characteristic birds of the British countryside. So it is, at least of the agricultural countryside … it is unlikely that there were any rooks in Britain, or indeed in Western Europe, before there were any farmers.’
The farmers themselves might take a less friendly approach, because if the premise behind the Norfolk rhyme is correct, the main threat to their precious crops would not have been the solitary crow but the gregarious rooks, whose large, noisy flocks can strip a newly planted field bare in an hour or two. This being the case, the scarecrow should really be called a scarerook; it is just another curious example of how words can mislead us.xxx
Whether it means rook or crow, it’s obvious that the word scarecrow is named after a bird, and not the other way around. Likewise, we know that the Harrier jump jet, the first aircraft capable of vertical take-off and landing, was christened after the low-flying bird of prey; and that the imprint Puffin Books was named after the seabird, whose comical appearance and brightly coloured bill clearly appealed to children.xxxi But in other cases, it can be hard to work out which came first: was it the name of a bird or that of the object?
Take the kite and the crane. You might think that kites were named after the children’s toy, while cranes were so called because of their resemblance to the mechanical version. Actually it’s the other way around. Like so many of our oldest bird names, these have onomatopoeic origins. Kite – originally ‘cyta’ in Old English – has no counterparts in any other European language, and so we know it originated in Britain, some time between the sixth and eleventh centuries, as it must have developed after the Anglo-Saxon invasion but before the Norman Conquest. The name comes from an imitation of the bird’s high-pitched, whistling call, though W. B. Lockwood suggested that it might have initially been applied to the mewing cry of the buzzard, and only later adopted for its scarcer cousin.
Likewise, ‘crane’ is also likely to have come about as a representation of the bird’s deep, honking call. The name has counterparts in the various Old Germanic and Scandinavian languages, showing that, as with other ancient names such as goose, it almost certainly has a Proto-Indo-European origin.
With both kites and cranes, some have argued that the use of the same names for the birds and man-made objects is simply coincidence. But it is also widely believed that both toy kites and mechanical cranes were named after their resemblance to these particular species of bird.
Kites (the birds) really do look like their namesake: they hang in the air on long, fingered wings with effortless ease, twisting and turning with each new gust of wind, and using their forked tail as a rudder to control their position. So it would be reasonable to assume the name derives from the bird’s aerobatic antics.
The evidence for and against this is mostly circumstantial. The OED certainly favours a connectio
n, suggesting that the name of the toy derived from ‘its hovering in the air like the bird’. And in the first recorded use of the new meaning, in Samuel Butler’s mock-heroic poem Hudibras, published in 1664, the author conveniently provided a direct comparison between the two:
As a Boy, one night, did fly his Tarsel of a Kite, The strangest long-wing’d Hauk that flies.
With ‘crane’, the link between bird and object is far more clear-cut. Unlike ‘kite’, variations of the same word are used in many European languages for both the bird and the machine: grue and grue in French, grúa and grulla in Spanish, and kraan and kraanvogel (literally ‘cranebird’) in Dutch. Looking at a crane as it stands tall and stately, its head and bill curving forward at right angles to its long, straight neck, the connection between the two does seem irrefutable.
Another reason why we might query the links between these bird names and their man-made equivalents is that we tend to think of both kites and cranes (the birds, not the objects) as scarce and limited in their range. But this is an illusion, caused by the way we view the historical status of birds through the prism of our own current experience. If a bird is rare or common to us, we tend to assume that it has always been so, in what ecologists call ‘shifting baseline syndrome’.
For cranes and kites, this assumption is quite misleading: a thousand years ago they would both have been far more widespread than they are today. Kites were the street-cleaners of medieval cities, snatching up any spilt food or unsavoury objects with alacrity, and earning a reputation as thieves and vagabonds. This explains Lear’s angry insult to his deceitful daughter Goneril, whom he calls ‘detested kite’, and also the reference in Coriolanus to ‘the city of kites and crows’. Although referring to Rome, this must surely have come about because Shakespeare had seen kites scavenging on the streets of London.xxxii
As wetland specialists, cranes would have been less widespread than kites, but were still common enough to be caught and slaughtered by the dozen to supply vast medieval feasts. Indeed, until their watery habitats were destroyed in the late Middle Ages, these lanky waterbirds would have been found across much of eastern England. The evidence of their presence here can be seen from the many place names featuring the name, such as Cranfield, Cranbrook and Cranford, the last of which appears in the title of Elizabeth Gaskell’s 1853 novel, which was televised in 2007.xxxiii
But over time, as the human population increased, persecution rose and wetlands were drained, both the kite and the crane began to decline in numbers. Red kites disappeared from the capital during the middle years of Queen Victoria’s reign, eventually retreating to a few hidden valleys in central Wales, where they just managed to cling on, despite the attentions of egg collectors.
Cranes were not so fortunate: they vanished altogether as a British breeding bird during the Tudor period. Apart from the occasional wandering flock from the continent, they were absent for more than 400 years, until a small group returned to breed in Norfolk in the late 1970s. I can still remember my first, unforgettable sighting of cranes one chilly November afternoon in a remote corner of the Broads when, an hour or so before dusk, three huge birds flew past me uttering their haunting, honking calls. My first red kite is also sealed in my memory. Back in the mid-1970s, having spent three days combing the valleys of mid-Wales for these elusive birds, my mother and I finally struck lucky when a single kite drifted high overhead on a cloudless July day, its long wings glowing russet-orange against the deep blue sky.
Since then, both kites and cranes have made a dramatic comeback, and are far easier to see than they used to be. Cranes are still thriving in Norfolk, and have also been reintroduced onto the Somerset Levels near my home. Red kites are now a regular sight in many parts of England and Scotland as well as Wales – one occasionally drifts over my garden on sunny spring days, while I have seen dozens of these aerobatic raptors hanging in the air over the M40 motorway in rural Oxfordshire, and even soaring over Lord’s Cricket Ground in the centre of London.xxxiv
But not every bird name in everyday language is as obvious as the kite and the crane, as two tales – that of a young inventor and our best-known fictional spy – reveal…
6: Hobbies and Spies
The winter of 1946-7 was one of the coldest on record. Freezing temperatures persisted for days, weeks, then months, as the whole of Britain was blanketed with snow and ice. For a nation still reeling from the Second World War, and enduring the continuation of food rationing, it must have been a grim and miserable time.
But deep in the county of Kent, one young man was working hard to cheer the nation up, by promoting a way for the dads and lads of post-war Britain to have fun. A year earlier, Peter Adolph had come up with an idea he was sure would be a huge success: a kind of table football that involved each participant flicking the diminutive ‘players’ against the ball, to shoot, tackle, save or score a goal.
All he needed was a name: and one day, as he toiled to perfect the exact shape of his cardboard playing figures, he came up with one: ‘Hobby’. But the officials at the Patent Office rejected his application outright. As one jobsworth pointed out to the crestfallen inventor, ‘You might as well call a game “Game”.’
Peter Adolph was back at square one. But then he had a clever idea. If he couldn’t call his new game ‘Hobby’, surely he could use the scientific name of his favourite bird of prey, Falco subbuteo – the hobby?xxxv And so, thanks to his ornithological expertise, the name of his product was born. A decade later, Subbuteo had become a fixture in homes up and down the country – and Peter Adolph was a millionaire.
So where does the bird’s English name, hobby, come from? It first appears in the fifteenth century, spelt ‘hoby’, before it transmutes into the present-day spelling in 1642, at the height of the English Civil War. The name refers to the characteristic way this slender raptor hunts for its prey.
When hobbies return to Britain each spring, after a long and arduous flight from their African wintering grounds, they need a rapid boost of energy. They gather over large wetlands such as the Somerset Levels, Cotswold Water Park and the Stour Valley in East Kent, where they hunt dragonflies and other insects, providing a spectacular sight for watching birders.
After becoming more elusive for the rest of the breeding season, hobbies then reappear later in the summer, seeking out gatherings of swallows and house martins, and snatching their unwary youngsters out of the air with their razor-sharp talons.
Hunting both dragonflies and swallows requires a high level of agility, so the hobby sweeps back its wings and zigzags across the sky in hot pursuit of its victim. It is this jerky flight-action that gave the species its name – from the Old French verb ‘hober’, meaning ‘to jump about’. However, unlike the connection between the scientific name of the species and the tabletop football game, the link with the word hobby – meaning pastime – is just a coincidence.
*
The influence of Falco subbuteo on the games industry is one of the more unusual examples of how bird names have been incorporated into popular culture. One often overlooked way that bird names enter society is as first or Christian names. The names of two falcons, Peregrine and Merlin (sometimes spelt Merlyn) are, mainly among the upper classes, given to boys, as in the veteran journalist and political commentator Peregrine Worsthorne and the former Home Secretary Merlyn Rees.xxxvi
Girls called Sylvia share their name with a genus of warblers, while Phoebe is the common name for three species of American flycatchers (in both cases the names have a classical origin, meaning ‘of the woods’ and ‘bright as the moon’ respectively). Robin, however, doesn’t count – as the bird was called after the boy’s name, not the other way around!
Bird names are also surprisingly common as nicknames for sporting teams: no fewer than five football or national league clubs – Bristol City, Charlton Athletic, Cheltenham Town, Swindon Town and Wrexham – are known as the ‘Robins’ (because of the prominence of red in their playing strip), as is the rugby
league team Hull Kingston Rovers. West Bromwich Albion (usually called the Baggies) are also known as the Throstles, a name that would presumably have pleased Max Nicholson; Norwich City, whose kit is yellow, are called the Canaries; while Newcastle United and Notts County, who both play in black-and-white, are known as the Magpies.xxxvii
Similarly, in Canada and the USA, a host of sporting teams are named after birds; most famously the major-league baseball teams the Baltimore Orioles, Toronto Blue Jays and St. Louis Cardinals. As with many British sports clubs, this is purely because of the colour of their strip, and not from any other affinity with the bird in question.
Sometimes the nickname has arisen as a result of the club’s geographical setting. So Torquay United are known as the Gulls, and Brighton and Hove Albion the Seagulls, simply because they are based by the seaside.xxxviii But the origin of these bird-related nicknames isn’t always obvious. Nowadays Crystal Palace’s nickname is the Eagles, but until 1974 they were known as the Glazers. The name change happened when Malcolm Allison, one of the most flamboyant characters in football history, became their manager. Wishing to cultivate a more powerful image, he simply borrowed the nickname ‘Eagles’ from the Portuguese club Benfica.
No fewer than four amateur clubs in the English and Welsh leagues are known as the Linnets. This appears to be a curious choice, given that the linnet is not a very showy bird, and its only prominent colour is the pink patches that appear on the male’s breast during spring and summer. When you discover that Burscough, King’s Lynn, Runcorn Linnets and Barry Town don’t play in pink, but in green, the name becomes even more baffling. The somewhat obscured reasoning behind this is that they are actually named after the species once known as the ‘green linnet’, a now long-forgotten folk name for the greenfinch, which is also commemorated in the title of a poem by William Wordsworth.