Mrs Moreau's Warbler

by Stephen Moss

  So while the names ‘diver’ and ‘skua’ remained, Inskipp and Sharrock’s paper proposed that the descriptive English names should give way to the American versions. Thus white-billed diver (known in North America as the yellow-billed loon) became ‘yellow-billed diver’, while Arctic skua (known in North America as the parasitic jaeger) became ‘parasitic skua’. Such messy compromises satisfied no one, and set the tone for the acrimonious opposition to the changes that would follow.xii

  The next category of proposed changes was for those instances where two similar species had names distinguished only by a qualifying adjective – such as ringed plover and its smaller, scarcer relative the little ringed plover; and black tern and its rarer cousin, the white-winged black tern. This was deemed to be illogical, and so the latter were to be changed to ‘little plover’ and ‘white-winged tern’. Again, this was completely logical, and yet somehow felt ‘wrong’.

  Other suggested changes were more arbitrary. The small seabirds known for generations as Leach’s and storm petrels were renamed ‘Leach’s storm-petrel’ and ‘European storm-petrel’ respectively, on the grounds that this distinguished them from the larger petrel species. Further modifications included changing stock and rock doves to ‘stock pigeon’ and ‘rock pigeon’, turning dunnock into ‘hedge accentor’, and replacing bearded tit with the simple word ‘reedling’ (but not, however, adopting William MacGillivray’s splendid suggestion ‘furzeling’ for the equally ill-named Dartford warbler).

  At this stage, alarm bells were beginning to sound in the minds of most readers. It was hard to imagine any birder in the field ever using the proposed new names for any of these species. And if a name is never actually used, except in print, can it really be considered acceptable?

  Then there was the addition of gaps between words, in order, so it was said, to avoid confusion and be consistent. So skylark and woodlark became ‘sky lark’ and ‘wood lark’ (presumably to match shore lark) and corncrake turned into ‘corn crake’. Although this made logical sense, and even, it could be argued, reflected the older, hyphenated versions of these names, they still looked very odd when set down in print.

  The third and final major proposal was the addition of a distinguishing epithet to almost a hundred one-word names: these were birds where only a single species in their family is commonly found in Britain, and so for centuries they have been known by a single-word name. Examples included pheasant, crane, cuckoo, kingfisher, bee-eater, roller, swift, nightjar, swallow, nuthatch, wren, wheatear and starling.xiii

  These are, without doubt, classic examples of British insularity, arrogance and jingoism. Each is just one member of a much larger family, containing many more species found around the world. But because we named our own familiar species first, before we were aware of any of its relatives, most of us continue to call them by their original, abbreviated name, without any qualifying adjectives.

  Thus ‘our’ nuthatch is just one of two dozen species, which include the Kashmir, Chinese, Corsican and Algerian nuthatches, the eastern and western rock nuthatches and, supreme amongst them all, the beautiful nuthatch, whose bright blue plumage lives up to its name. Likewise, what we call the ‘swallow’ is one of about fifty species, the ‘wren’ one of eighty, and the ‘kingfisher’ one of almost a hundred.

  Hence the proposed new names, with added descriptors to bring them into line with the rest of the world. By far the largest category of proposed new descriptors was the fairly meaningless adjective ‘common’, to be applied to thirty-one species, closely followed by the more helpful geographical distinctions ‘Eurasian’ (twenty-two species, such as wigeon and hobby) and ‘European’ (eleven species, including nightjar and bee-eater). ‘Northern’ was added to the names of eight species, but ‘Western’ to just one (the capercaillie).

  Oddly, the committee in charge of these proposals then went off-piste. It was as though, bored with the addition of such dull and predictable words as ‘common’ and ‘Eurasian’, they rebelled. So amongst this rather mundane list there were a dozen marginally more imaginative labels: rock ptarmigan, pied avocet, red knot, black-legged kittiwake, Atlantic puffin, barn swallow, white-throated dipper, winter wren, wood nuthatch, black-billed magpie, spotted nutcracker and red-billed chough.

  In some cases, this involved adopting a name widely used elsewhere in the world, particularly in places where two similar species occur. For instance, black-billed magpie was already in use in North America, to distinguish it from its close relative found there, the yellow-billed magpie. Similarly, the name black-legged kittiwake was already used to differentiate from its cousin, the red-legged kittiwake.

  But ironically, what really riled some of the opponents to these changes was the inconsistency of the proposals. A hundred and fifty years earlier, William MacGillivray had at least had the courage to be truly radical: to sweep away the old and suggest an entirely new and systematic approach. Yet when it came to some of the least logical of our bird names, Inskipp and Sharrock held back. So they kept such oddities as fieldfare, redwing and black-cap, even though these do not provide any clue as to the family to which the birds belong.

  The immediate reaction to Inskipp and Sharrock’s proposals was a potent blend of bemusement and hostility. One correspondent to British Birds called the whole debate ‘a waste of time’, and pointed out that – thanks to Linnaeus and his successors – we already had a perfectly good and universal way of telling species apart: ‘Have Inskipp and Sharrock forgotten what the Latin system of scientific names is meant to be for?’7 However, not everyone was against the changes: another reader praised the authors for ‘producing such a well-thought-out and comprehensive review [of] this perennial problem’.8

  But perhaps the most pertinent response to the proposals – Ian Wallace’s verbal tour de force notwithstanding – came in the pages of a scruffy parody of British Birds (which is widely known as ‘BB’). This was little more than a few cheaply printed pages held together by staples, which rejoiced in the title Not BB, and ran to five quirky and often hilarious editions.

  In a short feature entitled ‘Changes to the English Language’, the anonymous authors produced their own version of the proposed name changes.9 These included:

  Black Vulture TO BECOME Afro-Caribbean Vulture

  Garden Warbler TO BECOME Stately Home Warbler

  House Sparrow TO BECOME Slum Weaver

  Robin TO BECOME Northern Red-breasted Bush-Robin

  Wren TO BECOME Jenny Wren

  As the authors sardonically noted, in what would become the final nail in the coffin for the suggested changes:

  The following names are so manifestly apt that they are TO REMAIN:

  Barnacle Goose, Black-headed Gull, Dartford Warbler, Kentish Plover, Iceland Gull, Marsh Tit, Slavonian Grebe, Turtle Dove…

  And yet, despite the widespread hostility towards the name-changes, a few of these new names – including barn swallow and northern wheatear – have gradually crept into use, especially when British birders travel abroad. They are also used in scientific papers, and in magazines such as British Birds, though I still can’t get used to the clumsy ‘sky lark’ to describe that wondrous aerial songster – just try saying ‘skylark’ and ‘sky lark’ out loud, and you’ll soon see what I mean. Shelley would surely be turning in his grave.

  But the vast majority of the new names will never be spoken. And that, surely, is the key reason why they never really caught on.

  *

  My real objection to every proposal to impose a definitive list of English names on us – from MacGillivray’s doomed attempt in the mid-nineteenth century to the British Birds affair – is not so much practical as philosophical. While I can understand the advantages of standardised names, and do occasionally use them myself when it will avoid confusion, the drive towards homogeneity goes against the very reason I am writing this book.

  To me, the diversity of bird names is not an inconvenience but a wonder. The fact that we can choose to ca
ll Prunella modularis the hedge sparrow, hedge accentor or dunnock, or Erithacus rubecula the ruddock, redbreast or robin, or that there are more than thirty different folk names for the barn owl,xiv is for me not a cause of frustration, but something to celebrate. Like the rest of the English language – and especially the names we call ourselves and the places where we live – our bird names display a richness, complexity and downright quixotic quality that marks them out as part of our culture and heritage.

  However, in a changing world, some bird names are now definitely considered unacceptable, as two stories from opposite sides of the Atlantic reveal.

  3: Politics and Political Correctness

  In the year 2000, the American Ornithologists’ Union (AOU) made one of its official pronouncements on bird names. They had decided to change the traditional name for the duck Clangula hyemalis from ‘oldsquaw’ (a relatively late name, first appearing in print in 1834) to long-tailed duck – the name we have used in Britain since the naturalist George Edwards first coined it in the middle of the eighteenth century. Pamela Rasmussen, the distinguished US ornithologist based at Michigan State University, who was on the committee that made this decision, recalls that this proposal caused more controversy than any other name change, before or since.10

  The AOU suggested that this was ‘to concur with world-wide usage’, even though it was abundantly clear that it was actually to avoid offending Native Americans, some of whom maintain that the word ‘squaw’ is unacceptable and demeaning. Ironically, though, this worthy intention may have been misplaced, as one anonymous contributor to a blog thread pointed out:

  Did anyone stop to think that possibly an original person from the Penobscot Nation may have named the bird, ‘Oldsquaw’, and removing that name may dishonor the origin of it? I heard that when an old Native American woman dies it is believed her spirit goes into a bird … hence ‘Oldsquaw’.11

  But the AOU’s decision was small beer when compared with the wholesale changes carried out by the Swedish Ornithological Society in 2015. As they were compiling a list of more than 10,700 Swedish names for the world’s birds, they came across some that they realised, to their horror, could easily be considered racist.

  These included a small African duck named the hottentott, based on a derogatory term for the Khoikhoi people of south-western Africa;xv kafferseglaren, which translates as ‘kaffir-sailor’, another deeply offensive South African insult, for the white-rumped swift; and zigenarfågel (‘gypsy-bird’) for the peculiar South American bird known as the hoatzin – the only bird, incidentally, whose youngsters have claws on their wings to enable them to clamber around the forest foliage. Four other names included the word neger, which translates as ‘negro’: these were changed to svart, a less offensive term translating simply as ‘black’.xvi

  Around the same time, the author Robert Macfarlane published his book Landmarks, full of rediscovered dialect words for features of the British landscape. As the journalist Patrick Barkham wryly observed in the Guardian, ‘I wonder how many racist words he has discovered and quietly not added to his word-hoard?’

  Barkham also touched on the question of whether any current English bird names can be considered offensive. Here we must tread carefully, as offence is very much in the eye – or ear – of the beholder. Surely even the most devout Roman Catholic is unlikely to take exception to the use of the name cardinal for the bright red North American finch, or a lawyer be offended by the name prothonotary warbler (the descriptor refers to a high ranking court official).xvii

  But prudish people can still be offended by the apparently rude names of some common and familiar birds: tit, shag and booby are the first that come to mind (meaning ‘small’, ‘crested’ and ‘stupid’ respectively). Other dubious names, some of which must be said out loud to be properly appreciated, include hoopoe, hawfinch, chough, bonxie (the Shetland dialect name for the great skua, still in common use amongst birders), great bustard and nutcracker.

  Across the pond, a similar list might contain dickcissel, tufted titmouse, horned puffin and that wondrous orange and black South American bird, the cock-of-the-rock. But apart from providing amusement for bored bloggers, in most cases there is no genuine linguistic linkage between the bird name and the apparently rude meaning.

  This is not the case, however, when it comes to the ultimate taboo in rude bird names – one that puts tit, shag and booby in the shade: windfucker. The origins of this now obsolete folk name for the kestrel reveal the fascinating history of what must surely be the best known swear word in the English language today.

  Anyone who has ever watched a hunting kestrel as it hovers in the air, holding its head virtually motionless while its wings beat rapidly to keep in position, has marvelled at the bird’s skill and technique. The Victorian poet Gerard Manley Hopkins was suitably impressed, and celebrated the kestrel’s extraordinary abilities in his 1877 poem ‘The Windhover’:

  I caught this morning morning’s minion, kingdom

  of daylight’s dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding

  Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding

  High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing

  In his ecstasy! Then off, off forth on swing,

  As a skate’s heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl and gliding

  Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding

  Stirred for a bird – the achieve of, the mastery of the thing!

  But as a Jesuit priest, who dedicated this poem ‘To Christ our Lord’, Hopkins would surely have been deeply shocked by ‘windfucker’, an earlier name for our commonest falcon.

  The first – and indeed only – reference to this folk name for the kestrel dates back to 1599, when the Elizabethan pamphleteer, playwright and poet Thomas Nashe wrote of ‘the kistrilles or windfuckers that filling themselues with winde, fly against the winde euermore’. Soon afterwards, in the early seventeenth century, it was adopted as what the OED calls ‘a term of opprobrium’, in phrases such as Ben Jonson’s ‘did you euer heare such a wind-fucker, as this?’xviii Alternative versions included ‘wind bibber’ (Sussex), ‘wind cuffer’ (Orkney), ‘wind fanner’ (Surrey and Sussex) and the blunter ‘fuckwind’, which was still being used in the north of England as late as 1847.

  On the surface, the origin of these names is clear: like ‘windhover’, they all refer to the way the kestrel’s wings beat the air so that the hovering bird can stay in one place and keep its eyes fixed on its target below. But although we may be shocked at the use of the terms ‘windfucker’ and ‘fuckwind’, our ancestors might not have found them quite so offensive.

  According to W. B. Lockwood, the word ‘fuck’ was originally a euphemism, meaning ‘to beat’12 – rather like the word ‘bonk’ is used as a euphemism for the word ‘fuck’ today. However, we have only his word for this, as the term ‘windfucker’ is the only recorded use of that word before it took on the offensive meaning it has nowadays. We can, though, assume that it won’t be considered as an alternative name for the kestrel, at least in the foreseeable future.

  4: Splitting Species

  In the aftermath of Inskipp and Sharrock’s controversial proposals, while we in Britain were focusing on proposed changes to English bird names, on the other side of the Atlantic a more momentous revolution was occurring in the world of scientific ornithology. This would not simply shake up the names we give to different birds: it would change the way we look at the relationships between the species themselves.

  In 1990 three US ornithologists and biologists, Charles G. Sibley, Burt L. Monroe Jr. and Jon E. Ahlquist, produced two blockbuster books that between them would put a metaphorical bomb under what had been, until then, the stable and predictable world of bird taxonomy. Their proposals would completely disrupt the longstanding way in which we classify the relationships between different species of birds into larger groups and families.13

  Until Sibley, Monroe and Ahlquist came along, to determine which sp
ecies belonged to the same family, and to differentiate one species as separate from another, ornithologists had mainly relied on the long-established principles of external and internal morphology. These involved looking at the physical form and structure of different birds, and using these characteristics to establish how they were related.

  But this approach could put the cart before the horse, because it made no real attempt to reflect what scientists call ‘phylogeny’ – the history of the evolutionary descent of different organisms. Just because two species look similar, or have similar physical characteristics, doesn’t necessarily mean they’re related: they could have evolved to look alike because their lifestyles are similar.

  The new approach put forward by these three scientists began with phylogeny: it was an ambitious attempt to recreate the ‘Tree of Life’, to accurately represent the way the various species of bird had evolved, and therefore to show the relationships between them. In two huge volumes, each weighing several kilos, which between them contained more than 2,000 pages of text, Sibley, Monroe and Ahlquist completely overturned our established knowledge and understanding of the way we classify birds.

  For the phylogeny they employed was based on a controversial new biochemical technique known as DNA–DNA hybridisation. This involved heating strands of DNA taken from one species until they separated, and then recombining the individual strands with similarly isolated strands taken from another species. When this new ‘hybrid DNA’ was in turn heated, the higher the temperature needed for the DNA to separate, the more closely the two species being compared were related, and vice versa.

  This revolutionary approach was – so the authors and their supporters claimed – ‘the Holy Grail of avian systematics’. They believed it would finally provide a definitive answer to the thorny problem of how closely two species – or on a larger scale, two orders or familiesxix – were actually related. Instead of looking at external features or internal structure, all you needed to do, they suggested, was to cook up samples of their DNA, and then do the maths.