written by Stephen Moss
book review by JoAnn Hackos
Of course you’ve never heard of Mrs. Moreau’s Warbler, most likely because it is only found on a peak in eastern Tanzania. It was named by Mrs. Moreau’s husband, Reginald Ernest Moreau, an expert on bird migration. Winnie Moreau was also an ornithology expert. They found and first identified the warbler on an expedition to the Uluguru mountain range, naming it Scepomycter winifredae. It’s still rare, beautiful, and has an amazing lyrical song. You can look it up in Birds of the World. It’s very cute.
In his story, Stephen Moss focuses on British bird names, although many of them are the same in the U.S. But that focus doesn’t affect the compelling story he tells about the origins of bird names in the English language. We learn that they are often named locally by the people who see them most frequently, usually with names based on colors, patterns, shapes, size, habits, and behaviors. Only in the 17th century did bird names generally become based on habitat or specific places. By the 18th century, more species are named after people. As Moss explains, bird names are “coined by a whole range of different people, over many thousands of years, from the prehistoric era to the present day.”
One of the earliest recorded bird names comes from Proto-Indo-European, a language originating on the Eurasian grasslands about 3,000 BCE. The name is ghans, meaning goose. Geese would have been seen migrating over the grasslands and feeding there in winter. The name survives in German and Dutch as gans.
One of the earlier recorded English bird names is Cuckoo, appearing in a mid-thirteenth century verse:
Sumer is icumen in,
Ludhe sing cuccu
Likely the Cuckoo is named for its song, a loud recognizable Cuc-koo.
As we now recognize, many bird names have to do with color, but sometimes the names get confused. Consider the Redstart, which has red or orangish patches on its wings and tail. But why “start?” It comes from an old English word steort, meaning tail.
By the 18th century, bird names began to be influenced by scientific nomenclature, originating with the work of Carl Linnaeus. He invented binomial nomenclature, the use of two words to identify a species. For example, passer domesticus is the scientific name of the House Sparrow. The same scientific name is used worldwide. I recall birding with a French-speaking group outside Paris one year. We didn’t share common bird names, but we could communicate (and did) in Latin.
Ornithologists, recognized as scientists in the 18th century, began to have a significant influence on bird names, often giving them eponymous names in honor of other ornithologists. MacGillivray, for the warbler found in Colorado, published the five-volume History of British Birds from 1837-1852. MacGillivray never saw the warbler named for him and never visited the United States.
I’m sure most of you know that there are plans afoot by the American Ornithologists’ Union to rename our North American birds to eliminate all eponymous names. In 2000, the AOU renamed the ‘oldsquaw’ to long-tailed duck to “avoid offending Native Americans.” The McCown’s Longspur has already been named the Thick-billed Longspur to rid it of the name of a Civil War general who attacked and killed native Americans. However, many of the eponymous names are associated with people who actually made a difference in identifying the birds that have their names attached.
Stephen Moss argues that “the diversity of bird names is not an inconvenience but a wonder.” In fact, he remarks throughout his tale that many people retain the bird names that they have always known rather than adopting new ones.
Despite the controversy at hand today, Mrs. Moreau’s Warbler ends with a very satisfying epilogue. Stephen Moss and two local guides travel to the Eastern Arc Mountains in Tanzania. After climbing for two “long and exhausting hours,” they are in the right place to find the warbler. Their ritual – “stop, play, listen … and move on.” Finally, they hear the notes of two birds singing and after some confusion the pair come into binocular view. Moss is relieved, happy, and fulfilled but also sad because much of the forest that supports the warblers is being cut down and replaced with farms. “Every bird lost to extinction,” he writes, “is a tragedy.” We need to work very hard to keep these extinctions from happening.