I have never been a bird-watcher, but I have watched a surprising number of British murder mysteries about bird-watchers.
A mystery I watched recently featured the hoopoe. The dictionary said the bird was nonpassarine. I didn’t know w h a t t h a t word meant, so I looked it up. This was the not-very-helpful definition: of, relating to, or being any of various arboreal birds (such as pigeons, woodpeckers, hummingbirds, and kingfishers) that are not passerines.
OK, so then I looked up passerine, meaning of or relating to the largest order (Passeriformes) of birds, which includes over half of all living birds and consists chiefly of altricial songbirds of perching habits.
I had one more task: looking up altricial, which means being hatched or born or having young that are hatched or born in a very immature and helpless condition so as to require care for some time.
I really had to work for an understanding of that bird.
Numerous people over the years have used many bird traits to name the 10,000 bird species. In the 17th century or so, birds were named for their behaviors, such as swimming, methods of defeating prey or singing. Later, more scientific means were used. This is how Ornithology.com describes the process:
Bird groups are organized by scientific classification, based upon their anatomical structure, geographic distribution, behavior, blood proteins, and a variety of other characteristics. Most recently, and probably most accurately, DNA hybridization has determined the relationships and supposed evolutionary history of all the bird groups of the world and most of the species.
That’s fine, but I’ll bet not one person asked a single bird to weigh in on the process.
The names weren’t always accurate, either. The red-bellied woodpecker does not have a red belly. The National Audubon Society suggests the naming was tongue-in-cheek. It would be similar to my parents naming me Blondie.
The great horned owl doesn’t have horns. The feathers on their heads just resemble horns (see arkansasonline.com/1123owl ).
The magpie received its name because of its raspy chattering. When it was named in the 17th century, Margaret or Meg were nicknames for old gossiping women. The first part of the word became mag. The second part of the word came from piebald because the bird had patches of white.
Some birds are named by the person who first saw a member of the species. Alexander Wilson, the “Father of American Ornithology,” has quite a few namesakes: Wilson’s snipe, Wilson’s storm-petrel, Wilson’s warbler and others.
One article on Ornithology lists a few funny bird names, including the mustached puffbird, the spangled drongo, the zitting cisticola, the brown trembler, the sandy gallito, the bearded mountaineer, the strange-tailed tyrant, and black-throated huet-huet, and agile tit-tyrant and the fluffy-backed tit-babbler.
You just know those young birds were taunted on the playground by the birds with simpler names.
I feel bad for the common starling and other birds tagged with this judgmental name. Does a man called a “common criminal” feel as if he should work on his crime repertoire? Do you feel as though having a “common cold” was inferior to having other, greater sicknesses? The poor common starling likely gets compared to its cousin, the superb starling or the babbling starling.
Other birds facing this ego attack are the common merganser, the common nighthawk and the common loon. I hope they have all formed a support group.
Some bird names became nouns to describe people.
The chickadee is a small, cute, common bird.
It’s also a word a man might call his sweetheart. Or the woman he’d like to be his sweetheart. (I can’t confirm that all women would like the moniker.) W.C. Fields and Mae West starred in the 1940 movie “My Little Chickadee.” When I think of Mae West, the words little chickadee don’t come to mind. But I think Fields used the nickname on other women, too.
We have coots, which are birds that live near the water. Somehow, a coot also became an odd older man.
We have various owls in the world, including the barn owl, the spotted owl and the screech owl.
Owls are considered to be wise by some, and a smart person might be said to be “as wise as an owl.” In Greek mythology, Athena, the goddess of wisdom, often had an owl with her.
In Indian mythology, the goddess of wealth is named Lakshmi. She apparently has moods, though, and when she’s depicted using an owl for transportation, that owl symbolizes corruption and foolishness.
A n d o n e b i rd n a m e is also a verb. The quail i s a g ro u n d - dwe l l i n g bird (see arkansasonline.com/1123quail). If a quail is surprised or alarmed, it will “explode” into short, rapid flight.
I wondered whether this is where the verb to quail comes from. To quail means to recoil or cower.
I couldn’t find a confirmation of this, though.
Sources include Merriam-Webster, American Heritage Dictionary, Ornithology, All About Birds, National Wildlife Foundation, Bird-Photography.com . Reach Bernadette at