In 2017 an avid photographer and birdwatcher noticed something unusual about a bird that was a frequent visitor to a watering hole near his house. After some outstanding detective work, it was found that this bird was a new species, in fact a hybrid of a hybrid crossed with another species.

The species is now known as Burket’s warbler, named after Lowell Burket, that lucky guy who spotted the bird in the first place.Naming birds after people is known as honorific naming or an eponym, and names can be seen in the common name as with the new warbler, or hidden among the Latin species name, as with Scepomycter winifredae, or Winifred’s warbler, also known as Mrs Moreau’s warbler.

Naming birds after people is known as honorific naming or an eponym.

What's in a name

Of course, the birds don’t give a literal hoot what you call them, but that’s hardly the point. We need some way of identifying things we come across in the world as part of our communication strategies. It’s believed language evolved simply as a means ofsurvival – “no eat that fungus, that fungus make belly hurt and long sleep. But this fungus good! That fungus bad, this fungus good. No, not that fungus! That fungus death cap. OK?” And so on.

Since hunter-gatherer times, the practical need to determine between things we can kill and things that kill us was quite probably the driving factor for many bird names. Carl Linnaeus didn’t devise his binomial nomenclature – two-name naming system – until 1753 so many of the birds we know today were named in prehistoric times through to more “recent” history of the Middle Ages. Many bird names given before the Linnaean system are referred to as folk names.

Bird comes from the Anglo-Saxon word “brid” which meant brood.

Some of those folk names can mostly be traced back to other languages long since evolved but documented somewhere along the way. Historians have found the origins of gull (Cornish), ptarmigan (Scottish Gaelic) and corvids like rook and raven (West Germanic).

Some birds have been named after a physical attribute: what they do – woodpecker, turnstone; what they sound like, such as the chiffchaff, or the cuckoo; what we think they sound like, for instance the magpie is 50% so-called because of its chattering call, with “pie” coming from the Latin pica describing the black and white colouring, and “mag” from a 15th century derogatory name for gossiping women; and what they look like, such as the long-tailed tit, or the blackcap.

But many of those names are also wronglyattributed. Through advances in genetic research, we now know that, like the bearded tit (not bearded, not a tit), the long-tailed tit comes from a completely different family to the birds we know as tits.

They are in fact more closely related to a similarly gregarious species from Asia known as babblers. But they hang around with tits, forage and live in the same habitat, and they’re small, plus they’ve got long tails, so yeah let’s call them long-tailed tits. In a similar fashion, not much thought seems to have gone into the dunnock, once known – and in some parts of the world, still is – as a hedgesparrow.

The first bit can be written off as fair enough but just because they’re brown and grey doesn’t make them a sparrow: they are in fact accentors. In some parts of the world, they are also known as shufflewings, because of their whirring wing-dance during courtship.

Black is black

Some folk names for birds stuck, such as the long-lived name of the blackbird. A prolific thrush, the name for this bird seems to be quite straightforward – it is, after all, black (well the male is). But why this bird and not the rook, or the raven?

That answer lies in the word “bird” itself. Today, and indeed since the 14th century, we now use the word “bird” to refer to all birds, but “bird” comes from the Anglo-Saxon word “brid”which meantbrood, or chicks, and adult birds of any size were referred to as fowls, from the Old English word “fugol”, very similar to the Dutch and German word for bird, “vogel”.

Over time, ‘fowls’ lost its popularity to describe all birds, and ‘birds’ became the word applied tosmaller songbirds. So back then if you pointed at a small bird that happened to be black and said “look, a blackbird”, it didn’t seem so weird, as larger birds were still called fowls.

New world order

As the years pressed on and continentexploration became a thing, the world’s birds were being discovered in their thousands, and naming went ballistic. As the majority of explorers who then went on to colonise these “discovered nations” were wealthy white men, quite a chunk of some of the birds today are named after them, and whilst this was the accepted standard for many centuries, there is a movement today in the bird world that is calling a lot of these names to account.

It is no secret that some of those explorers, botanists and zoologists who landed on foreign shores tended to treat the original inhabitants appallingly, with a propensity for arrogance bordering on the psychopathic.

‍ Called Bird Names for Birds and created as a reaction to and in tandem with the global outcry after the death of George Floyd, this organisation scrutinises the human names ascribed to many species, and asks if some of those honorific names are actually as honourable as they should be.

The medical community has long since removed any associations to terms derived from the human experimentation carried out by the Nazi Party, and for some in the ornithology world the events in Minneapolis on May 25, 2020, and the subsequent backlash to honouring the names of some institutions, statues and parks was enough to call into question birds such as Bendire’s thrasher, Hammond’s flycatcher, andMcCown’s longspur.

This last was named after a Confederate General who collected the first specimen in 1851, and a second petition to change the name supported by the American Ornithological Society was brought to the North American Classification and Nomenclature Committee (NACC); the first was rejected two years before on “political correctness grounds”.

On August 7, 2020, the NACC voted again and a unanimous decision was made to rename the bird to thick-billed longspur, a direct interpretation of its Latin name Rhynchophanes.

There are a further 149 birds on the list of disputes, but all parties accept the complexities involved, not least with all those field guides that would need to be changed, so the merits of change need to be weighed against the disruption it could cause.

Some argue the use of eponyms should be discontinued altogether while others argue that such eponyms should be kept as a method of teaching others the history of an awful and murderous past. Some people excuse the historical actions of others as “this was the way things were” and McCown, for instance, was just part of the era he was living in.

But others argue that doesn’t mean that’s a good reason to continue honouring him today. There are various compelling arguments on both sides, but at least both sides agree there is an issue. Whether you agree with renaming birds or not, conversations like these show that there are little-known aspects to the history of ornithology which by all accounts is a microcosm of the history of the world.

The long-tailed tit comes from a completely different family to the birds we know as tits.

If you wish to know more about how birds were named, then we highly recommend the excellent book “Mrs. Moreau’s Warbler” byStephen Moss, and if you would like to know more about some of the disputed eponyms attributed to birds then take a look at the beautiful and frank artwork of Teresa Dendy whose project “Dishonourific Birds” illustrates particularly illuminating aspects of the naming past of 31 birds.

From learning about why a goose is called a goose (fun fact – no-one knows) to learning about why Spix’s macaw is thus named, any conversation about bird-naming will highlight the past and those who shaped it, and education is never a bad thing, whether we like the subject matter or not.