Muffies, moreporks, and ooaas: a foray into the world of bird names

The popular names of birds form a significant proportion of the entries and senses in the OED: sorting them out is one of the more interesting, and challenging, aspects of editing entries for the Third Edition.

During the nineteenth century dialect glossaries were produced for many regions of the British Isles, and hidden among them are a wonderful variety of local and mostly long-forgotten names for birds. One warbler, the whitethroat, has no fewer than ten local names in just the letter M of the OED, many of them referring to the bird's white throat: mealy-mouth, miller, mocker, muff, muffit, muffy, muffy whey-beard, muffy wren, mufty, and muggy. The Old English name wren was used for a variety of small songbirds: the 'willow wren', 'golden-crested wren', and 'jenny wren' were all well-known to my mother as names of the willow warbler, goldcrest, and (common) wren. The name jenny wren was one of a number that had acquired a familiar epithet; in the case of the robin redbreast it was only the epithet 'Robin' that survived, and in jackdaw and magpie the current names have incorporated the epithets 'Jack' and 'Maggie' respectively.

However, not all bird names refer to real birds! In 1590 Spenser used the phrase 'the mounting lark' in apt reference to the skylark's song flight, and this remained popular in poetry for many years. In about 1730, however, someone felt that 'mountain lark' sounded better, and this too was adopted by poets. A new species had been invented, but the name didn't see the light of day in the real world until it was used for quite a different bird in North America in the twentieth century. Read about this curious tale in OED Online!

A number of bird names have survived from Old English, and for a thousand years there was little ambiguity with such names as gannet, heron, bittern, lapwing, swallow, starling, crow, rook, and raven. With the blossoming of natural history in the nineteenth century writers chose the names which were felt to be most apt, sometimes inventing what were once disparagingly called 'book names' but which have often become the standard names of today. Exploration in new areas of the world yielded many new birds that were related to more familiar ones, so the old names were used with a descriptive epithet. In the New World the (common) wren is just one of many wrens, so it came to be known there as the winter wren. Names of this kind were also applied to birds which proved to be unrelated to the 'genuine' article. Thus we have the well-known robin of North America, and a mushrooming of wren and robin names in the Antipodes.

Birds such as the cuckoo, curlew, chiffchaff, and kittiwake will obligingly tell you their names. So do the chickadee, kiskadee, dickcissel, and bobolink in North America, and the bokmakierie and piet-my-vrou in South Africa. (I have noticed, however, that the great tit will untruthfully shout 'blue tit, blue tit!'.) Similar sounds can speak of quite different birds: the peewit of Britain is the lapwing, the peewee of Australia is the magpie lark, and the pewee of North America is a tyrant flycatcher. Nocturnal birds have particularly distinctive calls: the poorwill, whippoorwill, and chuck will's widow are all North American nightjars, and the boobook (or mopoke, morepork) is an Australasian owl.

A childhood spent partly in the South Seas has left me with a fascination for a group of bird names that owe nothing to the Anglo-Saxons, and the Maori and Hawaiian languages are especially prolific. In New Zealand the bellbird (a honeyeater) is variously called the korimako, makomako, moki-mok, and moko-moko, while the tomtit is called the miromiro in North Island and ngiru-ngiru in South Island. Island birds, however, are sadly prone to extinction, and their names can follow their owners into the history books. In Hawaii there were several kinds of oo (also honeyeaters), one of which had tufts of yellow feathers that were once used for making ceremonial cloaks. The last of the oos died out on the island of Kauai as recently as the late 1980s. It rejoiced in the name of ooaa, which is probably my favourite bird name! I have drafted a new entry for this word, and look forward to its appearance in OED Online next year.