That's got my bird name written all over it

Many, such as cuckoo and rook, might be onomatopoeic and others, including lapwing, owe their moniker to the nature of their flight, explains Derek Turner, as he takes a bird's eye view of avian nomenclature

- Derek Turne

BIRDS sing, soar and twitch through our landscapes, lives and language. They were probably among the first animals the first humans really noticed and, after noticing, always comes naming. As Susan Myers describes in The Bird Name Book: A History of English Bird Names (Princeton University Press, £30), their names can come from their appearance (raven), behaviour (dipper), diet (chaffinch), habitat (moorhen), other languages (kiwi), geographical origin (pheasant) or similarities (American robin) and some are named for several characteristics at once. Names vary within and between countries and others were long applied indiscriminately. Scientific nomenclature is itself often romantic, as with the rhea, named after the daughter of Gaia and Uranus, alluding to the flightless bird’s confinement to earth.

The hypothesised three millennia-old proto-Indo-European language contains a word, ghans, that means goose. As are other bird names—cuckoo, hoopoe, rook and turtle dove—ghans is probably onomatopoeic, inspired by the goose’s call. By the 10th century, ghans had become grœde in the Exeter Book, a foundational text of English literature—helping launch geese into folklore, metaphor, proverb and slang as a symbol of foolishness, good eating and the onset of winter.

By 1382, when Geoffrey Chaucer penned Parlement of Foules, birds of many kinds had alighted in every branch of national life, a source of fascination and joy: ‘On every bough the briddes herde I singe,/With voys of aungel in her armonye.’