Mrs Moreau's Warbler by Stephen Moss

Author:Stephen Moss [Stephen Moss]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781783350926
Publisher: Guardian Faber Publishing
Published: 2018-05-01T04:00:00+00:00

2: Eponymous Birds

William Leach and George Montagu are just two of several thousand people commemorated in the vernacular or scientific names of the world’s birds – or, as these names are often known, ‘eponyms’.2 The heyday for this trend was during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when new species of birds were being discovered at a tremendous rate.

This was fuelled by the expansion of the British Empire and its associated exploration of the globe, and especially by the rise of a new breed of intrepid gentleman-explorers, whose gung-ho attitudes would lay the foundation for much of our knowledge and understanding of the world’s birds.

Appropriately, many of these men (and a handful of women) are still commemorated in the English names of birds. But even at a time when the fashion for eponyms was at its height, getting your name attached to a new species was not quite as easy as it might appear.

First, you had to travel to distant places with a shotgun over your shoulder, and enough supplies to enable you to spend long and arduous periods in the field. Then you had to find a bird that had never been seen before, shoot it, retrieve the lifeless corpse, and preserve this for long enough for someone else to examine it – ideally one of the museum-based ornithologists back home in Britain. They needed to verify that what you had found was indeed new to science, and not simply some aberrant form, or unknown plumage, of an already familiar species.

Finally, you had to persuade them to honour you by giving it your name – either in English or Latin, or preferably both. But this presented a further problem. The protocol was very clear: you were not under any circumstances permitted to name a bird after yourself, but you could name it after a fellow ornithologist, who would then, perhaps, return the favour by naming another new species after you.

That was the theory. Unfortunately, however, this cosy mutual arrangement did not always work. In 1826, Charles Payraudeau named Audouin’s gull, which he had discovered on a visit to Corsica, after his ‘excellent ami’ Jean Victor Audouin. However, Audouin somehow neglected to return the favour, and so while his own name lives on in the field guides, the unfortunate Monsieur Payraudeau is consigned to ornithological obscurity. I like to imagine Payraudeau writing a series of increasingly desperate letters to Audouin, imploring him to fulfil his side of the bargain.iv

Charles Payraudeau was perhaps unfortunate – after all, many other ornithologists of his day did end up being commemorated in eponymous bird names. Yet looking down a list of the 250 or so different birds that occur regularly in Britain, it immediately strikes me how few are named after people. The reason is obvious: by the time it became the norm to do so, from the late eighteenth century onwards, the vast majority of common British birds had already been found, and so already had vernacular names.

Apart from Montagu’s harrier and Leach’s petrel,

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