On the Marsh by Simon Barnes

Author:Simon Barnes [Barnes, Simon]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster UK

Father Francesco Cetti was an Italian Jesuit. He was also a naturalist and a mathematician. He was born in 1726 and wrote Storia Naturale di Sardegna, The Natural History of Sardinia. I got these facts from Whose Bird?, which lists all people who have had birds named after them, and supplies a brief spot of biography. You can read about Bewick, of Bewick’s swan, who was the great print-maker and ornithologist; and about Montagu, of Montagu’s harrier, the 18th-century British naturalist: both British birds, and both birds I would love to see on the marsh.

British birds are a little light on birds named for humans: we have been aware of them too long and their folk-names have become part of our language. But if you travel, you find many more birds named for half- or completely forgotten men, and a few women too: there’s a Mrs Moreau’s warbler, an African species that was described by Mr Moreau. It was rediscovered by my old friend Bob. He communicated his findings to Mrs Moreau herself, who was by then a widow: a touching tale.

I have seen Pel’s fishing owl and Heuglin’s robin and Arnot’s chat and Bonelli’s eagle and Böhm’s bee-eater. There’s a Bonaparte’s gull, named not for the emperor but his nephew, who was an ornithologist. Thrillingly, there’s Barnes’s wheatear, which is a subspecies of Finsch’s wheatear; this Barnes was a professional soldier who rose from the rank of private to become a commissioned officer; he was also an ornithologist. There’s also Barnes’s cat snake in Sri Lanka, and there’s a species a chiton – a kind of mollusc – called Radsia barnesii.

My favourite of these name-bearing creatures is the lovely Narina trogon, which the French naturalist François Levaillant named for his Khoikhoi mistress. The word means ‘flower’ in the local language. It was not her given name, but it was what he called her: so we have a lovely bird that bears the love-name of a beloved lover.

There are 18 species named for David Attenborough, which is all very right and proper. I hate it when the names of species are rationalised and reorganised for no very good reason save busybodying. These days I’m supposed to refer to Heuglin’s robin as a white-browed robin-chat: well, when I take clients into the bush in Zambia, they have to accept a few archaic names. Heuglin was a 19th-century German explorer and ornithologist, he has eight species of bird named for him, and I think it’s right to keep his memory going with the names of his birds. These names matter: they are part of the long and complex history of human interaction with birds.

The scientific name of Cetti’s warbler is Cettia cetti: the genus Cettia is in the family of Cettidae, which contains a couple of dozen species. So there’s glory for you.

So I’m always ready to raise a glass to Padre Cetti. Imagine having your life commemorated by something as wonderful as a living bird. In its way it’s a form of Not Dying.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.