The Bird Name Book

In style, this very engaging book sits somewhere between the terse Helm dictionary of scientific bird names (by James Jobling) and Ray Reedman’s much more discursive Lapwings, Loons and Lousy Jacks. In content too. The subtitle here is all important - “A history of English bird names”. It aims to cover the ‘common’ English names of all bird groupings (from Accentor to Zeledonia). So no explanations of scientific names here – except where they have been transferred into the “English” name – and no specific epithets, so while “gull” is there, there is no entry for James Clark Ross. The names follow “standard” usage, but are refreshingly global, so both diver/loon and skua/jaeger are there, along with, for example, many Australasian names. Although there are some autochthonyms (names borrowed from another language), and, no, I didn’t know that’s what they were called either, such as Ākohekohe (Hawai’ian), Kagu (Kanak) or Ibon (Tagalog), other names, especially where they refer to individual species, perhaps not unreasonably in terms of length, are missing – so no Bonxie or Tystie, for example. This led me to wonder how many potential autochthonyms we missed out on as early European explorers ran roughshod over much of the world? It is nice that the author nods to the sensitivities around some names without erasing them completely – this is a “history” after all. Most of the entries are short, less than a page, with a generous helping of high-quality photographs and historical illustrations, so this is a great book for dipping into and there is much to learn, but it is perhaps not complete enough to be a true reference book.

Book reviewed by Rob Robinson