ROB JORDAN completes his research into old local names for native birds by looking at inland species.
I HOPE you can recall the first part of an article I wrote in The Northumbrian last summer (Issue 74) about the old names we had for some of our native birds. I explained how I had been given three crusty old out-of-print bird books and was fascinated by the reading they provided. They were about the folklore, tales and names of some of our British birds, and that first piece I wrote was restricted to the gulls, waders and seabirds - all birds of the coast.
There remains, however, a wealth of common and more general birds whose old local names are now obviously fading into disuse and seem destined to be lost for all time. I say “obviously” and “seem” because, as I speculated at the time, these names - like many country practices - have disappeared with the passage of time. I asked for comments from Northumbrian readers, particularly the more senior readers, about their own memories of old names, and I'm afraid to say I received a zero response. So let's see if some of these other birds' names stir the old grey matter.
I already knew the odd local name, but it surprised me to find that just about every bird had a common or local name, some of them very local, with many restricted to just Northumberland or northern England. The book references mostly went back to the works and writings of the likes of Bolam, Bewick and Gilbert White - not exactly contemporary times.
Cushat is a well-known local term for a woodpigeon: rather rarer are cowshot, cruchet and cowprise.
For instance common species like the blackbird, song thrush and mistle thrush are known today as blackie, throstle and missler, but have you ever heard of the amsel, black-jack, ouzel, merle or woofel for the blackbird? The song thrush was variously called throlly, mavis, thirstle and sometimes whistling dick, while the mistle thrush has one of the longest entry of names in the books, with names like mizzly dick, thrice-cock, fendy-fare, charcock, big throstle and an absolute host of other names seemingly derived from the 'mistle-toe bird' - an association with holly and mistletoe berries. References even go back to Aristotle, quoting him: “since it feeds on naught but mistletoe and gum”. It has sometimes been regarded as the portent of bad weather, and given the name storm-cock.
Other commoners, house sparrows (a word itself from the Anglo-Saxon spearwa), had names like the obvious spuggie but also spug, sprig, spadge or spadger. The now-scarce tree sparrow has no distinctive name in the north, but was known elsewhere as copper-head or copper-nob, and even Hamburg tree-creeper. The ubiquitous starling was a shepster, stare or starnell from its habit of landing on the backs of sheep to pick off ticks, and numerous variations of gyp, a word regularly used for anything black.
Birds of the hedgerow such as hedge-sparrows (unrelated to sparrows, and more commonly known now as dunnocks) were called smokey, titlene or titling and also hedge-warbler. Yellowhammers were known as scribbling larks, yeldrin, yerlin, yellow yite and even yeorling at Berwick. Again in Berwick, the linnet was called the pinkie linnet whilst on nearby Holy Island it was the peepy lennart, and elsewhere in the north the whin-lintie.
A cock linnet, or peepy lennart if you're from Holy Island
Among the pigeon family, the stock dove was craig doo and stockie, and the rock dove was blue dove. Woodpigeon have many similarly derived names - cushat, cowshot, cruchet and cowprise. Interesting names elsewhere were timmer-doo, zoo-zoo and queasy or quist.
The once-scarce woodpigeon, which has increased over the last two centuries of improved agricultural methods, is much despised by farmers. It will eat weeds, insects and pests but prefers the grain and seedlings, particularly the fat, full seeds - wild or cultivated, and does much damage to crops. An old line or saying about the woodpigeon, however, refers to a bad year on the farm; when woodpigeon have to resort to the tiny seeds of the grasses or 'bents'; so “when the pigeons go abenting, then the farmers lie lamenting”.
The now very common and widespread collared dove, which breeds in my own garden, has literally no old names in my old books. Until the mid-1950s it was a bird of central and southern Europe, but since then it has had the most spectacular and widespread expansion of range of any European bird. It can now be found the length and breadth of the British Isles, and yet the first confirmed breeding in the south was only in 1955. Wouldn't it be nice to create some new local names for this relative newcomer to our shores?
My favourite family of birds includes the wheatears, redstarts, robin and the chats - including my own very favourite, the stonechat, which I recently read has increased by 153 percent since 1994. It was once a very rare sight on England's east coast, especially in Northumberland, but since that date I can personally bear witness to this increase, seeing one on most visits to the coast these days, whatever time of year. I've even seen a couple of pair inland as far as Ingram Valley and Hadrian's Wall.
Presumably because of this previous shortage the stonechat has no names from the region but there are some wonderful names from elsewhere, such as blackytop, fuz-clacker, moor tit, moretetter and vuzzy-napper. It's near cousin the whinchat, an equally handsome bird, has northern names like hay-chat, whin-clocharat and whinchacker.
Wheatears, birds of uplands and hill valleys, derive their name from the Anglo-Saxon hwit (white) oers (rump) referring to its white rump and tail and often corrupted to the term 'white arse' a name I've known and used, obviously mischievously, since boyhood. Its other names include stone-chacker, white-rump and clod-hopper. The redstart, meanwhile - a bird I haven't seen for a long time and would dearly love to photograph - was the star-finch, firetail or brand tail in this area.
I could go on and on: there are thousands of wonderful examples of these beautifully descriptive names, but this is my last visit to the subject. I would be really interested to know if anyone can actually remember any of them (or others) today. •
* www.robjordan.co.uk