Of a Feather: The museum of bird names

By BILL CHAISSON
All living creatures have two sets of names: their vernacular or ‘common’ names and their scientific or ‘real’ names. There are strict rules for assigning scientific names, through the binomial nomenclature established by Karl Linné (Carolus Linneaus) in the 18th century, and more rules for modifying them. There are no such rules for vernacular names. The names given to animals and plants by lay people very from place to place – for the same plant or animal – but they can also endure for a very long time, thus preserving some very odd words that you don’t see elsewhere.

The bird that made me think of this is the redpoll. What exactly is a poll? The adult birds, which we may see around here at feeders during the winter, have a rosy blush on their chests and a bright red crown.

“Poll” is the Middle English (medieval) word for “head.” There is also a breed of cattle called a Red Poll. Polled livestock are bred to never develop horns, which is to say you have an animal that is “headed” rather than “horned.”

We use polls in connection with elections, where the original use of the word applied to the count, not the place where the counting is done. Its use in this context is an example of synecdoche, the part represents the whole. In this case, the head represents the whole voter.

Woodpecker names include some interesting verbs. The red-cockaded woodpecker is confined to southern pine plantations of a certain age, so we don’t see it here, but what is a “cockade”?

It is knot of ribbon twisted into the shape of flower and worn as a decoration on a hat, often on military hats to denote rank or honor. While most woodpeckers have a red spot on the crown or nape of the head, male red-cockaded woodpeckers have a small crescent between the rear of the auricular (cheek) and the supercilium (eyebrow). Placed there, it does indeed look like a decoration worn at a rakish angle. Indeed, cocked hats (including the colonial tricorn) often had decorative pins through the sides to keep the brims vertical.

A local woodpecker with a name that everyone pronounces differently is the pileated woodpecker. “Pileated” means “crested,” but the root is the Greek word “pileus,” which refers to a peaked hat worn by the Bronze Age infantry.

Staying with obscure adjectives for a bit, what is a flammulated owl? It is one of our smallest owls (less than seven inches tall). It lives in the desert Southwest and in the arid “rain shadow” forests of the coast ranges of the West Coast.

There are two phases, gray and red. The red phase plumage is marked by complex vertical streaks of gray, black, white and rust that apparently gives it the appearance of being on fire. “Flammulated” is derived from the Latin “flammula,” which means “small flame.”

While we enjoy the scarlet tanager here in the Northeast, in the Southwest they have the hepatic tanager. As with the summer tanager, the male is entirely red, but in the western bird the color is described as dusky, which makes it appear tinged with orange or even brown.

“Hepatikos” is the Greek and “hepaticus” the Latin word for the liver. Anyone who has been forced to eat calf’s liver as a child will recall (perhaps a little too vividly) its unappetizing mixture of brown and red color that sets apart from other organs.

We can use tanagers as a way to return to exploring the odd nouns that are used as bird names. “Tanager” is derived from the Tupi word, “tangara,” for this family of birds. The Tupi are tribal people of northern Brazil. There are over 300 species of tanager in South America and the Caribbean. As it happens the five species in the genus Piranga that range from Central to North America have recently been found to be more closely related to the cardinals.

Speaking of bright-colored birds, why do we call them orioles? The name is derived most directly from the French “oriol” and thence from the Old French and Medieval Latin “oriolus,” which is in turn based on the Latin “aureolus,” which means “golden.” The -ole part of the word often suggests a diminutive, as in vacuole, a small vacuity.

The Old-World orioles are not related to the New-World species. Just one Old-World species, the Eurasian golden oriole, is found in the temperate parts of Europe, where it got its French name.

Our Baltimore oriole (actually a garish blackbird) is so named because its plumage of a golden-orange and black matches the colors of the Barony of Baltimore. In the early 18th century Charles Calvert, the 5th Baron of Baltimore, was the governor of the Province of Maryland, and the state flag still bears the colors of the family coat of arms, a check of orange and black. The barony went extinct in the 1770s after the death of the 6th baron, but the oriole is going strong.

Which reminds me of another orange and black bird, the redstart, a warbler that is quite common in these parts. Red is obvious enough, but what is a “start”? It is the Middle English word for “tail.”

But just as the name oriole originally referred to an unrelated European bird, so it is with the redstart. There are two species of Old-World flycatchers called the common and black redstarts, both of which are distinguished by their orangy-red tails.

The male American redstart does indeed have orangy-red on its tail, although the center and tip are black. However, the painted redstart, found in the American Southwest, has red only on its belly and has a black and white tail. Evidently, whoever named it did so for its resemblance to the European black redstart rather than for the literal meaning of the common name.