Old Names Along Shore

By BILL CHAISSON
Of a Feather
While our names for wood warblers tend to be descriptive and derived from modern English words, those of shorebirds are often arcane. I suppose this is because no one really paid any attention to warblers until the 19th century (before that they were all just “dickey birds”), but people have been hunting shorebirds for centuries, first with nets, then with arrows and finally with guns.

Consequently, the common names of this group were bestowed quite a long time ago and may seem a tad unfamiliar now. What, for example, is a dotterel? This Eurasian plover breeds along the northern edge of Europe but also nests on the northern coast of Alaska. We have the word “doddering” to refer disrespectfully to an old person who is wandering a bit in their mind and gait and “dotterel” is just the noun, which we Americans don’t use, except for the bird.

Speaking of plovers, is there a verb “to plove”? “Ploved”? “Ploven”? Um, no. Instead it is from the late Latin plovarius, which means “belonging to the rain.” The association is unclear. The Oxford English Dictionary provides several different origin stories: that the birds tend to arrive during migration with the rain, that they can be most easily taken during a rain, because they seem to become restless with the onset of rain, or because their plumage looks as if it is dappled with rain drops.

The American avocet is a bird of the western U.S. that easterners can see during the winter from North Carolina south. It is a member of a globally distributed family that includes the more straightforwardly named stilts. The English name is a corruption of the Italian avocetta, which was applied to the pied avocet of southern Europe. But the English spelling is also the third-person singular present active subjunctive form of the Latin verb avoco, which means “to distract by calling one away.”

Curlews are a group of shorebirds with long down-curved beaks. Their name is derived from the Old French courlieu, which refers to a runner or messenger. Curlews, as any birdwatcher will notice, are adept at running. However, the Eurasian curlew (which the Old French would have seen and hearn) cries COURli, COURli, COURli, and it is thought that listeners believed the bird was announcing that it was a runner … in French. The two of the three North American members of this genus make quite different calls, but Sibley describes the call of the long-billed curlew as coooLI.

The whimbrel is found in North America and Eurasia. Its name is supposedly onomatopoeic (like the phoebe) but having listened to several recordings of their various calls (at allaboutbirds.org), I have to say I don’t hear a “whimb” sound in any of them. Just as the dotterel is “one that dotters,” the whimbrel is meant to be “one that whimbs.” Well, OK.

Godwits are a group with a rather arresting name if it is separated into its two syllables. Its origin, however, is unknown (even to the Oxford English Dictionary), although it is has been spelled various ways—godwitte, -witt, -wipe, -wike, gotwit, goodwit, and even godwyn. None of the Old-World species have a call that sounds like the name, but the marbled godwit, a wholly New World species does. Go figure. The name for the stints, which are sandpipers, has a similarly mysterious etymology.

The red knot is a sandpiper with a circumpolar distribution, but was, of course, named in the Old World. Many of these birds have very old names because they have been killed and eaten for centuries (millennia?). They migrate in large flocks, so even though each of them may be quite small, many can be netted in one go. A Danish prince called Cnut won the throne of England in 1016, ending centuries of Viking-caused unrest. Two years later he became king of Denmark as well, and eventually Norway. Cnut is remembered as an especially successful medieval king, but it is still unusual that anything of his personal life or habits could be known. However, the knot supposedly received its name because Cnut had a taste for the bird.

Another sandpiper, the dunlin, is named for its color. “Dun” is a Middle English word for a dingy shade of brown. This is quite an unfair description of the breeding plumage of this bird, which includes a rufous back, a black belly, brown wings and a whitish chest and head speckled with black. But this striking appearance does in fact give way to rather uniformly grayish brown on the upper parts and a mottled off-white below in the winter.

The sanderling has a name that at first looks somewhat obvious with respect to an origin. You might think that it is along the lines of Earthling, but, you know, on sand. It is not, in fact, the case, although the first syllable, “sand,” does refer to that stuff of which beaches are made. It is not really surprising that a seagoing people like the Saxons would have inherited a Proto-Germanic word and made it their own, passing it on to English. The “erling” part, however, is derived from yrling, which is Old English for “plowman.” As a plowman is “one who turns over the earth,” that isn’t too far from Earthling after all.

Finally, the dowitcher is a name with a New World origin. It comes from the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) word tawistawe, what the Oneida call “snipe.” Although dowitchers are larger and longer legged sandpipers than what we call a snipe today, the resemblance is undeniable. There are three species in this genus, a rare one in east Asia and two in North America that were thought to be one species until recently. You can imagine a 17th or 18th century European seeing a wholly unfamiliar bird during fall migration and (just before he shot it) asking a nearby tribal person, “What’s that?”, getting the answer, and, as usual, garbling it.

— Bill Chaisson has been a birdwatcher for over 50 years. He lives and works in Wilmot.