A Family of Linnets

By Bill Chaisson
Of a Feather
My surname is ostensibly of French origin, but means “a person from Chiasso,” which is a town on the Italian side of the Swiss border near Lake Como. (The spelling went from Chiasson to Chaisson on Prince Edward Island in the late 18th century.) However, I was corresponding with my mother’s brother by email last week when he mentioned that his family name, Fanelli, means “linnets” in Italian. Having a surname that refers to a very scenic pass through the Alps is nice, but having your family named for a bird, a specific species of bird, is fun. The English equivalent would be names like Bullfinch or Heathcock.

The Eurasian linnet (Linaria cannabina) is small finch that ranges throughout Europe and eastward to Mongolia, cutting a wide berth around the high treeless steppes of “the ‘stans.” The fanello is a year-round resident of Apulia (Puglia in Italian), the part of Italy from which my mother’s family emigrated. It is the “heel” of the Italian peninsula. It has a typical Mediterranean climate: hot, dry summers and mild, rainy winters, and it is mostly flat. It is among the hottest and driest places in the country.

It is an intensely cultivated region, producing 40% of the olive oil in Italy, but also grows a great deal of durum wheat, from which pasta is made, as well as many vegetables. Apulia therefore includes plenty of habitat acceptable to the linnet, which is found in a variety of settings, including “edges of cultivation, fallow fields, scrub and weed patches, plantations, orchards, vineyards, hedgerows …”

The English name for this bird is derived from its association with flax, from which linen is produced, and the Latin name for which is linum. (This is the origin of the bird’s genus name as well; linaria means “linen-weaver.”) It is, as is typical of finches, primarily a seed eater. Birdsoftheworld.org lists literally dozens of species upon which this bird is known to feed (including flax).

The list includes both herbaceous and woody plants, but the linnet is known to forage primarily on the ground. It does, however, venture into low scrub and is especially fond of thorny shrubs. The Danes call this bird tornirisk, which means “thorny,” a reference to its foraging habits, not its disposition.

Linnets also forage for and eat invertebrates, and this is particularly so while they are feeding nestlings. This is a common practice among normally seed eating birds; in order to supply their young with concentrated protein, they will feed them animal matter for several days after they are out of the shell. Take that, adamant vegans.

The taxonomy of this species has been tangled. In 1758, Linnaeus called it Acanthis cannabina, associating it with another plant (gardeners will know bear’s breeches, A. mollis), but in the 19th century it was shifted to the genus Carduelis, which includes the European goldfinch. A comprehensive DNA study in 2012 showed (as many suspected) that Carduelis was what is impolitely called a “garbage pail taxon” and politely called polyphyletic, that is, composed of groups of species with different origins. Our siskin and goldfinches were found to be their own clade and reassigned to Spinus, and the linnet and some other European finches were assigned to the resurrected genus Linaria. Acanthis is now home to all the redpolls.

In addition to the twite, another ubiquitous European finch, Linaria includes two other linnets that have split off from the southeastern edge of the common linnet’s range. One is found in Yemen and the other in Somalia. The Yemeni bird’s plumage lacks any crimson at all, and the Somali species has only a patch on the flank.

How would anyone acquire a surname that refers to the linnet? Generally, the non-nobility (and my Italian ancestors are certainly not noble) acquired surnames during the early Modern period (after the Middle Ages), when governments decided that it was easier to keep track of people for taxing purposes if they had family names. Commoners often already had incipient last names just to distinguish one person from the other when they had the same given name: John the smith versus John the fletcher (maker of arrows); Peter of the valley (LaValle) versus Peter of the woods (DuBois). But those with names derived from plants and animals are thought to have shared attributes—looks, behavior—with their namesakes.

Linnets are small, the size of a chipping sparrow or an indigo bunting (~5.5 inches long), and prettily colored, but not flashy. The forehead of the male linnet is a rich crimson with black bases to the feathers. The upper breast and sides are also crimson, but paler and with brown bases to the feathers. Other than that, it is grayish about the head, brownish on the wings and back, and streaked with black over off-white below. The females lack any of the male’s crimson and are paler and more heavily streaked.

This widely distributed taxon has several subspecies. In Apulia my ancestors would have been surrounded by members of the mediterranea subspecies, which is generally paler than the nominate subspecies but with darker patches here and there.

Il fanello’s voice is perhaps more attention-getting than its looks. It is a very vocal species, calling and singing while in motion and at rest. It delivers its song, which is described as “a soft and varied lilting and hurried musical warble interspersed with twitters, whistles and trills,” from the top of a low bush or even from the ground. Its flight call is “a series of soft twitters or trills,” which sounds more elaborate than our goldfinch’s corresponding efforts.

The fact that all my partners and friends through the years have been astonished by just how much my family talks, makes me suspect that the Fanelli surname might be sourced to a congenital chattiness that reminded my ancestors’ neighbors of a certain bird that was making a constant, but not unattractive ruckus in the hedgerows and fallow fields of Apulia.