Cage & Aviary Birds Magazine No.5820 A Wiltshire Paradise Back Issue

WHEN IT COMES to names, by instinct
I’m a traditionalist. I like the connection
with history that comes from using the
same names that our forebears did.
For example, officially I live in
somewhere called Spelthorne. Admittedly, this name is in
the Doomsday Book, rather than having been cooked up by
some local government wonk the year before last. The
problem is more that Spelthorne is, administratively, a
borough of Surrey and, as we all know, Surrey is that place
“south of the water”. This side of the Thames, we are in
Middlesex: Vice County 21, not 17, if you will. Where the
Middle Saxons used to live. Lords, rather than the Oval.
OK, OK, mild obsession alert. More relevantly, I favour
traditional bird names over modern concoctions, too. I’d
much rather a bird took its name from its describer’s mistress, not
from the colour of its vent. Names are parts of the past; in the case of birds, as a record of their relationship with people. The first birdmen to record the incredible richness of the New World avifauna, faced with a deluge of undescribed species, invented the terms “antwren” and “ant-thrush” for new birds that reminded them of familiar ones. We know now that those birds are only very remote relatives of wrens and thrushes, so the names aren’t strictly appropriate. So what? It’s good to commemorate that historical bemusement, even at the expense of “accuracy”. So I’m with reader Andrew Stevens (see letter, left) in preferring the old “touraco” to the modern “turaco” and, while we’re at it, the old “mynah” to the new “myna”. Yet we use the modern spellings in Cage & Aviary Birds. It is, I’m afraid, a victory of head over heart. We could spend many happy hours compiling and consulting our own “style guide” for bird names. Thing is, we’d be musing over the merits of “leafbird” versus “fruitsucker” while our print deadline sailed past, ignored.