The starting point of my latest collection, Letter-winged Kite, was the discovery of this simple fact: every bird in the world has a common English name. That strikes me as extraordinary. A scientific name, yes: every bird, every living thing, has been tagged with a binomial, following Linnaeus’s formula of generic name first, specific name after: Passer domesticus. For countless creatures and plants, this is the only form of name conferred, because we think it enough. In fact a second name has been gifted to every member of only one class of organisms: Aves. Each bird, even the most distant, obscure, localized member of the tribe, has a common English name primed and ready to be dropped into everyday speech. Which may strike us as odd: given that the majority of birds on the list are not endemic where English is the first language, there can be no root-level cause for so many English folk-names. The effort suggests a missionary determination that we should be on first-name terms with all birds, wherever they are.
That is the position of US ornithologists Frank Gill and Minturn Wright, who in 2006 published the first attempt at a standardised nomenclature, Birds of the World: Recommended English Names. Usually referred to as the IOC World Bird List, this lays down guidance on which is right: robin, or redbreast? Dunnock, hedge-sparrow or accentor? The names are American English, of course, and on this side of the Atlantic we might niggle (have niggled; are still niggling) over “gray” for “grey”, or “loon” for “diver”. Compromises have been introduced, and the list is tweaked from time to time. But it is what we have. Other languages, incidentally, have common names for many, or most, of the world’s birds; one reason the IOC list has been made complete is the role of English as the lingua franca in ornithology.
The 10,331 names on the IOC list have a very mixed etymology. There are the old-world vernacular names, some of them such as crow, rook and goose rooted in the prehistory of language. Others are erratic stones deposited in what became the English language from Anglo-Saxon, Norse, Germanic and other incursions. For the many new species identified from the age of scientific discovery in the seventeenth century, ornithologists coined new names (Dartford warbler), while attempting consensus on the variations of local names (chaffinch). World exploration and colonisation harvested loanwords from indigenous languages (kookaburra), or cobbled together makeshift neologisms such as magpie-lark and fairy-wren.
The number of species, of names, has grown as science has enabled us to identify genetic differences between similar birds. In naming close relatives, we most commonly flag up that one species has a part of its anatomy a distinctive colour; or else that it is crested or crowned, spotted or striped, greater or lesser. The names may recognise location (Madagascar grebe), habitat (saltmarsh sparrow), behaviour (solitary sandpiper), voice (trumpeter finch), movement (fluttering shearwater) or diet (ant-eating chat). Or, in many instances, pay tribute to a patron or fellow naturalist (Lady Amherst’s pheasant, Bewick’s swan).
The resulting list is an extraordinary achievement, a wonderful sweetshop mix of the everyday and the obscure, the literal and the evocative, with some names in family clusters, some outliers. There are those that strike us as apt or even inevitable (kingfisher), others, such as the varieties of laughingthrush (see Available in a choice of colour…) testament to the thankless task of trying to distinguish some – any – difference between so many, so similar species.
The IOC list strikes me as a unique resource for poetry, an entire vocabulary ready to be dipped into, picked over and reordered. The challenge is to construct sequences from this remarkable catalogue alone that attempt to find new relationships, within the shapes and sounds of words, their meanings and ambiguities. The poems in Letter-winged Kite, published on 1st August 2020 by Penteract Press, are composed entirely of names from the IOC list, usually one per line, with the separation of a comma where more than one name occurs on a line. The titles are my own. A couple of examples:
Haiku (ii)
Red Kite, Canvasback
Red Knot, Red-billed Streamertail
Fly River Grassbird
Sonnet
Restinga Tyrannulet
Pernambuco Pygmy Owl
White-breasted Guineafowl
Planalto Tyrannulet
Rufous-lored Tyrannulet
Vulturine Guineafowl
Tamaulipas Pygmy Owl
Oustalet’s Tyrannulet
Caspian Tern, Red-billed Gull
Armenian Gull, Large-billed Tern
Cayenne Tern, Slender-billed Gull
Andean Gull, Yellow-billed Tern
Aleutian Tern, Ring-billed Gull
Caspian Gull, Gull-billed Tern
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Letter-winged Kite, John Bevis, Penteract Press, 2020. £9
Available to order online from penteractpress.com