The Great Arrival

More than one author has conjured up the image of a Great Arrival, the 16 million or so migrant birds all heading north to summer on these northern breeding grounds. Most recently, in his excellent book Say Goodbye to the Cuckoo, Michael McCarthy speculated on how we would react were all these birds to arrive in a single flock. Such a flock would fill the sky; people would stop what they were doing in order to take in the spectacle and it would become an important signal that spring had reached our shores, celebrated with street parties and a public holiday.

Of course, our summer migrants do not arrive all at once in some grand flock; instead they turn up in small numbers or individually, with many arriving at night when the energetics of migration are better balanced. These overnight arrivals do provide one thing however; they deliver a sense of the unexpected to us birdwatchers, the thrill that the night just gone might have delivered some exciting find to an early morning trip to a patch of coastal scrub or waterside reedbed. Even those who would not describe themselves as a birdwatcher derive a thrill from seeing the summer’s first Swallow or hearing May’s first Cuckoo.

While these individual encounters act in some small way as a talisman for a wider arrival, the movement of this mass of birds, streaming out of Africa and up across Europe, goes largely unnoticed. Taken for granted, we find ourselves unaware of the problems faced by these many and varied travellers, problems which have resulted in dramatic population decline for some species. We only know of the changing fortunes of our summer visitors because of the work of organisations like the British Trust for Ornithology (BTO), whose partnership between researchers and birdwatchers provides regular monitoring of the birds breeding across Britain and Ireland. Yet even with this information we only know that something is wrong, we don’t fully know why. Are the numbers of Wheatears, Cuckoos, Turtle Doves and flycatchers falling because of difficulties here or is it because of problems on their wintering grounds or along their migration routes?

Recently, the BTO and RSPB have launched projects in Africa to look at our migrants on their wintering grounds, seeking to understand what is happening to the habitats they use during our winter. This work is only the start of a wider process which, ultimately, will need to feed into conservation action targeted at the different species across their whole range. The scale of this work also serves to bring home the message that while we view these birds as being ‘ours’, they are only ours for part of the year.

What's in a name

I have been leafing through the new edition of my favoured bird guide, a publication that will accompany me on my birdwatching trips around the county. I hope that it will serve me as well as the battered copy of the first edition that it is now replacing. The book contains new information and so recognises new species, created where previously recognised races have been split into two. So now, for example, I have Yellow-legged and Caspian Gull. Annoyingly, for me at least, the guide contains some of the creeping changes in bird names that seems to come from an increasing Americanisation of our language. Gone are the Red-throated, Black-throated and Great Northern Divers, the ‘Diver’ now replaced by ‘Loon’. I cannot imagine any birdwatcher I know referring to the ‘Great Northern Loon’ at Whittlingham Country Park. At least the authors have not gone as far as those of a bird list that I saw recently; they’d replaced Common Gull with ‘Mew Gull’ and the term ‘Skua’ with ‘Jaeger’!

Somebody suggested that standardising the English names in this way is a sensible approach, enabling our New World cousins to understand which species we are writing or talking about. My natural response to this is that we already have names in place that enable those working on birds, in whichever country, to understand which species we mean. These are the Scientific names, based on the binomial system devised by Linnaeus.

Of course, such changes are not new and if you browse through bird guides from generations past, you will see many other examples of bird names that have changed. The Yellow Bunting of 1943 is now the Yellowhammer, the Hedge Sparrow is now Dunnock or Hedge Accentor and, going back further, the Red-breast is now the Robin. This last change of name is particularly interesting as the ‘Robin’ bit in ‘Robin Red-breast’ was a sort of country or folk name, in much the same way as some people refer to ‘Jenny Wren’. Imagine if we started calling the Wren, the ‘Jenny’!

I am often struck by how much more charm there is in the local names of birds than in many of the common names that we use at the national level. The ‘bee bird’ for Spotted Flycatcher is one of my favourite local Norfolk names but there are others: Bunt Lark (Corn Bunting), Blood Olp (Bullfinch – derived from ‘alpe’, the oldest known name for this bird and used by Chaucer) and the Sea Dotterel (Turnstone) are just three of many.

Whatever your views, names remain important because they enable us to communicate about these creatures and share our passions for the natural world.