BIRDS sing, soar and twitch through our landscapes, lives and language. They were probably among the first animals the first humans really noticed and, after noticing, always comes naming. As Susan Myers describes in The Bird Name Book: A History of English Bird Names (Princeton University Press, £30), their names can come from their appearance (raven), behaviour (dipper), diet (chaffinch), habitat (moorhen), other languages (kiwi), geographical origin (pheasant) or similarities (American robin) and some are named for several characteristics at once. Names vary within and between countries and others were long applied indiscriminately. Scientific nomenclature is itself often romantic, as with the rhea, named after the daughter of Gaia and Uranus, alluding to the flightless bird’s confinement to earth.
The hypothesised three millennia-old proto-Indo-European language contains a word, ghans, that means goose. As are other bird names—cuckoo, hoopoe, rook and turtle dove—ghans is probably onomatopoeic, inspired by the goose’s call. By the 10th century, ghans had become grœde in the Exeter Book, a foundational text of English literature—helping launch geese into folklore, metaphor, proverb and slang as a symbol of foolishness, good eating and the onset of winter.
By 1382, when Geoffrey Chaucer penned Parlement of Foules, birds of many kinds had alighted in every branch of national life, a source of fascination and joy: ‘On every bough the briddes herde I singe,/With voys of aungel in her armonye.’
Sparrow
Diese Geschichte stammt aus der January 11, 2023-Ausgabe von Country Life UK.
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Save our family farms
IT Tremains to be seen whether the Government will listen to the more than 20,000 farming people who thronged Whitehall in central London on November 19 to protest against changes to inheritance tax that could destroy countless family farms, but the impact of the good-hearted, sombre crowds was immediate and positive.
A very good dog
THE Spanish Pointer (1766–68) by Stubbs, a landmark painting in that it is the artist’s first depiction of a dog, has only been exhibited once in the 250 years since it was painted.
The great astral sneeze
Aurora Borealis, linked to celestial reindeer, firefoxes and assassinations, is one of Nature's most mesmerising, if fickle displays and has made headlines this year. Harry Pearson finds out why
'What a good boy am I'
We think of them as the stuff of childhood, but nursery rhymes such as Little Jack Horner tell tales of decidedly adult carryings-on, discovers Ian Morton
Forever a chorister
The music-and way of living-of the cabaret performer Kit Hesketh-Harvey was rooted in his upbringing as a cathedral chorister, as his sister, Sarah Sands, discovered after his death
Best of British
In this collection of short (5,000-6,000-word) pen portraits, writes the author, 'I wanted to present a number of \"Great British Commanders\" as individuals; not because I am a devotee of the \"great man, or woman, school of history\", but simply because the task is interesting.' It is, and so are Michael Clarke's choices.
Old habits die hard
Once an antique dealer, always an antique dealer, even well into retirement age, as a crop of interesting sales past and future proves
It takes the biscuit
Biscuit tins, with their whimsical shapes and delightful motifs, spark nostalgic memories of grandmother's sweet tea, but they are a remarkably recent invention. Matthew Dennison pays tribute to the ingenious Victorians who devised them
It's always darkest before the dawn
After witnessing a particularly lacklustre and insipid dawn on a leaden November day, John Lewis-Stempel takes solace in the fleeting appearance of a rare black fox and a kestrel in hot pursuit of a pipistrelle bat
Tarrying in the mulberry shade
On a visit to the Gainsborough Museum in Sudbury, Suffolk, in August, I lost my husband for half an hour and began to get nervous. Fortunately, an attendant had spotted him vanishing under the cloak of the old mulberry tree in the garden.
