View From the Shed by Volunteer Shaun - QUOD NOMEN TIBI EST

QUOD NOMEN TIBI EST

I know that the vast majority of my readers are highly intelligent and educated people but for the very few of you who might not understand Latin, I’ll translate the title; “QUOD NOMEN TIBI EST” means “What is your name?”.  It’s the question that we ask of all birds, animals and plants as soon as we see them, whether consciously or not. Identification is knowledge, and we all know what knowledge is.

Identifying a bird should be simple. There are lots of great examples where you can look at it and immediately know what it is. A Blackbird for example. A Hedge Sparrow. A Black-Headed Gull. All dead easy, surely?

Well no. The fact that I’m using them as examples should tip you off. There are many black birds, some much uniformly blacker than a Blackbird. Those sparrows that live in my garden hedge are all House Sparrows. The Hedge Sparrow that I used to watch with my Grandad is so incorrectly named that it’s no longer even in the same family group as sparrows. It was long ago reclassified as Britain’s only member of the accentor family, and is now known as a Dunnock. And if you’ve ever seen a Mediterranean Gull you’ll know that it’s a gull with a black head, much blacker than the brown head of the so-called Black-Headed Gull

Ah, gulls. I’m not a particular fan of them. It’s not that they’ve ever done anything bad to me; I wasn’t, for example, traumatised by one neatly plucking the flake from my 99 ice cream as it flew by (that was my wife). It’s just that they all look incredibly similar to me and naming them is nigh impossible.

For example, I’ve recently got back from a trip to Iceland. I saw a bird there that I thought was a Common Gull but I wasn’t 100% sure. I just needed a little confirmation. I’ve been to Iceland a few times now so I’ve invested in an eye-wateringly expensive guidebook of birds that I might see in the area. Naturally, the Icelandic book bought in Iceland about Icelandic birds had their Icelandic names printed first. I cannot speak or read that language (I know, I’m such a slacker) but fortunately there was an English translation section. According to this my bird was definitely a Sea Mew Gull. No, I’d never heard of it either. But it also said that the bird was a Larus canus. My Latin is terrible but with the internet’s help I translated that as ‘old-aged big seabird’. That didn’t help much either but when I learned that the Latin for ‘old-aged’ comes from the same root word as ‘grey’ (as in grey-haired old person like me) then it makes more sense. This ‘grey gull’ was indeed a Common Gull which also apparently goes by the alternative name of Sea Mew. QED, indeed.

Sadly on this Icelandic trip I didn’t quite manage to see Larus glaucoides, the Iceland Gull. But there’s further confusion in that name too. Surely Larus glaucoides would be the Glaucous Gull? I can’t even pronounce ‘Glaucous’, (Larus hyperboreus) let alone identify the gull with that prefix but wouldn’t it make sense? I’ll be honest, both look like Herring Gulls to me.

The following table shows just how confusing gull names can be. You’re extremely unlikely to meet some of them at Old Moor or indeed in Britain at all, but they’re great examples of how names and descriptions can be misleading. I hope you appreciate the nerdiness of my research.

…and Pacific Gull is an alternative name for, you guessed it, the Large-Billed Gull.

Here’s another one to confuse you further. If I were to travel to Germany I might recognise a bird that they call a ‘Kohlmeise’. We have the same bird here at Old Moor. My German is a little rusty and limited but I know that ‘Kohl’ translates as ‘coal’ and ‘Meise’ is a bird of the Tit family. So surely the ‘Kohlmeise’ must be a Coal Tit, right?

Wrong. The German’s ‘Kohlmeise’ is known in Britain as a Great Tit. It’s the Tit with a coal-black head that the Germans most commonly see. The bird that we call a ‘Coal Tit’, they refer to as a ‘Tannenmeise’ - literally, ‘Tit that lives in the forests’. Hopefully you can see why we need a reference system that can be understood by anyone regardless of their mother tongue.

Let’s go back a couple of centuries to when the natural sciences as we know them were expanding on a daily basis. During the 18th century a Swedish naturalist named Carolus Linnaeus created 'binomial nomenclature', where an organism is identified by their genus and species. Latin was selected for this convention as it was a dead language and hence would not change. Scientists and other scholars found it easier to communicate and understand the ‘Latin’ names that usually described the bird but, more importantly, were standardised worldwide. Thus we have Tyto alba (‘white bird of the owl family’ AKA Barn Owl), Anas platyrhinchos (‘the broad-billed duck’ - that’s a Mallard to us) or Picus viridis (‘green bird of the woodpecker family’ - you can work that one out for yourself).

So you can see how, from their scientific names, an ancient Latin-speaker in the Dearne Valley would be able to have a stab at identifying all the creatures mentioned in this piece. I’m not sure that those ancient Romans really had the words for “Volunteer Shaun the Blogger” though.