Book Review: The Bird Name Book by Susan Myers

Full of fascinating facts - the new book

HATS off to ornithologist Susan Myers on the exhaustive research and colourful writing style that characterise her latest book.

The title is somewhat dull, but The Bird Name Book is hard to put down.

The richly-illustrated contents span alphabetically - from accentor to zeledonia - all the bird groups of the world.

So if you ever want to know the derivation of names such as snipe, booby, phalarope or shag, this is the volume to explore. 

Many of the names are English versions of ancient foreign languages - for instance, Anglo-Saxon or Old Norse. 

Snipe apparently derives from an old German word, 'snipon', meaning a long thin object - just like the bird's bill.

In some cases, the author more or less admits to being stumped.

For instance, shrike is often thought to come from the Icelandic word 'skrikjar' which translates as shrieker. Trouble is, as Ms Myers points out, "the vocalisation of shrikes could hardly be described as a shriek".

By way of compensation for not coming up with a satisfactory explanation, the author offers the interesting snippet that, in Germany, there is a superstition that a single great grey shrike kills nine birds a day.

With the whimbrel, she is on controversial territory when she claims that the word is "imitative of the bird's far-carrying whining call derived from, the dialect  'whimp'".

This is surely inaccurate. Whimbrels do not whine, they are noted for uttering seven short whistles. It seems more likely  that the species was named after a musical instrument of similar name.

But this is not to cavil. Inevitably, there will be some contentious entries, but that only serves to make the book more lively.

The Bird Name Book, published by Princeton University Press at £30, will be available wherever books are sold from October 25.