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Book 25: Mrs. Moreau's Warbler: How Birds got their Names by Stephan Moss (reading notes)


I consider myself to be an anglophile and have paid regular visits to England for the last 20 or so years. Every time I go there, I buy books that become my souvenirs of the trip. This is one such book.

I am a great lover of both language and popular science, and often when I find books that feature both, I try to buy or borrow them. Natural history, including zoology and its many branches, is also among my favorite non-fiction subjects to read about, so this books was an obvious choice for me.

Mrs. Moreau's Warbler mainly deals in etymology - one of my favorite aspects of language studies. But it is not just about etymology - the origins of words - but about and how we use language to define and classify the world around us, combined with taxonomy, ornithology, history and the author's bird-watching activities.

The author's approach to the subject is systematic and time/history based, i.e. he begins with the "Origins of Bird Names" and then moves on through different periods and naming conventions, ending with the current practice of naming birds systematically by committee and attempts to change established bird names ("The Names We Use Today"), and a speculation on the future ("The Future of Bird Names"). The book's title is derived from the habit of naming birds after people.

Moss gives brief histories of those British ornithologists and proto-ornithologists who shot, examined and named many species of birds all over the world - often after their colleagues or patrons or sometimes (as in the case of the eponymous bird) spouses, children, siblings, or parents. Some of those characters would, no doubt, themselves be interesting subjects for biographical study.

The sub-title is a bit misleading in that is isn't about bird-naming conventions everywhere, but rather about British - mainly English - ones. However, my home country of Iceland shares some of the same species with the UK (especially sea-birds), and so I was, to some extent, able to compare the traditional British names with the traditional Icelandic ones.

One thing I would recommend: if you aren't a bird enthusiast but want, perhaps, to read this book for the linguistic elements, do keep a bird-manual on hand - you will need it to connect all the bird names with the actual birds, because there are no pictures in the book. Also, if you are not a native English speaker, I recommend a dictionary or bilingual glossary of bird-names as well.

I'll end this disjointed mini-review by saying that I intend to keep the book, and I will definitely be on the lookout for more of Moss''s books the next time I visit England. I think The Wren: A Biography might make a good addition to my collection of popular science books, since it's about a bird that is also found in Iceland.
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