Naming Birds: Calls, Color, Behavior, and More

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi.

Hello.

Who are you?

This is Annie.

Hi.

This is Annie Butler from Omaha, Nebraska.

Omaha. What a lovely town. It’s been a couple of nice days there.

What’s on your mind, Annie?

I was calling. My partner and I have really gotten into bird identifying, bird watching, bird listening, and was wondering what the origins of some of the bird names or calls is from. Specifically, we heard an Eastern, what was it, an Eastern Wood Peewee. And I was just curious how it got its name. I understand the call of the Peewee, but how, I would think that the consonants could be interchangeable. How did they get the P and the W?

What is the call?

Okay, I’m going to try. But it’s like Pee-a-wee. It sounds like a television station sting that they do after the news. Pee-wee, we’ll be back after the weather after this. Pee-wee.

Right.

Wow.

Okay. What a wonderful question. Are you using the Merlin Bird ID app for this?

We are, yes.

Yeah. Isn’t that amazing?

Mm—

But, yeah, in terms of Pee-wee, it begins with that P sound, and you’re wondering why it can’t begin with another sound, for example?

Yeah, yeah. I mean, I guess, you know, in my case, like, I hear the vowels, but just who came up with, you know, yeah, putting that P there, that W there.

Mm—

Mm—

Yeah. Well, that has to do in a way with what we call English sound symbolism. The fact that P is what we call a stop consonant, and stop consonants are consonants like P and T and K, which, you know, feel kind of quick and abrupt. You know, you get words like pop and tick and crack. And those are different sounding from what we call continuance, like the letter N or the M sound or L or R. Those feel more smooth or flowing, you know, like murmur and lull and nice. And so when you’re trying to distinguish those bird sounds, we tend to use those stop consonants.

You know, I’m thinking of, do you know how an oven bird sounds?

I don’t know. Supposedly, the mnemonic for that one is teacher, teacher. I’ve listened to these recordings on the Merlin Bird app, and it doesn’t really sound like teacher, teacher to me. But there’s also the bard, Al, B-A-R-R-E-D, which supposedly sounds like who cooks for you. And it’s got those kind of, you know, K sounds. That one makes a little bit more sense to me.

I feel like. Yeah. Yeah. And so people were coming up with their own versions of these terms, but they started to get stabilized when people were publishing different guides to birding. You know, there was the Roger Torrey Peterson one back in the 1930s and the National Geographic Society published a field guide to the birds of North America. And then, of course, David Allen Sibley, the Sibley Guide to Birds, those publications started to codify those different English versions of those bird calls. But what really interests me about these is that, you know, kind of like words, they tend to change over time and vary from place to place. Like the white-throated sparrow, I remember reading this 1970 children’s book, The Trumpet of the Swan by E.B. White, and he mentions in that book, just in passing, he talks about this little sparrow with a white throat that arrived and sang, oh, sweet Canada, Canada, Canada. Which is now, if you go to bird guides, you know, they’ll say the call is, oh, sweet Canada. But before that, it was old Sam Peabody, Peabody, Peabody.

Martha, that reminds me that there’s another layer to this. Particularly if we’re talking about the Peewee or the Peewee, in that the North American Peewee is a different bird than the European one. The European one is a lapwing, and the ones in North America are known as tyrant flycatchers. And so the name was borrowed intercontinentally. It was already in people’s minds, and so they just reused it because the sound was kind of the same. And the other layer to this is what people choose when they’re trying to represent the onomatopoeia of a bird sound depends on their phonetic inventory, what languages they know. So the same exact lapwing birds that are called Pee-wits or Pee-wees and a variety of other things in the English-speaking world are called Kee-wits in Kee-wits in Dutch and South African and German. Because they have a different phonetic inventory than we do. And so they represent the sound differently.

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I realized this morning, too, that I had a cockatiel growing up who could actually talk. And so I think that’s maybe another part of me not being able to hear exactly what the mnemonics are.

Right, right. That makes a lot of sense. Do you have any other favorite mnemonics?

I mean, the ones that we have here in Omaha, lots of blue jays and robins. You know, and it’s the cheer up, cheer up, cheer up. And I don’t hear it, you know. But I guess I do hear, you know, with the blue jay, it’s like jeer, jeer, jeer. And you do hear that hard jay sound in that.

Well, Annie, send us your cool bird sightings. I have one of those bird buddy feeders with a camera built in and I love it.

Yeah, we do too. And it just sends me cool pictures of birds.

Yes, that’ll be the next purchase for sure. It’s a sign of old age and I don’t mind it.

Yes, exactly. Take care of yourself, Annie.

Thank you.

You too.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

877-929-9673 or send your emails to words@waywordradio.org.