Table Of ContentThis book is aimed at anyone with an interest in birds, words, or the history A ian Fraser and Jeannie Gray
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of Australian biology and bird-watching. it discusses common and scientific
names of every Australian bird, to tease out the meanings, which may be s
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useful, useless or downright misleading!
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The authors examine every species: its often many-and-varied common
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Austr AliAn
names, its full scientific name, with derivation, translation and a guide to
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pronunciation. stories behind the name are included, as well as relevant aspects i
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of biology, conservation and history. Original descriptions, translated by the
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authors, have been sourced for many species. bird nAmes
As well as being a book about names this is a book about the history of b
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ever-developing understandings of birds, about the people who contributed
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and, most of all, about the birds themselves.
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A COmplete Guide
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AbOut the AuthOrs A
Ian Fraser is a naturalist, conservationist, author, AbC broadcaster, natural m
history tour guide, environmental consultant and adult educator who has lived Bird
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and worked in Canberra since 1980. he was awarded the Australian natural s
history medallion in 2006, for services to conservation and education, and is
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the author of A Bush Capital Year. a
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Jeannie Gray is a retired teacher and counsellor with a lifelong passion for the r
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study of languages and natural history. e
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AUSTR ALIAN
BIRD NAMES
A COMPLETE GUIDE
Ian Fraser and Jeannie Gray
© Ian Fraser and Jeannie Gray 2013
All rights reserved. Except under the conditions described in the Australian Copyright Act 1968 and
subsequent amendments, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system
or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording,
duplicating or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. Contact CSIRO
PUBLISHING for all permission requests.
National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry
Fraser, Ian, 1951–
Australian bird names: a complete guide/by Ian Fraser and Jeannie Gray.
9780643104693 (pbk.)
9780643104709 (epdf)
9780643104716 (epub)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Birds – Australia – Classification.
Birds – Australia – Identification.
Birds – Australia – History.
Gray, Jeannie.
598.0994
Published by
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Cover illustrations from the Companion to Gould’s Handbook; or, Synopsis of the Birds of Australia
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CONTENTS
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS VI
INTRODUCTION VII
How common names of Australian birds have been derived vii
How scientific names of birds are derived xii
Procedures and pronunciations xiv
NON-PASSERINES 1
STRUTHIONIDAE; ostrich 2
CASUARIIDAE; emus, cassowaries 2
MEGAPODIIDAE; mound builders 3
NUMIDIDAE; guineafowl 4
ODONTOPHORIDAE; California Quail 5
PHASIANIDAE; quails, chook relatives 5
ANSERANATIDAE; Magpie Goose 7
ANATIDAE; geese, ducks, swans 8
PHAETHONTIDAE; tropicbirds 18
PODICIPEDIDAE; grebes 19
PHOENICOPTERIDAE; flamingoes 21
COLUMBIDAE; pigeons and doves 21
PODARGIDAE; frogmouths 31
CAPRIMULGIDAE; nightjars 33
EUROSTOPODIDAE; eared nightjars 34
AEGOTHELIDAE; owlet-nightjars 35
APODIDAE; swifts 37
HYDROBATIDAE; northern storm-petrels 38
OCEANITIDAE; southern storm-petrels 39
DIOMEDEIDAE; albatrosses 41
PROCELLARIIDAE; petrels, prions, shearwaters 44
SPHENISCIDAE; penguins 54
FREGATIDAE; frigatebirds 57
SULIDAE; boobies and gannets 58
ANHINGIDAE; darters 59
PHALACROCORACIDAE; cormorants 60
PELECANIDAE; pelicans 62
CICONIIDAE; storks 62
ARDEIDAE; herons, egrets, bitterns 64
THRESKIORNITHIDAE; ibis and spoonbills 69
ACCIPITRIDAE; eagles, hawks, osprey etc. 71
FALCONIDAE; falcons 79
GRUIDAE; cranes 81
RALLIDAE; crakes and rails 82
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iv Australian Bird Names: A Complete Guide
OTIDIDAE; bustards 87
CHIONIDAE; sheathbills 88
BURHINIDAE; stone-curlews 88
HAEMATOPODIDAE; oystercatchers 89
RECURVIROSTRIDAE; stilts and avocets 90
CHARADRIIDAE; plovers and dotterels 91
PEDIONOMIDAE; plains-wanderer 96
JACANIDAE; jacanas 96
ROSTRATULIDAE; painted snipes 98
SCOLOPACIDAE; ‘waders’– snipes, sandpipers, curlews etc. 98
TURNICIDAE; button-quails 110
GLAREOLIDAE; pratincoles 112
STERCORARIIDAE; skuas and jaegers 114
LARIDAE; gulls, terns and noddies 115
NESTORIDAE; New Zealand parrots 123
CACATUIDAE; cockatoos 124
PSITTACIDAE; parrots 131
CUCULIDAE; cuckoos 144
STRIGIDAE; typical or hawk owls 149
TYTONIDAE; barn owls 152
ALCEDINIDAE; river or fishing kingfishers 154
HALCYONIDAE; tree kingfishers 155
MEROPIDAE; bee-eaters 160
CORACIIDAE; rollers 161
PASSERINES 163
PITTIDAE; pittas 164
MENURIDAE; lyrebirds 165
ATRICHORNITHIDAE; scrub-birds 166
CLIMACTERIDAE; Australasian treecreepers 167
PTILONORHYNCHIDAE; bowerbirds 168
MALURIDAE; fairy-wrens, emuwrens, grasswrens 171
DASYORNITHIDAE; bristlebirds 177
ACANTHIZIDAE; scrubwrens and allies, gerygones, thornbills, whitefaces 178
PARDALOTIDAE; pardalotes 191
MELIPHAGIDAE; honeyeaters and chats 192
POMATOSTOMIDAE; Australian babblers 216
ORTHONYCHIDAE; logrunners 218
PSOPHODIDAE; quail-thrushes, whipbirds, wedgebills 219
NEOSITTIDAE: sittellas 222
CAMPEPHAGIDAE; cuckoo-shrikes and trillers 222
PACHYCEPHALIDAE; shrike-tit, whistlers and shrike-thrushes 225
ORIOLIDAE; orioles and figbirds 230
ARTAMIDAE; woodswallows, magpies, currawongs, butcherbirds 233
DICRURIDAE; drongoes 239
RHIPIDURIDAE; fantails 239
Contents v
LANIIDAE; shrikes 242
CORVIDAE; ravens and crows 243
MONARCHIDAE; monarch-flycatchers 245
CORCORACIDAE; chough and apostlebird 251
PARADISAEIDAE; birds of paradise, riflebirds, manucodes 252
PETROICIDAE; Australian robins 254
ALAUDIDAE; larks 260
CISTICOLIDAE 261
ACROCEPHALIDAE; reed-warblers 262
MEGALURIDAE; some ‘Old World Warblers’, including grassbirds and songlarks 263
TIMALIIDAE; silvereyes, white-eyes 265
PHYLLOSCOPIDAE; some Old World warblers including leaf-warblers 267
HIRUNDINIDAE; swallows and martins 267
PYCNONOTIDAE; bulbuls 269
MUSCICAPIDAE; Old World flycatchers 269
TURDIDAE; thrushes 271
STURNIDAE; starlings 272
NECTARINIIDAE; flowerpeckers and sunbirds 274
ESTRILDIDAE; grass-finches 275
PASSERIDAE; Old World sparrows 283
MOTACILLIDAE; pipits and wagtails 283
FRINGILLIDAE; ‘true’ finches 285
EMBERIZIDAE; buntings and American sparrows 286
REFERENCES 287
INDEX OF COMMON NAMES 297
INDEX OF SCIENTIFIC NAMES 322
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
As we wrote this book, we were more and more amazed and impressed by the naturalists of old:
their extraordinary devotion to the collection and dissemination of knowledge, and the sheer volume
of work many of them produced. And we were impressed by and grateful for the collaboration of
libraries across the world, in making ancient and historic texts so readily available. In this we would
particularly like to pay tribute to the National Library of Australia and the national Trove project.
We would like to say how much gratification we have had from researching and writing
Australian Bird Names: A Complete Guide – it has been constantly interesting to us, as lovers of
words and birds, and usually great fun too. Our collaboration has been smoother than we could have
imagined – the times when a difference of opinion took more than one or two email exchanges to
resolve could be counted on the toes of a cockatoo’s foot. We both want to express too our great
appreciation to our partners, Lou and David, for their love, patience and support.
We are grateful to CSIRO Publishing for taking on the project, and in particular to John
Manger and Tracey Millen for overseeing the production. Our thanks also to Adrienne de Kretser
for her professional editing.
■■Illustrations
Acknowledgements are also due to the extraordinary Biodiversity Heritage Library, a consortium of
natural history and botanical libraries from around the world which makes available digital versions
of many marvels of writing and illustration. Special thanks go to the Smithsonian Institution
Libraries who contributed to BHL the volume from which we have taken the illustrations for the
current book. These are from the Companion to Gould’s Handbook; or, Synopsis of the Birds of
Australia by Silvester Diggles (1817–1880), published in Brisbane in 1877 by Thorne and Greenwell.
Diggles was a musician, artist and natural historian who took it upon himself to provide for
Australians an affordable guide to their country’s birds, at a time when Gould’s excellent but very
costly Birds of Australia was the only book available. Only three volumes of Diggles’s original
large-scale work, Ornithology of Australia, were published but he subsequently reissued parts of it
as the Companion to Gould’s Handbook. All the illustrations were done by Diggles himself, though
the signature of his lithographer Henry Eaton may be seen on some of them. Those we have chosen
show the beauty, accuracy of observation and quirkiness (though not always all in the one
illustration!) that characterise Diggles’s work.
INTRODUCTION
Australian Bird Names: A Complete Guide was written to fill a gap we perceived in the literature,
and has been a focus for our own thirst for knowledge about words and names. We examined bird
names in as much breadth and depth as possible, to give an accurate picture of their origins and,
where possible, of the intentions of the name-givers.
As well as being a book about names this is also a book about the history of ever-developing
understandings about birds, about the people who contributed and, most of all, about the birds
themselves. Ultimately names are just human conceits; they can never be more important or more
interesting than the organisms onto which we’ve foisted them.
This introduction to the main text gives a background to the names, common and scientific,
then offers a brief guide to the order of proceedings and our suggested pronunciations. By taking a
few minutes to read this introduction, we think you will find the answers to most of the questions
that might arise as you read further into the book.
■■How common names of Australian birds have been derived
The non-scientific names of Australian birds – the names by which they are known outside the
scientific literature – are a mix of words imported from Britain and applied to apparently similar
birds, indigenous names (sadly not many), names that spontaneously arose among the people who
encountered the birds and names carefully coined by influential writers. Since the early 20th
century, formal comprehensive checklists of birds have been prepared, forming the basis of
recommended names, both scientific and vernacular; inevitably the authors of such lists have at
times been required to coin their own names.
British names
Many older groups of birds, especially the non-passerines, are spread throughout much of the world
and so had acquired English group names long before Australian ones were named; duck, gull, owl
and finch are just a few. However, many of the namers were not ornithologists – and indeed some of
the early ornithologists did not recognise the same relationships as we do – so English names
became associated with utterly unrelated groups too; magpie, chough, wren and treecreeper are
some examples. In other cases it was realised that the birds in question were new and, with a lack of
knowledge of or interest in indigenous names, people were driven to coin strange chimeric names
based on unrelated bird groups with which the Australian birds were supposed to share some
characteristics. In really bizarre cases this involved merging names of birds from different Orders
– cuckoo-shrike, for instance – though in other cases they were just from different Families (from
each other, as well as from the bird being named). Shrikes, not found naturally in Australia, were
popular in such names, hence shrike-thrush, shrike-tit, crow-shrike and robin-shrike (the latter two
not often used these days).
Of course adjectives were then needed, coined informally or formally, to identify the different
species.
For pre-Australian English names, the Oxford English Dictionary (and other reputable
dictionaries) is an excellent source of information, as is the sometimes contentious Oxford
Dictionary of British Bird Names (Lockwood 1984).
Indigenous names
Of course all Australian birds had been named by humans before Europeans arrived here, but very
few of those names were adopted by our forebears. We see this as a sad situation. In some cases (in
particular from the Sydney area language, whose name we do not even know, according to the
Macquarie Aboriginal Words, Thieberger and McGregor 1994), a couple of bird names are among
the relatively few words surviving. Boobook is apparently one such, adopted early. Gang-gang is
vii
viii Australian Bird Names: A Complete Guide
another example of an indigenous name adopted early in European settlement, but we don’t even
know with any certainty from which language. Others – kookaburra and currawong, for instance –
were presumably known to the newcomers (kookaburra certainly was) but not accepted into general
English usage until the early 20th century.
Other languages
Some Australian birds have relatives in non-English speaking countries, from where the group’s
local name (or an Anglicised version of it) entered English. Cockatoo, cassowary, koel and jacana
are examples of this group of names.
Names ‘of the colonists’
This is a phrase that recurs in the writings of John Gould, who recorded such folk names (and
indigenous names), though he seldom adopted them himself. These are names that apparently arose
spontaneously among the British settlers and that were perpetuated in books, newspaper articles
and, perhaps most significantly, in oral tradition. Many did not survive or did not enter the later
birding literature, because they were too vague, were limited to one colony or were simply
supplanted by later names which proved more popular. Some survived, however, and have even
become first-choice names. Brush-turkey, Stubble Quail, Cape Barren Goose, White-necked Heron,
lyrebird and catbird are examples of modern names which apparently arose spontaneously in the
early days of the colonies.
Names coined by ornithologists
Many, perhaps most, of our currently used names can be traced to a small number of hugely
influential publications by professional ornithologists. It might intuitively be supposed that the
derivation of common names is not the domain of these professionals, but this has not always been
the case. Unlike scientific names, there are no rules for the setting and adoption of common names,
so successive publications have sought to supplant much of what went before; the adoption of such
recommendations is optional, but it is more likely to succeed if the proposing body also publishes a
significant journal over which it holds editorial sway.
The next section describes some of the most significant authors who stamped their mark on the
landscape of Australian bird names. In former times, it was clearly an ornithological advantage to
be called John!
John Latham
John Latham, who died in 1837 at the age of 96, was a successful English doctor whose passion was
natural history and especially birds. He is sometimes described as the greatest ornithologist of his
time; he was probably not that, though he was assiduous and dedicated and, most importantly, lived
at just the right time to make the first significant contribution to Australian ornithology. He was at
the height of his career when Captain James Cook was making his voyages of discovery and the
first specimens and illustrations were being sent back from the fledgling colony. Joseph Banks lent
Latham drawings from all the Cook expeditions, which he then copied! Latham also had access to
works by early colonial artists including Thomas Watling, via the collection of botanist Aylmer
Lambert. Many of his species descriptions were based on these drawings, with some odd results.
Latham was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1775, even before his major publications,
and in 1788 was a moving force behind the formation of the influential Linnean Society. The latter
was a bit ironic, because his reluctance to embrace the Linnaean system of binomial nomenclature
represented the major weakness in his earlier works. In Latham’s great General Synopsis of Birds
(1781–85), which he also illustrated, he opted for the old non-system of arbitrary common names; he
basically disapproved of Latin as foreign and couldn’t see the point of the new aim of consistency in
naming species. As a result the honour of formally describing the species he introduced in the
Synopsis fell to later workers, who used Latham’s work but assigned proper scientific names.
In Latham’s later works, Index Ornithologicus (1791, plus a later supplement) and A General
History of Birds (1821–28), he did fall into line with modern requirements and formally described
about 60 Australian species, including some of the best-known ones. His long reliance on vernacular
Introduction ix
names meant that he contributed many of those to the language, though few now survive. The reason
for this is that by modern standards Latham’s insights into bird relationships were pretty clouded
– lots of unrelated birds were referred to as ‘creepers’, ‘honey-eaters’, ‘warblers’ or ‘manakins’.
Further, much of his work contains confusions – he was dealing with vast amounts of new material,
some just in the form of notes or sketches – and in several identifiable cases he described the same
bird more than once under different names. He even did that within a book; Buff-rumped Thornbill is
an example. Some of the duplications were due to sexual dimorphism or juvenile plumage.
It was Latham who first applied the word honey-eater to Australian birds, though he used it for
everything from bee-eaters to robins to whistlers to bowerbirds to whipbirds (and some
honeyeaters). His White-eared Thrush survives as White-eared Honeyeater.
John White
John White was a naval officer who was chief surgeon to the 1788 settlement expedition to New
South Wales. He did an excellent job of maintaining health standards in the colony, and indulged his
passion for natural history during expeditions with Governor Arthur Phillip. His Journal of a
Voyage to New South Wales, published in 1790, was very successful and included sketches and
accounts of Australian birds. Some of the accounts were written by George Shaw, from specimens
sent by White, so attributions vary; we can be fairly sure that names that appeared in his 1788 diary
were White’s, unless he altered them later to fit the book. One of his best-known (though not very
inspired) names was New Holland Creeper, now known as New Holland Honeyeater.
George Shaw was a British polymath-naturalist who took a great interest in the flood of
Australian material, including some birds, though he is best known for his work on mammals. His
eight-volume General Zoology (1800–12) was highly influential, and included many Australian
species.
John Lewin
John Lewin (1770–1819) was a naturalist, talented artist and engraver who came to Sydney in 1800
to collect specimens for English patrons, bringing etching equipment which included a printing
press, copper plates and paper. His father William had written the seven-volume Birds of Britain.
Lewin’s first plan, backed by influential patrons, was to produce a book on the colony’s insects but
his interest broadened to include the birds. He produced two books in the colony, Prodromus
Entomology in 1805 and Birds of New Holland in 1808 for six English subscribers (plus of course
the King!). His 67 Australian subscribers did not receive their copies for reasons still unknown,
though it is suggested that the books were lost at sea en route back from the English printers. Only
eight copies of this book remain. A Sydney edition, called Birds of New South Wales, was
accordingly produced in 1813 for the Australian subscribers, using proof impressions that Lewin
had taken before he sent the plates to England. This was the first illustrated such book to be printed
in Australia and there are only 13 known copies.
While Lewin drew on Latham’s and White’s names, he was willing to provide his own as well;
Variegated Fairy-Wren (from his Variegated Warbler) is one of Lewin’s, but many of his names were
‘near misses’ (e.g. Scarlet-backed Warbler for our Red-backed Fairy-wren).
John Gould
Books could be – and have been – written about this remarkable man. He has occasionally been
dismissed as an entrepreneur (which he was) and as a charlatan who got credit for others’ artistic
work (credit that he never claimed, though he did many of the sketches which others, notably the
equally remarkable Elizabeth Gould, filled in). In truth, John Gould was an exceptional
ornithologist who changed the landscape of 19th century Australian bird taxonomy; by our
calculation he is the author of some 175 bird names (and 39 mammal names) still in use. He also
assigned another 150 or so names which have been superseded. Gould’s contribution to vernacular
names was equally immense, but fewer of those survived because of his habit of using scrupulous
translations (often his own) of Latin names, in particular using genus names as group names.
Swift-flying Hemipode, Little Chthonicola, Black-throated Psophodes or Ground Grauculus were
never going to catch the public attention.
