Names of Chinese birds
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If you are a birder, you are in for a treat. If you are a bird watcher who is particularly fond of Chinese species, you are in for a double treat.
Craig Brelsford is a writer and editor living in Shanghai, China. Mr. Brelsford is currently creating the world's first photographic field guide to the birds of China. To that end, he travels constantly throughout the vast territory of China.
His peregrinations have taken him to 31 of the 34 provincial-level entities in China researching his field guide. As even the briefest of visits to his blog will attest, Mr. Brelsford is one serious birder.
So far as I can tell, Brelsford began photographically documenting Chinese birds no later than July and August of 2011:
"Finally, My Species List from Sichuan 2011"
By August 7, 2014, Brelsford had photographically documented nearly 800 different types of bird, more than half of the approximately 1,400 total avian species (see below) in China:
In a note to me, Brelsford comments:
…the USA and Canada (which put together are twice the size of China) combined have about 900. China is a vast country with an amazing diversity of bird species. To cover the 1,400 species well, I'll need an average of 2.5 photos per species, or 3,500 photos. I hope to supply myself from a third to half of the photos that my field guide will need; I'm also writing all the text. After the first edition comes out, if time and funds allow, I'll get to work immediately on the second edition, seeking new species of bird to document with my camera. I see the field guide as a never-ending project.
As of early November, 2014, Brelsford is still actively documenting the birds of China, as can be see from his 397th blogpost. But let's take a look at one of Brelsford's posts closer to the middle of the series, post 220 recounting his recording of birds on Hainan during January and February of 2013.
What is remarkable about Brelsford's records, and why I am writing about this on Language Log, is that he gives the names of all Chinese birds in characters and in pinyin with tones, together with the corresponding English and Latin designations.
Here are some examples:
Oriental magpie-robin (鹊鸲, quèqú, Copsychus saularis prosthopellus)
puff-throated bulbul (白喉冠鹎, báihóu guānbēi, Alophoixus pallidus pallidus, endemic ssp.)
grey-capped pygmy woodpecker (星头啄木鸟, xīngtóuzhuómùniǎo, Dendrocopos canicapillus swinhoei, endemic ssp.)
red-headed trogon (红头咬鹃, hóngtóu yǎojuān, Harpactes erythrocephalus hainanus, endemic ssp.)
greater racket-tailed drongo (大盘尾, dà pánwěi, Dicrurus paradiseus johni, endemic ssp.)
greater yellownape (大黄冠啄木鸟, dà huángguānzhuómùniǎo, Chrysophlegma flavinucha styani)
streak-breasted scimitar babbler (棕颈钩嘴鹛, zōngjǐng gōuzuǐméi, Pomatorhinus ruficollis nigrostellatus, endemic ssp.)
Such a feast of taxonomic exactitude! I salute Brelsford simply for his painstaking identifications in characters, pinyin, English, and Latin, not to mention slogging through mudflats, climbing up mountains, and lugging his heavy, cumbersome gear through treetop perches.
I am impressed by Brelsford for his going the extra mile to include so much valuable linguistic information concerning the nomenclature of the birds that he photographs. I asked him how he acquired the ability to do this. His reply:
I arrived in China in 2007 knowing so little Chinese that I was afraid to take a taxi alone in Shanghai. Over the years, I picked it up, then, in 2013, I started attending Chinese classes at the Shanghai University of Engineering Science. I plan to continue learning Chinese there in 2015. I highly recommend this university. The tuition is reasonable, the teachers are good, and the books are good.
Since, according to this list in Wikpedia, the avifauna of China include a total of 1,314 species, Brelsford still has a ways to go before documenting most of them. But he seems like the kind of person who will persist to the end. He has what I call in Chinese wōniú jīngshén 蜗牛精神 ("snail spirit") — go slowly but persistently; eventually you'll reach your goal.
I would like to take advantage of this opportunity to salute a distinguished Philadelphia ornithologist, Rodolphe Meyer de Schauensee (1901-1984), curator of birds at the Academy of Natural Sciences for nearly fifty years. Italian by birth, though Swiss by heritage, Meyer de Schauensee was the author of The Birds of China, which I relied upon when I needed to study various species of birds that I encountered in my many trips to China or in texts that I was reading.
I believe that I got to know about Meyer de Schauensee's valuable volume through his daughter, Maude de Schauensee, the former Keeper of the Near Eastern Section at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, who wrote an exceptionally fine monograph on Two Lyres from Ur in the collection of our Museum.
My own affinity with Chinese birds runs deep. When I get the chance, I enjoy writing about bird behavior, including their calls and "communications", such as in this note to my translation of the Zhuang Zi, an early Chinese philosophical text:
Mair, Victor H. Wandering on the Way. New York: Bantam Books, 1994.
Swallow (p. 195). The information given in the Chuang Tzu accords closely with beliefs and customs concerning the swallow in a number of societies. The Taiwanese and the Nepalese, for example, do not consider a newly constructed house to be blessed until a swallow builds its nest under the eaves. It is the sacred quality of the mud-daubed nest that undoubtedly led the author of this passage to refer to it here as an “altar of the soil and grain.” Even more remarkable is a personal observation I made during an extended trip to the People’s Republic of China in 1983. After three weeks of travel across the length and breadth of the land, one of my companions who happened to be a bird watcher exclaimed with chagrin, “Oh, heaven! Victor, there are no birds in China!” And, indeed, except for a solitary kite that we had seen flying high in the sky above the remote upper reaches of the Yellow River, we had not seen or heard a single bird for three weeks. When I asked our Chinese guides how this could be, they explained that massive extermination campaigns had reduced the bird population to almost nil (“because birds compete with humans beings for grain”). There were also the local “bird-killing kings” who shot or netted as many as a hundred birds a day for sport or food. Four years later, in 1987, the Chinese authorities began to realize what an ecological disaster these misguided policies had spawned—millions of trees were dying from insect infestation, to name only one problem—and so they gradually began to attempt to control the wanton slaughter. But, to return to the conclusion of my 1983 trip, after nearly a month in China, as we reached Canton and were preparing to leave the country, we were overjoyed to behold scattered groups of swallows flying exuberantly in the vicinity of the Canton Historical Museum (formerly a temple that was originally built in 1380 on a commanding height overlooking the city). I was so startled by their existence that I could not help but ask my Chinese host why they, too, had not been killed. “In the first place,” he said, “their fight is too fast and jittery for anyone to shoot them easily. Secondly, they help us kill insects that rob us of grain. And finally,” he admitted, “they bring good luck.” Hence, even in godless communist China, an ancient tradition about the swallow had been preserved—after a fashion.
Judging from Craig Brelsford's accounts, the bird population of China has noticeably rebounded.
The following is a description of the captivating calls of one of my favorite birds, the koel:
Mair, Victor H. Contact and Exchange in the Ancient World. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2006.
- Even various species of animals spread over large portions of the globe, taking their “culture” and “language” with them. There is a type of cuckoo known as the koel (Eudynamys scolopacea) that has blue-black plumage (in the male), red eyes, and a stout olive yellow or greenish bill. It is a fairly large bird, approximately 40 to 44 centimeters in length. Like the cuckoo, the koel gets its name from its distinctive call (we pronounce the name with the accent on the first syllable, but the call is very heavily accented on the second syllable). Koel is an extremely apt Anglo-Indian name (Hindi koil, koil, koyal < Sanskrit kōkilah; Yule and Burnell, 1985 [1886], 490b; Klein 1966, 851a). The territorial call of the male is very loud and has the “shape” of a bell curve lasting about a second and a half for each pulse, with the peak (which is stressed) being about a third the height of the total length of the curve and one note higher on the octaval scale. The pulse of the call is emitted throughout with a very smooth and whistlelike quality, more resembling the sliding of a high-pitched trombone than the glissando of a keyed or stringed instrument. These pulses are repeated five to ten times in succession with increasing intensity and elevation until the bird seems to have become so excited that it cannot continue. It is the custom of the koel to begin its call just before the break of dawn, but it may also be heard around noon or occasionally at other times of the day. Since the call carries so far and the bird itself is rather elusive, the koel is more often known by sound than by sight. Aside from its primary call, the koel also has several secondary calls, one of which has been described as follows: wreep-wreep-wreep-wreep-wreepwreepwreep…or breep-breep-breep-breepbreepbreepbreep….
The koel is distributed quite widely across South Asia, Southeast Asia, Australia, Melanesia, Polynesia, Micronesia, South China, and Central China. Its breeding and wintering grounds may be located at a great distance from its normal habitat, often separated by great stretches of open water, making it a migratory bird of sorts. See Viney, Phillipps, and Ying 1977, 126 and facing plate; Meyer de Schauensee 1984, 262b- 263; Robson 2000, 281-282 and plate 18; King and Dickinson 1975, 186-187 and plate 25; Sibley and Monroe 1990, 101a.
Whether its distinctive behavior and call are genetically transmitted or imitatively acquired, the important thing to note is that this species has a shared “culture” (behavioral patterns) and unique “language” (set of calls). It is impossible that the highly distinctive culture and language of the koel could have been spontaneously invented and reinvented at countless places across thousands of miles of land and water in virtually an identical fashion. While the koel may adopt both its culture and its language slightly to local circumstances, it –like humankind – is a gregarious creature that maintains its genome and its behavioral identity through constant interaction (directly and indirectly) with the other members of its species near and far.
References
King, Ben F., and Edward C. Dickinson. 1975, rep. 1993. Collins Field Guide: Birds of South-East Asia. N.p.: HarperCollins.
Meyer de Schauensee, Rodolphe. 1984. The Birds of China. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Robson, Craig. 2000. A Guide to the Birds of Southeast Asia. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Sibley, Charles G. and Burt L. Monroe, Jr. 1990. Distribution and Taxonomy of Birds of the World. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Viney, Clive, Karen Phillips, and Lam Chiu Yang. 1977, rep. 1996. Birds of Hong Kong and South China. Hong Kong: Government Publications Centre.
As a sane Language Logger, I am not claiming that the koel possesses speech, but after listening to them daily, sometimes for an hour or more at a time, when I lived in Hong Kong during 2002-2003 and elsewhere in Asia both before and after that extended stay, I am convinced that their calls convey a variety of information. Ditto for crows, the "language" of which is even more complex. I spend a lot of time listening to them as well. Although I do not analyze crow calls systematically as a scientist would, I've paid enough attention to them since I was a little boy traipsing through the fields of Stark County, Ohio, that I am keenly sensitive to the nuances.
Here they are excited.
Here's an angry murder of crows.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8oeWYhCq4oA
Here, thanks to The Cornell Lab of Ornithology, is a select set of crow caws and calls.
But I have heard many more crow sounds, including songs and subtle, contemplative mutterings and maunderings.
But I'd better stop right here before I am accused of having become a loony birdbrain.
[Hat tip Michael Rank]
Richard W said,
November 16, 2014 @ 7:44 pm
I expressed admiration for the glossy black appearance of crows while in Japan, and discovered that people there have a negative view of these birds. It seems to be so in China, too. My wife sometimes used to say to me "烏鴉嘴!" ("Wūyāzuǐ!") I wondered why she said that in Chinese while speaking to me English, and asked her what it meant. She said "crow's mouth", and sure enough, that's what the ABC Chinese dictionary says. (I wonder whether a more enlightening definition could be written. In my experience, it seems to be what somebody exclaims if you say something inauspicious.)
Jerry Friedman said,
November 16, 2014 @ 11:39 pm
This guy has photographed more species than I have on my life list. And considering how lucky I have to be to get one decent picture of a bird…
I saw a crow "funeral" last year. Maybe I should have tried to video them and record their calls, though I was pretty far away. (One theory is that they're reinforcing an aversion to a place where a crow died.)
To my ears, Common Ravens have far more variety in their calls than American Crows, though I don't know how they compare in communicate ability.
China's great avian diversity is because it extends into the tropics. All the countries with more species of birds are entirely tropical and, except for Brazil, much smaller than China.
Jerry Friedman said,
November 16, 2014 @ 11:42 pm
And for the classic Language Log questions—are the names Brelsford gives in Modern Standard Mandarin? Standardizing them must have been an even more interesting task than standardizing American English and British English bird names. And how useful will the standard Chinese names be to birders around the country?
Craig Brelsford said,
November 18, 2014 @ 5:15 am
Hello Professor Mair and thank you for writing about me in your blog. Jerry Friedman is correct when he says, "China's great avian diversity is because it extends into the tropics." There are other reasons, among them the great diversity of habitats–I'm thinking here of mountains (China is much more mountainous than the similarly sized United States). In China, birds adapted to life at up to 5000 m can occur close to lowland birds. Another reason for the high number of bird species in China is its position on the great Eurasian supercontinent. Whereas to the east and west of the United States are great and mainly empty oceans (there are oceanic species, but they are not so numerous), to the west of China is Central Asia, itself rich in birds, and to the east is sea, but beyond the sea still more land (Japan, the Ryukyus, Taiwan). Many species from Central Asia and the Japanese Islands have ranges just touching mainland China, further upping the number of species.
Craig Brelsford said,
November 18, 2014 @ 5:26 am
Jerry Friedman asks, "[A]re the names Brelsford gives in Modern Standard Mandarin? Standardizing them must have been an even more interesting task than standardizing American English and British English bird names. And how useful will the standard Chinese names be to birders around the country?" The names are in simplified characters (used on the mainland). I use Pinyin along with the characters for two reasons. One is to help non-Chinese who may know some Chinese but can't read the characters and can at least be able to pronounce the words using Pinyin. The second reason I use Pinyin is for my CHINESE readers! Many Chinese don't know how to pronounce the specialized characters and so rely on Pinyin! This may sound strange, but then, many native English speakers also can get hung up on ornithological words–can you, for example, pronounce "Phainopepla"? As for the usefulness of standard Chinese names around China, the situation is somewhat similar to that of the United States, in which some regions use "crayfish," some "crawfish," and some "crawdad." In almost every region I go to in China, local people have local names for their birds and may not recognize the standard Chinese name.
Jerry Friedman said,
November 18, 2014 @ 2:44 pm
Craig Brelsford: Thank you for the interesting answers to my questions, especially for helping me understand Chinese bird diversity better. (By the way, I should have said that all the countries with more bird species than China have large parts of their area in the tropics.)
Yes, I can pronounce "Phainopepla", and don't get me started on mispronunciations of bird names. (Actually, my pronunciation of "plover" and "falcon" is not beyond criticism.) I was thinking that the pronunciation problem must be much worse in China than in the U.S. Even someone who has no idea there could be something called a Black-throated Green Warbler or a Western Grebe or a Bushtit can pronounce the names. Only a few names cause problems (jaeger, prothonotary, pileated, etc.). I'd imagine a lot more Chinese bird names have specialized characters whose pronunciations aren't widely known.
Emily said,
November 18, 2014 @ 7:38 pm
Re bird pronunciation, recently I learned that I have been pronouncing "towhee" wrong, or at least nonstandardly. I was confused by a fellow birder referring to something called a "tu-whee," which turned out to be what I call a "toe-hee."
And apparently some people misparse "nuthatch" as "nu-thatch."
Jerry Friedman said,
November 19, 2014 @ 10:55 pm
Emily: Merriam-Webster and American Heritage both give "TOE-hee" first and "toe-HEE" second or third. I don't think you've been pronouncing it wrong.
Emily said,
November 21, 2014 @ 3:00 pm
@Jerry: Huh. The OED has /ˈtaʊhiː/ and /ˈtaʊiː/ (TAU-hee and TAU-ee, for those who don't know IPA). Maybe it's a regional thing? I live in Southern California, and the birders I met who said "TU-whee" were from another state, I don't remember where.
And I just listened to a "Birding by Ear" CD that used yet another pronunciation: /toʊi/ (TOE-ee).
As an aside, supposedly the name of the toe-ee/tau-hee/tu-whee is onomatopoeic, but the towhees I most often see (California Towhee, Pipilo crissalis) , just make a sort of metallic chirp and sometimes trilling calls.
Jerry Friedman said,
November 23, 2014 @ 8:39 pm
Emily: The OED pronunciation is interesting, since it matches the one in the Century Dictionary. I've never heard it, though. Maybe all the modern American pronunciations are spelling pronunciations.
You need a good imagination to get an pronunciation of "towhee" out of the song of the Eastern Towhee, which is apparently the original one, or the Spotted Towhee here in New Mexico. With your California Towhee or our Canyon Towhee I see no chance.
Kevin McCready said,
November 24, 2014 @ 12:48 am
For my money birds do possess speech (passively and/or actively).
Think of the lab work with smart parrots and think of the 17 words of Jackdaw which Konrad Lorenz knew and wrote about in KING SOLOMON'S RING chapter 11.
I love birding and love the koel which migrated to where I used to live in subtropical Australia. Now in NZ for the last few years I'm learning Tui.
Craig, if you need translation help this is just the sort of thing I'd love to do for free.