{"id":5649,"date":"2024-01-05T10:17:55","date_gmt":"2024-01-05T14:17:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/how-groups-of-birds-got-their-names-with-wondrous-vintage-illustrations-by-brian-wildsmith-the-marginalian\/"},"modified":"2024-01-05T10:17:55","modified_gmt":"2024-01-05T14:17:55","slug":"how-groups-of-birds-got-their-names-with-wondrous-vintage-illustrations-by-brian-wildsmith-the-marginalian","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/how-groups-of-birds-got-their-names-with-wondrous-vintage-illustrations-by-brian-wildsmith-the-marginalian\/","title":{"rendered":"How Groups of Birds Got Their Names, with Wondrous Vintage Illustrations by Brian Wildsmith \u2013 The Marginalian"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Profit<\/a>
\n<\/p>\n

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Language is an instrument of great precision and poignancy \u2014 our best tool for telling each other what the world is and what we are, for conveying the blueness of blue and the wonder of being alive. But it is also a thing of great pliancy and creativity \u2014 a living reminder that how we name things changes what we see, changes the seer. (This, of course, is why we have poetry.) It is the birthplace of the imagination<\/a> and forever its plaything: I remember my unabashed delight when a naturalist friend first introduced me to the various terms for groups of birds \u2014 from \u201ca deceit of lapwings\u201d to \u201ca pitying of turtledoves,\u201d and could there be a notion more charming than \u201can ostentation of peacocks\u201d?<\/p>\n

Some of these collective nouns, often called company terms, are based on observable characteristics of the species \u2014 \u201ca fall of woodcock\u201d references the bewildering air dance of the courting birds, \u201ca watch of nightingales\u201d pays homage to the nocturnal wakefulness of Earth\u2019s most musical bird<\/a>, and \u201ca gaggle of geese\u201d turns their migratory cries into delicious onomatopoeia. Some stem from myths and folk beliefs about birds dating back centuries, to a time when Satan was realer than gravity in the human mind, Kepler\u2019s mother could be tried for witchcraft<\/a>, and superstition was the primary sensemaking tool for causality \u2014 an organizing principle for life, reflected in language: \u201ca murder of crows\u201d alludes to various superstitions about crows as emissaries of death, believed capable of killing their own kind in punishment for transgression; \u201ca parliament of owls\u201d draws on ancient Greek mythology, in which an owl accompanies Athena \u2014 the goddess of wisdom and reason, representing freedom and democracy across the Western world. <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

A great many of these company terms originate in one of the first books printed in English after the invention of the Gutenberg Press: the Boke of Seynt Albans<\/em> [Book of Saint Albans<\/em>], also known as The Book of Hawking, Hunting, and Blasing of Arms<\/em>. Anonymously published in 1486 and written largely in verse, it was lauded as the work of \u201ca gentleman of excellent gifts\u201d \u2014 until it was discovered that the author was a woman named Juliana Barnes. <\/p>\n

Like Sor Juana<\/a> two centuries later, Juliana had suffered some great unnamed heartbreak that led her to retreat to a cloister, where she immersed herself in study \u2014 convents were often the only way women could access books in an era when formal education was entirely closed to them. Like Montaigne, she became a prolific diarist. Having refined herself as a writer on these private pages, she began writing for the public \u2014 an act of tremendous courage and confidence for a woman in the fifteenth century to begin with, and doubly so given she chose to write about masculine endeavors: hunting, fishing, hawking. <\/p>\n

Tucked into the middle of her book is a long list of company terms under the heading \u201cTHE COMPAYNYS OF BEESTYS AND FOWLYS.\u201d Discernible through the confounding Old English, through the bastarda blackletter script barely legible to modern eyes, are the charming \u201cexaltation of larks\u201d (Exaltyng of Larkis<\/em>), \u201cmurmuration of starlings\u201d (Murmuration of Stares<\/em>), \u201cwatch of nightingales\u201d (Wache of Nyghtingalis<\/em>), \u201csedge of herons\u201d (Sege of heronnys<\/em>), \u201cgaggle of geese\u201d (Gagle of gees<\/em>), and \u201cunkindness of ravens\u201d (unkyndenes of Ravenes<\/em>), all still in use today.<\/p>\n

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Half a millennium after Juliana Barnes died an unknown nun in an English convent on a planet without clocks, calculus, or democracy that thought itself the center of the universe, the English painter and children\u2019s book illustrator Brian Wildsmith (January 22, 1930\u2013August 31, 2016) brought to life the loveliest of these company terms in the 1967 gem Birds by Brian Wildsmith<\/em><\/strong><\/a> (public library<\/em><\/a>).<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Not all of these terms have remained the same across space and time \u2014 different eras and different regions have devised their own strange and wondrous lexicon for the same bird groupings. Juliana Barnes\u2019s \u201csedge of herons\u201d gave way to the \u201csiege of herons\u201d more popular today, shifting focus from the silent silhouettes of these dignified birds rising from the edge of the pond like tall grass to the inelegant and rather violent-sounding vocalizations they make during flight; in Wildsmith\u2019s painted aviary owls are not a \u201cparliament\u201d but a \u201cstare,\u201d the term now brinking on the obsolete, having peaked in use the year before the book was published.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
A stare of owls<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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Usage frequency in printed sources<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Emerging from these changing terms is a testament to Toni Morrison\u2019s insistence that language is best understood \u201cpartly as a system, partly as a living thing\u201d<\/a> \u2014 evidence that language is but a microcosm of life, subject to its own evolutionary forces of adaptation to context akin to those that transformed the dinosaurs into birds. Lest we forget, words too face the peril of extinction<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
A fall of woodcock<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
A wedge of swans<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
\"\"<\/a>
A sedge of herons<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
\"\"<\/a>
A rafter of turkeys<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
\"\"<\/a>
A congregation of plover<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
A party of jays<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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A walk of snipe<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
\"\"<\/a>
A siege of bitterns<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Complement with the fascinating science of the owl sensorium<\/a> and some stunning centuries-old illustrations of birds of paradise<\/a> \u2014 which, if they moved in groups, deserve the company term \u201cconstellation\u201d \u2014 then revisit the story of how the clouds, those eternal companions of the birds, got their names<\/a>. <\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n

\"Profit<\/a>
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Language is an instrument of great precision and poignancy \u2014 our best tool for telling each other what the world is and what we are, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":5650,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5649","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-purpose"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5649","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5649"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5649\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5650"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5649"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5649"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5649"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}