Confused? Let me explain, maybe, it will all make sense!
Same name, different family
Let’s begin with one of our most famous and cherished birds, the Robin. In fact this is not one species, but two: the American Robin and the European Robin.
The American Robin is one of the larger visitors to your yard: 10 inches long, and 2.7 ounces in weight. Its European counterpart, however, is less than half that, measuring in at only around 5.5 inches long; and tipping the scales at a mere two-thirds of an ounce — less than one-quarter the weight of its American edition.
American Robin
American Robins and European Robins are also very different birds: American Robins are long birds, with a deep russet belly and breast and dark grey upperparts; European Robins are short, plump and perky birds with a brownish back and orange-red breast.
European Robin
And that’s the hint to the confusion. When the Pilgrims arrived in the New World in the fall of 1620 they were tired, disgruntled and far from home. When they spotted a ground-hopping bird with a russet-red breast, they thought it like a familiar bird from home and dubbed it the ‘robin’. And while the American Robin is indeed a member of the thrush family (the European Robin is an Old-World flycatcher), the name stuck!
The Robin is not the only New-World bird to carry an Old-World name. Look more closely at those familiar visitors I mentioned: blackbirds, warblers and sparrows. In Europe, the Blackbird is a big thrush — in fact it is a close relative of the American Robin, and very similar in size and shape.
In North America, the bird species with ‘blackbird’ in its name – including the continent’s commonest bird (the Red-winged Blackbird) – all belong to another large and very diverse family, Icteridae, which also contains orioles, cowbirds, grackles and even meadowlarks (which are not closely related at all to the Old-World family of larks).
Red-winged Blackbird
Once again, homesick British settlers encountered birds with dark black plumage superficially resembling the familiar Blackbird of home and applied the same name.
European Blackbird
The same process then played out in two families of small, insect-eating, mostly migratory birds, the so-called ‘warblers’. Most species overwinter far to the south (those that breed in North America migrate to Central and South America, and British and European species migrate to Africa).
The term ‘warbler’ originated in Britain, where a group of very similar-looking and difficult to identify birds are often differentiated from one another by their lilting and very unique songs. In North America, the same name came to be applied to over fifty different types of little, colourful birds from the family Parulidae, called ‘wood-warblers’, the vast majority of which have ‘warbler’ somewhere in their name.
In the UK, so many species derive their names from where they’re found: Willow, Wood, Reed, Marsh and Sedge warblers / are just a few. That’s because those differences in plumage are often so subtle, they cannot always be distinguished based on field marks.
Willow Warbler
Warblers, by contrast, are usually brightly coloured birds of the North American bush, with rather distinctive plumage: hence they are often named after how they look. Such as Yellow, Black-and-white, Bay-breasted, Black-throated Green and Black-throated Blue Warblers, and of course Yellowthroat.
Yellow Warbler
The free-performing third group of birds with the same name belong to a different family of birds: sparrows. There are over thirty different North American birds with the word ‘sparrow’ in their name: and all except one of these are indeed members of the family Emberizidae.
In Britain, these are known as buntings (from an old word meaning ‘little plump thing’) and include the Snow Bunting, which also occurs in North America.
The sole exception is, of course, the House Sparrow. This species hails from the Old World, and when humans first began to settle down and farm the land some 12,000 years ago, it adapted to living with us, feasting on grain and insects and nesting inside our homes and other structures — hence its name.
House Sparrows are intelligent and adaptable avians, and have successfully colonised the globe, whether by accident or intent. They first arrived in North America in 1851, when birds imported from Europe were deliberately freed in Brooklyn, New York City. By 1900, they reached the Rocky Mountains, and now they occupy all of temperate North America including Mexico, all USA, and Canada.
House Sparrow
Which makes it all the more confusing that a handful of backyard and garden birds have different names, but actually belong to the same family here as their European relations. These include chickadees (tits in the UK), kinglets (crests) and creepers (treecreepers). And just as British English and American English sometimes use different terms for the same thing (elevator and lift, for example, faucet and tap, sidewalk and pavement) so do bird families sometimes have different names on either side of the Atlantic: loons and divers, jaegers and skuas.
Black-capped Chickadee
The birds that grace our backyard bird feeders in the USA and Canada or come to garden bird feeders in the UK are not all from different families. Thrushes, woodpeckers, nuthatches, wrens, finches, jays, and (after all) pigeons and doves are all families that have radiated right across the northern hemisphere (as have others who don’t ever visit bird feeders at all, such as owls, swifts, swallows and martins).
These were mostly ones that spread from the Old World to the New, but in one case — the Wrens — did the opposite (the Eurasian Wren is the only representative of its 90-strong family to be found in Britain and Europe).
Euasian Wren
Carolina Wren
The difference comes in the number of species: North America has 14 members of the thrush family, 22 woodpeckers, 4 nuthatches, 10 wrens, 21 finches, 10 jays, and 13 pigeons and doves; Britain has only 5 thrushes, 3 woodpeckers, 1 nuthatch, 1 wren, 15 finches, 1 jay and 5 pigeons and doves. Partly that’s because of the vast difference in our relative land area; and because Britain is an island, many species on mainland Europe never crossed the English Channel.
Downy Woodpecker
Great Spotted Woodpecker
And finally, there are some species that you find on only one side of the Atlantic, but never (or at least almost never) on the other.
In North America, that includes hummingbirds, vireos, gnatcatchers and tanagers; in Britain and Europe, accentors (like the Dunnock) and wagtails.
Ruby-throated Hummingbird
Dunnock
How did Birds receive their names?
By now, you’re probably thinking, how the heck did our familiar backyard and garden birds get their names in the first place? Well, most of them were named by ordinary people (hence the expression ‘folk names’), and later days, rarer species were named by professionals in the form of scientists, naturalists or ornithologists.
More broadly, English names of birds can be categorized into seven distinct (and at times overlapping) categories:
Here are birds named after their sound
Examples of birds named for their colour or shade
Birds identified by a pattern or plumage feature
Birds named for their habits or behaviour
Habitat: Birds named for their place of residence
Examples of Birds named after the place they were first discovered
Birds that bear a person’s name (aka eponyms)
Here are some examples for each category:
Song: Whippoorwill, Chickadee, Pewee (US); Chiffchaff, Cuckoo, Kittiwake (UK)
Colour or shade: Scarlet Tanager, Purple Martin, Yellow Warbler (US); Blue Tit, Greenfinch, Grey Wagtail (UK)
Pattern or plumage feature (often with a colour or shade): Yellow-rumped Warbler, Bay-breasted Warbler, Tufted Titmouse (US); Crested Tit, White-fronted Goose, Blackcap (UK)
Habits: woodpeckers, nuthatches, creepers (both US and UK)
Habitats: Sedge Wren, Mountain Bluebird, Waterthrush (US); Sedge Warbler, Marsh Tit, Rock Pipit (UK)
Kentucky Warbler, California Gnatcatcher, Nashville Warbler (US); Dartford Warbler, Kentish Plover, Sandwich Tern (UK)
Bachman’s Sparrow; Lucy’s Warbler; Brewer’s Blackbird (U.S.); Bewick’s Swan; Cetti’s Warbler; Montagu’s Harrier (U.K.)
Tufuted TitmouseOne final curiosity about English bird names is that since almost all of them were firsts observed in the British Isles, where often only one species from each family can be found, single word monikers like Cuckoo, Wren, Swallow, Kingfisher etc. are used many times without a distinguishing adjective. In North America, though, where there’s so many more species from each of the families, these birds would be prefixed by words to form Yellow-billed Cuckoo, Barn Swallow, Winter Wren, Belted Kingfisher etc.
Mockingbird
For those interested in reading more about the fascinating and complex history of the origins of bird names, do read my book Mrs Moreau’s Warbler: How Birds got their Names, published by Guardian Faber, in the USA, Canada and UK.
Bird Names – Fun Facts!
North American Names
Catbird – from the bird’s mewing call, which sounds very similar to a domestic cat! In fact, the bird is a part of the mockingbird and thrasher family.
Mockingbird – the mockers are among the best avian mimics in the world, imitating the songs of many other species.
Kingbird — kingbirds get their name because they are so aggressive — they belong to the tyrant-flycatchers family Tyrannidae (from the Latin meaning ‘tyrant’).
Chuck-will’s Widow — a member of the nightjar family, Caprimulgidae; this species and its cousin the Whip-poor-will take their names from their eerie calls.
Parasitic Jaeger — known in the UK as Arctic Skua, this cousin of gulls is famed for hare about stealing other birds’ food — what scientist refer to as ‘kleptoparasitism’. “Jaeger” is the German word for hunter.
Skimmer – the only birds whose lower mandible (the bottom half of their bill) is longer than the top half, they are named from their habit of dipping this into the water as they fly, and snapping it shut to catch fish on the surface.
Peregrine Falcon – the name (usually just called ‘Peregrine’, for short) is derived from a Latin word meaning ‘to wander’, referring to the bird’s habit of flying long distances during hunting sorties.
Spoonbill – from the unusual, spoon-like shape of the bird’s bill; this species was also once called the ‘shoveler’ (now the name for a species of duck) from its feeding habits.
Roadrunner — for its tendency to run fast along roads, and popularized by the cartoon version. A word of Spanish origin, from correcamino — which means exactly the same!
Waterthrush — two species of wood-warblers (Louisiana and Northern) named for their thrush-like spotted breast and because they inhabit frees alongside rivers and streams.
British Names
Cuckoo – named for the unmistakable two-note call of the Common Cuckoo, the quintessential sign of spring in Britain, Europe.
Robin – [actually a pet name (after the diminutive for Robert), which became more popular than the name given by British – ‘Redbreast’.
Yellowhammer – that has nothing to do with tools, it comes from the German word for bunting, and was originally ‘Yellow-ammer.
Redstart – ‘start’ comes from the Anglo-Saxon word ‘steort’ meaning tail, referring the bird’s distinctive orange-red tail. Balearic Shearwater – on Balearic Island.
Chiffchaff – like the name ‘cuckoo’, this describes this little warbler’s feathered two-note song.
Puffin – ‘little fat thing, puffing’’ – was what the young Manx Shearwater was originally known as, because they were eaten and their fat was gleaned and used as oil; the shearwater is known by the scientific name Puffinus puffinus!
Stonechat — named for its distinctive call, which resembles two pebbles being tapped together.
Crossbill — for the shape of its bill, whose two mandibles cross over each other, allowing the bird to pry open pinecones for the seeds within.
Redpoll – following an old word meaning ‘head’, as in ‘head tax’.
Nuthatch – unrelated to laying eggs – this is from a more ancient word meaning to ‘hack’ (as in ‘hatchet’) because of the birds’ habit of using its strong bill to open nuts.
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