Birds – Page 6 – David Bradley

Birding and wording

TL:DR – An answer to the question why are so many science writers also birders?

Someone on social media asked me as a science writer why so many science writers are also birders. My initial thoughts were as follows: Well, to be a science writer, I think you have to be curious, analytical, interested in lots of stuff…a polymath. Birds are interesting, identification requires analysis, writing about them is fun and if you’re a togger [birder-photographer], you always have a decent photo to illustrate your article.

Wind-blown Short-eared Owl perched on a fence post — Short-eared Owl

One possible explanation for the prevalence of birding among science writers is the concept of “flow.” Flow is a state of deep engagement and enjoyment that occurs when a person is fully absorbed in an activity that is challenging but also within their skill level. Birding can be a highly immersive activity that requires focus, attention to detail, and knowledge of ecology and behaviour. Science writing also demands a similar level of engagement and attention to detail. Thus, individuals who enjoy birding may be drawn to science writing because it provides a similar experience of flow. [In my case, I’d say it was the reverse, I was drawn to birding, because I had a scientific mind and was a science writer and wanted an additional creative outlet].

Another possible explanation is that birding can serve as a form of “nature therapy” that provides mental health benefits. Research has shown that spending time in nature can reduce stress, improve mood, and increase creativity. Science writing can be a demanding and intellectually stimulating profession, and birding may provide a healthy balance by allowing individuals to connect with nature and recharge their mental batteries.

Red Kite flying against a blue sky — Red Kite

Finally, it’s possible that there is simply a correlation between the personality traits that make someone a good science writer and those that make someone interested in birding. For example, curiosity, attention to detail, and a broad range of interests are all traits that are valued in both professions. Additionally, both birding and science writing are activities that can be pursued alone or in groups, providing opportunities for social interaction and a sense of belonging. [I definitely think of myself as a wannabe polymath, hence my “songs, snaps, science” motif].

Overall, while there is no definitive answer to why so many science writers are also birders, it’s likely that a combination of these factors plays a role. Regardless of the reason, it’s clear that the intersection of birding and science writing provides a rich and fascinating field of exploration.

Knots landing again

TL:DR – Tens of thousands of Knot murmurate over The Wash visible from the north Norfolk and Lincolnshire coasts.

We spent the night in North Norfolk, tried to have an early night at a cheap hotel, and were up well before dawn to get to Knots Landing (RSPB Snettisham). We hoped to be in plenty of time for the high tide and the potential for a Wader Spectacular. We, and dozens of other green-clad, enthusiasts were not disappointed.

The weather was damp and drizzly and very cold and we got soaked through, but we witnessed tens of thousands of Knot (Calidris canutus) murmurating over the advancing tide as we headed for the landing site.

Most have at this point already been pushed off the deluged mudflats of The Wash, their low-tide feeding grounds, and into the air. Within minutes, the murmurs flood the banks of the inland lagoons with birds crammed tightly together to ride out the high tide. They wait patiently for a distant trigger that calls them once the ebbing tide retreats along the muddy shoreline.

Flocking Knot looking like a live Escher etching

As the tide turns, they flock back to sea, murmurating along the way – strength in numbers – to confuse any preying Peregrines. Ultimately, the seem lost to the waves but are merely gone from view.

This is not the first time we’ve seen the Knot murmurations, although it is the first time we’ve made a special trip to catch them at a dawn high tide. We visit the area often and have seen these wondrous flocks on numerous occasions and caught one wader spectacular just as the sun was setting a few years ago. Always amazing to watch the sun set over the sea when one is ostensibly on England’s east coast. You’ll have to look at the map for Snettisham, Norfolk to see how that can be. (Video from 2018 visit here).

Knot crammed together to find refuge on the banks of the lagoon at Snettisham to escape the high tide — Knot crammed together find refuge on the banks of the lagoon at Snettisham to escape the high tide

The bird’s name comes from the name of the King who demonstrated his fallibility to his subjects by failing to turn back the tide – King Cnut – better known to us Brits as King Canute. The bird’s scientific name is Calidris canutus. Kalidris, or skalidris, was a word used by Aristotle to describe various grey-coloured shore birds, waders. The (Red) Knot, C. canutus, is the “type species” of the genus, although unusually does not have a tautonym (it would have been Calidris calidris).

Knot heading back out to sea with a few Godwits along for the ride

Meanwhile, on the same trip taking in a visit to nearby RSPB Titchwell we also clocked Avocet, Bar-tailed Godwit, Black-headed Gull, Black-tailed Godwit, Brent Geese, Chaffinch, Common Gull, Cormorant, Curlew, Dunlin, Gadwall, Golden Plover, Goldfinch, Great Black-backed Gull, Grey Plover, Greylag Geese, Herring Gull, Lapwing, Linnet, Mallard, Marsh Harrier, Meadow Pipit, Mediterranean Gull, Mute Swan, Peregrine Falcon, Pintail, Redshank, Red Kite, Reed Bunting, Robin, Sanderling, Shelduck, Shoveller Duck, Skylark, Snipe, Spoonbill, Teal, Turnstone, Water Pipit, Wigeon, Wren, and others.

One of a couple of Snipe feeding at RSPB Titchwell

Do this if you want your photos to really take flight

TL:DR – Tips on choosing which photo to process how to denoise and sharpen software, adjust levels, and crop.

Recently, I wrote about the beautiful Short-eared Owls that turned up on our patch over-winter in the slightly warmer climes of the Cambridgeshire Fens. I got photos of three hunting in the hour before dusk. The photos were okay, but I knew I could make them better with a few simple tools.

UPDATE: The SEOs are back. At least six of them on the fen. I got a few more shots late November 2023 including this one of a grumpy-looking Shortie that had just missed catching a vole.

Short-eared Owl hunting over the fen — Short-eared Owl hunting (unsuccessfully at this point) over the fen

The problem is always hand-holding a big lens when the light’s fading. There’s camera shake and a short shutter speed is also needed to freeze the action. This adds up to the camera switching up the sensitivity, the ISO, and that makes for more photographic noise.

So, what can you do to improve a noisy photo that might also have a bit of motion blur. First off, you must make sure you’re shooting in RAW mode. RAW mode lets you download what is essentially an unprocessed digital negative of the photo you took.

I’ll run you through what I do with the RAW files out of my camera. First, I select from the photos the one I think is the most dramatic or has the most character, the best light, the sharpest. I also try to pick one that doesn’t have distractions like foreground twigs or foliage or a cluttered background. Often your choices are limited with bird flight photography as the birds appear on their own terms and where you happen to be standing at the time determines a lot of that. A slight movement left or right might help sometimes in terms of foreground and background.

So, I’d picked this photo as the best of one of the owls flying in front of me. It was fairly close. Background isn’t too bad. The blurred building in the background almost adds to the composition although might have been more appropriate if it were a Barn Owl. That stem in the bottom left is a distraction and could do with being removed. We’ll see.

The original photo was shot at 600mm zoom, 1/3200s shutter speed, f/6.3 aperture and ISO 6400. That ISO number is way too high and I might’ve got a similar result if I’d used a slower shutter speed to get the ISO down a few stops.

I resized the photo to fit the website, but other than that with this first view it’s not cropped nor processed or edited other than a basic RAW to JPG conversion to make it displayable and to add my logo. The website loads the image as 1024 pixels wide with a JPEG compression of about 90%. It’s quite noisy, not as sharp as it could be, the levels (contrast, brightness, saturation etc are not optimised). And, in terms of composition, it’s not how I’d want the final photo to look.

TOP TIP: Push the sliders on whatever adjustment you’re making to the point where it is immediately obvious that you’ve made an adjustment and then claw them back ever so slightly. This way you will hopefully avoid making the photo too painterly. If you’re having to push anything beyond about 12% of the way up, then it might be worth abandoning the photo, unless you’re after a painterly effect.

So, stepping back I first feed the RAW file to DxO PureRaw. This removes a lot of the noise from any photograph really well. It also applies basic corrections that are known to be needed for the specific camera and lens setup used. I’ve zoomed in on the program in action so you can see, on the left just how noisy the photo was originally, and in the right of the frame, how well the noise reduction works.

The frame below is that same image saved in DxO PureRaw. Hopefully, you can already see some improvement from the original RAW capture above and displayed at the same composition. PureRaw lets you export as a DNG file, which is like a generic RAW format so you can do the subsequent processing as if the file were fresh from your camera.

At this point, I generally make an important choice. I can either simply open the denoised image from DxO in my photo-editor (PaintShop Pro) or add another step and open it in Topaz Sharpen AI. This software does denoising too but it can also sharpen and remove motion blur. Either way, at this point, I would first crop the image to give me the composition I would like in the final image and perhaps mirror the image so that the subject is facing in a more pleasing direction (flying left to right is better to my eye than having the bird fly off to the left.

The following photo is cropped and reversed to give me the composition I am after. I’d usually do a square crop for Instagram.

I am quite happy that this image is fairly sharp and so I won’t apply Topaz in this instance. Instead, I will use PSP to adjust various parameters: Overall brightness (raised 14%), shadows (up 10%), and highlights (no change). Saturation up 8%, Focus/sharpening up 66%. I’ve left the white balance as it was. I then brought in the blacks by 6% and the whites by 4%.

I then raised the vibrancy, which is an adjustment related to saturation but slightly subtler, I gave that a 12% boost, which I think gives the photo even more of a “golden hour” glow. Also added a few percent of “fill highlight” and boosting “clarity” by about 10%.

That grass stem sticking up from the bottom right is a bit of a distraction, so I removed it using what PSP calls the Scratch Remover tool. PSP also has a tool called Magic Fill which can do a much better job of removing objects from a photo if they’re not simple, thin lines.

Once all that’s done, the final couple of steps are always to apply a moderate “unsharp mask” to make the final image even crisper and then to add my dB/ logo.

So that’s probably as far as I’d take it. To my eye, it looks fine. At the very least, it looks a whole lot better than the RAW original, but that’s to be expected, you don’t expect to look at negatives instead of prints of photos. All photographs have to be developed, they always have been, in the digital age, we have more sophisticated tools to do the job for better or worse.

When looking close up at the originals (pixel peeking), I can see marked improvements with each stage of the above processing and would be confident that cropped closer it would still print nicely in a print magazine, screening at 300 dpi, at up to 6 inches width, but perhaps no bigger in this case.

Just for completeness, I did do a Topaz process on the DxO output and it does reduce the speckles of noise still further. However, there was also a bit more of a loss of detail. The image below was DxO then Topaz and then the same PSP processing as before. I cropped it a bit tighter for what I might use as a photo to accompany an article about this species, or owls in general, showing a bit less of the fenland background.

Instagram-ready version below

DxO and Topaz are the leaders in terms of denoising at the moment, I’d say. I prefer what DxO does though, but Topaz has the sharpening options that DxO PureRaw lacks. I trained on Photoshop but have stuck with PaintShop Pro for editing for many years, PSP has almost all of the same tools as Photoshop for the basic processing I do. Lightroom has advantages and there are, of course, many alternatives out there to all these programs. I must confess that I usually use SnapSeed for photos on my phone and sometimes for a landscapes, architecture, flowers, moths etc. I might do use the above workflow but then open the file on my phone in SnapSeed to bump what that app calls “Ambience” and “Structure” and adjust saturation a little more.

Short-eared Owls on the Fens

TL:DR – Information about and photos of local Short-eared Owls.

I’ve discussed the Short-eared Owl, Asio flammeus, previously. Beautiful bird that occasionally overwinters in the UK, having spent the summer months in Iceland, Russia, or Scandinavia.

We are lucky to see them hunting on the fens sometimes. These photos were taken in the hour before sunset at NT Burwell Fen. There were three shorties hunting.

We usually anticipate their arrival in October, November, but they can sometimes arrive earlier and will stay until early April. There were half a dozen at Burwell a couple of years ago and one of them with damage to its wing (it could still fly) stayed through the summer months.

Shorties will hunt over fens, grasslands, marshes, and other open habitats. In my experience, the best time to catch sight of them hunting is in the hour before sunset, but others report seeing them at any time during the day when the owls hunt small mammals such as voles, mice, and shrews.

The owl has a distinctive, buoyant, and “floppy” flight style, they usually follow a “flap-flap-glide” flight pattern, and will often perch on fence posts or bushes, looking out for moving prey. They will often perch quite close to birdwatchers and photographers.

Also see on the same trip to Burwell Fen – Peregrine (in flight over the Wicken side), several Common Kestrel, Barn Owl, and Common Buzzard.

Fowl play: old gravelpits as birdwatching hotspots

TL:DR – Gravel pits that have been converted into nature reserves can offer some lovely scenery and the opportunity to see interesting and even rare wildlife.

There are lots of old gravelworks in our area some of which are earmarked as nature reserves as I’ve mentioned before, a couple of times, and some are used as fisheries. Where there’s water and reeds and trees there will most likely be birds regardless of the anglers or visitors.

Great White Egret perched on a half-submerged tree stump

On this almost sunny Friday morning, I headed to the fishery lakes adjacent to Meadow Lane, St Ives – known to some as Meadow Lane Pits. I was hoping to see and perhaps get photos of the five Smew, a type of diving duck, that had turned up there earlier in the week. Birders had reported three drakes (males) and two females, known among birders as “redheads” for their obviously different appearance to the males.

A female "redhead" Smew flanked by two drakes — A female “redhead” Smew flanked by two drakes, an additional redhead and another drake were on the water nearby

I parked up and trekked around the muddy footpaths, trouser bottoms tucked unfashionably into my walking socks, to try and catch sight of the Smew. En route I saw (in no particular order) Tufted Duck, Black-headed Gull, Bullfinch, Starling, Blackbird, Gadwall, Little Egret, Goldeneye, Egyptian Goose, Wigeon, Great White Egret, Great Crested Grebe, Lesser Black-backed Gull, Grey Heron, Great Spotted Woodpecker, Coot, Cormorant, and at some point quite early on, one or two of the Smew, and then all five.

Old gravel pits, particularly those that have been allowed to fill with water, can be nice spots for birdwatching for various reasons. First, there is the potential for habitat diversity. Gravel pits can develop a mix of habitat types, including open water, reedbeds, mudflats, and vegetated areas. This can attract a variety of bird species but it also cultivates large numbers of invertebrates as well as small mammals, amphibia, and fish which can all thrive there if given the chance.

Where old gravelpits have been managed there are often large areas that are not open to the public, so there can be far less disturbance to the wildlife in those areas and along the margins this spills over into the publicly accessible areas. As they mature, these old gravel pits often become tranquil areas of scenic beauty. Many are rather peaceful, hardly see any visitors, have attractive vegetation and in short, the overall combination of habitat diversity, food availability, and lack of disturbance make them excellent spots for a bit of peace and quiet and a spot of birdwatching.

New Year in Norfolk 2023

TL:DR – New Year trip to North Norfolk – diary entry blog post.

As has been our habit for the last few years, we have eschewed the midnight festivities of New Year and escaped to the coast. This time, we straddled the New Year with three nights in a cosy cottage in Wells-next-the-Sea. We enjoyed the local hostelries in the evenings during our trip, but the main focus was to walk as far as we could manage each day (usually 7 or 8 miles) and to take in the birding and other sites of nature en route.

Pallid Harrier in flight over marsh edge at Warham, Norfolk, about 1200 metres from the camera — Record shot: Pallid Harrier in flight

Wells, Warham, Titchwell, and Holkham Gap were the main areas, beach, woodland, marsh, and nature reserve. A couple of Muntjac (one deceased), two or three Grey Squirrel, half a dozen Grey Seal, and 1001 dalmations and others dogs were the limited list of mammals we saw.

Red Kite with fishy prize — Red Kite, Holkham Gap

The birding list was much better as you’d expect, for starters, we saw a rare vagrant over the marsh at Warham east of Wells, a Pallid Harrier, along with a couple of Hen Harriers on the same marsh. It was dull and grey at that point and the low-light photos of the harriers are just my record shots.

The Pallid Harrier, Circus macrourus, is a migrant that breeds in Eastern Europe, Iran, and central Asia, wintering in India or Africa depending on its migratory wont. It is rare in Western Europe and the UK, but occasional vagrants are ticked here. That said, the species is now known to have bred in The Netherlands (2017) and Spain (2019). A changing world means a changing world for the birds too.

We saw dozens of other species (around 80). Many of those we had seen before, some many times, but one was rather special and we’d only seen it once before, in Poole Harbour in the autumn of 2022 – White-tailed Eagle. An immature specimen flew over us as we were heading back along the beach to Holkham Gap from the westward marsh end of the patch. The bird itself was heading to its roost on the marsh where it had been reported at roughly the same time for the previous couple of days. We don’t know at this point whether the bird we saw was one of the two we saw in Poole, these Isle of Wight reintroduction birds do cover a lot of ground on their travels.

Archive shot: Immature White-tailed Eagle in Poole Harbour

On a smaller scale, but much more numerous, we had some lovely views of visitors from The Arctic, Snow Buntings (30+), which are distant cousins of the Yellowhammers and Reed Buntings. We also saw Shorelarks (about 11) at Holkham Gap despite the best efforts of uncontrolled dog walkers to repeatedly scare the birds away.

Parial flock of 30+ Snow Bunting, Holkham Gap — Flock of Snow Bunting, Holkham Gap

Below is the, hopefully complete, list of birds we saw, we may have a few others that we may have glimpsed in passing but are not claiming for the list, Grey Partridge, Bullfinch, Whooper Swan, Sparrowhawk. There were no feeders at the RSPB Titchwell cafe area on this visit, so no sighting of Coal Tit on this visit.

Grey Plover in flight along the coast at RSPB Titchwell — Grey Plover

Avocet, Black-headed Gull, Bar-tailed Godwit, Black-tailed Godwit, Blackbird, Blue Tit, Brent Goose, Buzzard, Cetti’s Warbler, Chaffinch, Collared Done, Common Scoter, Coot, Cormorant, Curlew, Dunlin, Dunnock, Egyptian Geese, Goldcrest, Golden Plover, Goldeneye (F), Goldfinch, Great Black-backed Gull, Great Crested Grebe, Great Tit, Great White Egret, Grey Heron, Grey Plover, Greylag Goose, Hen Harrier (ringtailed: F or Juv), Herring Gull, House Sparrow, Jackdaw, Jay, Kestrel, Kingfisher, Knot, Lapwing, Lesser Black-backed Gull, Little Egret, Little Grebe, Long-tailed Tit, Magpie, Mallard, Marsh Harrier, Meadow Pipit, Moorhen, Mute Swan, Oystercatcher, Pallid Harrier (NFM 2023), Pheasant, Pink-footed Goose, Pintail, Pochard, Red Kite, Red-breasted Merganser (pair, twice to locations), Red-throated Diver, Redshank, Reed Bunting, Ringed Plover, Robin, Rook, Rough-legged Buzzard, Sanderling, Shelduck, Shore Lark, Shoveller, Skylark, Snow Bunting, Starling, Stock Dove, Stonechat, Teal, Tufted Duck, Turnstone, Water Rail, White-throated Diver, Wigeon, Wood Pigeon, Wren.

Ringtail Hen Harrier in flight at Warham, Norfolk, over the marsh bridge — Record shot: Ringtailed Hen Harrier

I fed this article paragraph by paragraph to an AI chat bot, ChatGPT, and have put together a post showing the call-and-response artificial conversation I had with the bot. I also followed up that article with a bit of discussion about AI and its role in human creativity and innovation. But, and here’s the clever bit, I didn’t provide my own thoughts, I asked the bot a question and it came up with an answer for me.

A Blackcap in Winter

TL:DR – The Blackcap, Sylvia atricapilla, is commonly a summer visitor to the UK from sub-Saharan Africa. But in recent years, some birds that spend their summers in the east of Europe and would normally head for the Iberian peninsula or North Africa in winter have reached the UK where they found winter food on bird feeders. There is now evidence that these birds that overwinter in the UK are not mingling with the Iberian or African overwinterers when they go back to their breeding grounds in east Europe.

UPDATE: As of 13th March 2023, the male Blackcap that overwintered since mid-December in our garden is still here. The outside temperature has gone from freezing to about 17 Celsius, but he is showing no signs of departing just yet. He enjoyed mistletoe berries, pyracanthus berries and now most of those have gone, he pecks at suet balls in a feeder right outside our living room window.

It’s no wonder this little fellow looks so grumpy perched next to the mistletoe growing on our rowan tree…most other Blackcaps will be enjoying a much balmier winter on the Iberian Peninsula or even in Africa. We have had Blackcaps in our garden in winter for several years now. Never see them in the garden in summer though. We had a male and a female last winter. So far this winter, just this solitary male.

In recent years, a lot of migrating Blackcaps (Sylvia atricapilla) have headed west from eastern Europe for the winter instead of turning south. Their compasses seem to have lost calibration, perhaps due to climate change, but other factors may be at play. The species seems to be affected by climate change, a decalibration of their internal compasses, and perhaps moreover by the British wont to stock garden bird feeders and put out fat balls, which is not such a common practice on the continental mainland.

When they head back to their mating grounds in the spring, they are marginalised by the southerners it seems and two distinct groupings are observed. This is an early process in speciation whereby in the long-term we might see a sub-species emerge that no longer mates with the other.

Whatever happened to that birding book you were writing Dave?

TL:DR – I compiled a sampler for a newbie birding book with ten chapters, but I am yet to write the remaining 90.

Back in August 2017, I was all hyped about putting together a new book. It come up with a title, Chasing Wild Geese, and the plan was to write a short piece about the hundred birds a novice birder might “tick” first in the UK. Each item would be illustrated with one of my photos of said bird.

Chasing Wild Geese, the gosling book cover — Chasing Wild Geese, the gosling feather book cover

I put together a taster, with the first ten written and formatted and even did a spoof bio page in the same style about yours truly.

I gave the cover a silly acronym: FEATHER. This stood for “Food Environment Aural Type Habitat Etymology Resemblance” and was a summary of the contents of each page.

I shared the sampler widely on social media and estimate that between six hundred and a thousand people downloaded the PDF file from my website. It’s still available if you’d like to take a look, here. I spoke to my publisher and ideas were batted back and forth. Ultimately though, the likely costs of producing a full-colour photographic book of this sort we agreed were likely to have been prohibitive at the time, so sadly, I put the Geese on the backburner and turned my attention to other writing, photography, and more songwriting.

In the meantime, there have been several similar books on the market from far more expert birders and better photographers than me, any one of which would easily have outsold the honking Geese. I do now have better photos of all the birds in the sampler, and at least a couple of hundred other birds that might have featured in a follow-up…maybe if I stop chasing it, it will come home to roost. We’ll see…

Starling Murmurations

TL:DR – Fundamentally, starlings murmurate because they enjoy it, it’s instinctive behaviour, but there will be reward feedback loops in their brains that drive the behaviour that’s almost beyond doubt. But, the phenomenon is in their instincts to help protect them from raptor predation.

I’ve talked about Starling murmurations several times before here. They are a fascinating, exciting, wonderful natural phenomenon with a lot to teach us about animal behaviour and perhaps even fluid flow! There are two spots on the outskirts of our village here in South Cambridgeshire where you might see a murmuration.

There is a reedbed in the balancing pond that supports drainage from one of the housing estates and then there’s a similar pond on the edge of the local recycling centre (rubbish dump). I’ve mentioned the Red Kites that frequent that site too in an update to an old article. It was while seeking out and finding 20+ Red Kites a couple of weeks ago that I noticed the Starling numbers were building on the same patch, with two to three flocks of several hundred birds swooping around the farmland that abutts the dump.

We walked there again yesterday so I could photograph the Red Kites again. We saw at least 20, along with a couple of hundred Redwing and dozens of Fieldfare, and a Buzzard harried by the Red Kites. There were a lot more Starlings, three fluxional flocks of several hundred each. At one point, hundreds were in the hedgerow when a raptor interrupted their chirruping and chatting and they whooshed into the air en masse and murmurated to distract and confuse the bird of prey.

I got a few photos one of which shows a large flock moving in unison. I estimate about 1500 birds in this photo and there were perhaps two other flocks of maybe about a half to two-thirds the size. I’d suggest that this patch has at least 3000 birds. It will be worth another visit towards dusk to see them bed down to roost among the reeds, also might be worth getting up at dawn to see them rise as a single mass from their roost. My estimate of 1500 in this photo was corroborated by a proper birder friend with far more experience of counting than I.

Little and Large

My friend Andy, who, like myself, is a keen amateur wildlife photographer, often asks me questions about the birds and butterflies he photographs. I can usually come up with an answer. But, today, we were talking about Little Owls and he casually referred to the species as the Small Owl. As far as I know, there is no species known as the Small Owl. I pointed this out and he came back with an intriguing question. Why are the birds “Little” but the butterflies “Small”?

For example, among the birds, we have Little Owl, Little Gull, Little Stint, Little Ringed Plover, Little Egret, Little Auk, Little Grebe, Little Tern. But, for the butterflies, we have Small Blue, Small Tortoiseshell, Small Skipper, Small Heath, Small Copper, Small Pearl-bordered Fritillary, Small White.

The Large Skipper has a Small Skipper counterpart

It’s puzzling…there is a subtle difference in our perception of what we mean by “little” and “small”, but it’s hard to define. Small is the opposite of big, little is the opposite of large. The Oxford English Dictionary suggests that while little is generally synonymous with small, it can have emotional implications associated with it that the word small does not, I can’t quite put my finger on what those differences are. When we discuss dwarfism, people with that condition are often referred to as “little people” but “not small people”…

Etymologically, the word small, a word of Germanic origin, means “thin, slender, narrow, fine” but also refers to a diminutive animal. Indeed, the true root in proto-Indo-European (PIE) is the prefix (s)melo- used to talk of a “smaller animal”. Little, etymologically speaking, is also Germanic in origin, the PIE root is “leud” meaning small.

So, back to Andy’s question why are the birds “little” but the butterflies “small”? I wondered whether it had something to do with the etymology of the words or perhaps whether the naming happened at different times and one descriptor was favoured for some reason at a given time.

Another possible explanation is that the use of small for the butterflies was done because there is a large counterpart. For the Small Tortoiseshell, there is a bigger but similar species the Large Tortoiseshell. Similarly, for the Small Skipper, there is a Large Skipper. However, there are no pairings among the birds, there are lots of different species of gull, but there is no Big Gull nor Large Gull to be a counterpart to the Little Gull, the same with the Little Owl, we do not have a Big Owl or a Large Owl species.

Often these kinds of differences are related to Anglo-Saxon versus Norman etymology, as in the peasants grow the pigs, cattle, and sheep, while the Norman aristocrats eat the pork (porc), beef (boeuf), and mutton (moutton). Stephen Moss just reminded me that he alludes to this in his excellent book Mrs Moreau’s Warbler: How Birds Got Their Names. “I noted that three groups of birds have Norman French names – ducks and gamebirds, which were eaten by French aristocrats, and raptors, which were used to hunt them. Same principle as farm animals and meat!”

Then there are the Great birds…

Great White Egret, Great Tit, Great Shearwater, Great Black-backed Gull, Great Crested Grebe, Great Grey Shrike, Great Northern Diver, Great Crane. The “Great” also essentially means big and there are “lesser” birds that are generally smaller than the common species: Lesser Redpoll, Lesser Whitethroat, Lesser Black-backed Gull, Lesser Spotted Woodpecker…

Moss also points out that in the US there are birds with “least” in their names ‘Least Grebe’, ‘Least Sandpiper’, and ‘Least Bittern’, for instance, we don’t have “least” birds in UK English…which maybe a throwback to US English etymology and the great divide between English and American.

UPDATE: Moss put me in touch with fellow nature writer Peter Marren, author of the excellent Emperors, Admirals, and Chimneysweepers. He had this to say:

“I have never really thought about why birds are great/little/lesser but butterflies are small/large, and I don’t really have an explanation. I suppose traditions in naming spring up early, and that namers therefore tend to follow an established formula. Some of the small/large butterfly names are 18th century or even, with Small Heath, late 17th century, so it might reflect usage at the time – Georgian vs Victorian? Simple English vs 19th Century elaboration?”

Marren points out that there are a few ‘little’ moths eg the Little Thorn – named later, perhaps. But again more usually large/small. He adds that “Great’ just seems the wrong word for a British butterfly or moth, somehow, but not sure I could explain why. ’Large’ is often (usually?) used where there is also a ‘small’, eg Large and Small White, Large and Small Blue, Large and Small Tortoiseshell. But I guess the same pairing is true of birds.”

A pub conversation with a retired friend who was an English teacher, had me saying “All creatures great and small”, which is almost a crossover usage…the hymn should perhaps be “All creatures great and lesser” or “All creatures large and small” but neither would sound quite so poetic as the original hymnal words by Cecil Frances Alexander.