I vacillate in my opinions about bird names. Sometimes I like the names that are clear and technically descriptive. Sometimes I like the ones that bring a little poetry to the creature to which it is attached.
The names of wood warblers, the 56 (or so) species of North American songbirds in the Parulidae family, run the gamut on this.
The prothonotary warbler probably has one of the most linguistically obscure names in the family. I always liked the name, but what the hell does the word prothonotary mean?
If you’re a They Might Be Giants fan – my wife and I were lucky enough to see them play two glorious sets in Fort Lauderdale a few weeks ago – you know that Istanbul was Constantinople, and now it’s Istanbul, not Constantinople. But did you know before that, Constantinople was Byzantium?
Prothonotaries were the chief clerks in the ancient courts of Byzantium, the capital city of the Eastern Roman Empire from the 7th to the 15th centuries. Supposedly the clerks had saffron yellow robes that were similar in color to the warbler species, hence the name. Though it has been pointed out by people knowledgeable in all things Byzantine that there is no proof prothonotaries wore saffron-colored anythings.
Still, I love the name and its mysterious and enigmatic obliqueness.
Arguably the name worm-eating warbler is clear and technically descriptive. But I also think it is a bit judgmental and does the species a disservice. A lot of warbler species eat worms. Why judge these guys? Especially when one of their other older names was the much more sprightly forest chippy. Who doesn’t want to see a forest chippy?
At the extreme edge of the clear and technically descriptive end of the spectrum, there is the black-and-white warbler. They are black. And white. And a member of the warbler family. It doesn’t get more straightforward than that.
While black-and-white warblers no doubt spend some portion of their lives just standing upright on tree branches, like other songbirds, I hardly ever see them do that. More often than not, the ones I see are clinging to the side of a tree, sometimes working their way straight up or down, sometimes circling or corkscrewing around a trunk or a branch.
Black-and-white warblers are essentially alone among the rest of their family with the sideways-ness and their verticality, but they have fellow travelers in their techniques, specifically creepers and nuthatches, which also spend their lives hanging off the sides of trees as if it were nothing.
The sideways-ness and their verticality has a purpose – it’s to create their own environmental niche. Black-and-white warblers find their diet of ants and other insects between the creases and ridges of the tree bark that other species can’t access as adroitly.
It’s not just their indifference to gravity that I like about black-and-whites, it is also their chromatic simplicity. Their toes can get a little brownish, but other than that, their color scheme is gradation-free and close to purely binary – their parts, including their bill and legs, are either black or white. You have to appreciate a bird that would look the same if it was photographed in color or in black and white, whose image would print well on a single-color laser printer — or, say, a black-and-white newspaper page after your editor tells you they don’t have a color page for your column this week.
I spent a while digging through the index of John James Audubon’s “Birds of America” and his attached “Ornithological Biography,” looking for what he had to say about the black-and-white warbler, and I couldn’t find anything. Which couldn’t be right. Black-and-whites aren’t shy. And while the striations in their feathers look pretty similar in pattern to the bark they spend most of their life clinging to, they stand out like, say, a small monochrome photo laid over a larger color one. Black-and-whites also breed all over the upper half of eastern North America, migrate through most of the middle part of it, and winter in the lower part of it. How could Audubon have missed them? Especially in 1831, when they were, no doubt, more common than they are now.
Turns out he didn’t miss them.
He just called them the black & white creeper, and decided to put them with the treecreeper family, based on their behaviors. It turned out to be the wrong place in the taxonomic tree, which wasn’t totally his fault – Alexander Wilson and several other prominent natural historians, tracing all the way back to Carl Linnaeus in 1766, had done the same thing. And the taxonomic tree is a constantly evolving understanding of how different plants and animals are related. It’s hard to judge people who were figuring things out and pioneering a nascent field.
Someone must have figured it out in the years after Audubon, though, because when the American Ornithological Union published their first checklist in 1886, the black-and-white was listed with the warblers.
The black-and-white warbler’s wintering territory includes Florida and Texas, but most of their range is in Central America, the northern part of South America and the Caribbean. I was hoping there was a cool Jamaican colloquial name for them, but I couldn’t find anything. In Haitian Creole, they are called Ti Tchit demidèy, which according to Google translate means Little Tchit at noon. It’s unclear what tchit means, but I’m thinking maybe it’s derived from the sound of their contact calls. Their most common Spanish name is Reinita Trepadora, which translates to creeping warbler. In Mexico they are called Chipe Trepador, or Chipe Blanco y Negro. Chipe does not seem to have a direct English translation, though I wonder if that, too, is derived from the sound of their contact calls. (One of the great Conch slang names for warblers is chip chips.)The Colombians, though, have what I think is the best name for them – cebrita, or cebrita trepadora, which translates to the zebra creeper. Cebrita reinita (zebra warbler) would probably be more taxonomically accurate, but man, using zebra for the descriptive would be both poetic and put a clear idea into someone’s head about what the bird looks like.
