August 2019 British Wildlife 391 H orse-matcher, sally-wren and cold arse bird are just a few of more than 7,000 English folk names for about 150 British bird species collated by Swiss naturalist-etymologist Michel Desfayes. Volume 1 of his two-volume A Thesaurus of Bird Names: Etymology of European Lexis Through Paradigms, published in 1998, lists more than 100,000 European folk names in more than 11 European languages. Whenever known, the place where a name was collected is also stated, and etymologies of the names are given in Volume 2. The collating of these names from diverse and disparate sources, which he began more than 70 years ago, has been Desfayes’s life’s work, his passion: when I met him at his home in 2014 (see photo on p. 392), he was working on the European flora. It is not difficult to see why the carrying-out of such a vast act of collation has given Michel Desfayes so much joy. Immersing yourself for an hour in the diverse creativity of just the English names, of which about half relate to passerines, is enough to transport you to another time, another world. It is a world in which, although elements have changed profoundly, there is a curious familiarity. The birds themselves provide fixed points in a constellation of change, as do the fundamentals of what we like to think of as British characteristics – of humour, especially in adversity, of fairness, and an instinctive distrust of authority, and of respect for the individual – all of which shine through (Fox 2004). What we, as naturalists, however, might recognise in these names is a relationship with nature that is not purely scientific, not simply objective, but is imbued with a deeper sense of the value of life, and of humanity’s impoverishment in the absence of nature. Above all, the names reveal the intimate knowledge of the natural world held by people who worked, played and rested on the land, of the ‘folk’, expressed through the names which they coined for birds. Names such as the three mentioned above, the origins of which are long-since lost, if indeed they were ever known, speak to the space between bird and human, to the relationship between, as well as Andrew Gosler Brook-ouzel, as the Dipper was historically known in Cornwall, is one of more than 7,000 folk names for British birds recorded by Desfayes (1998). Mike Lane/FLPA What’s in a name? The legacy and lexicon of birds