A number of animals’ names are amongst the earliest recorded words in the entire English language. Predictably, a great many of them are the names of domesticated animals like dog, cow, sheep, ewe and ram, as well as animals that would have been caught or hunted for food, like hare, goose, crab, hart, herring and eel, although some other wild animals’ names are of comparable age, including rat, wasp, adder, fox, butterfly, seal and swan. All of these examples date from the Old English period in the language, and are more than 1,000 years old.
Some of the earliest recorded names for animals, however, are also amongst the most unusual, yet many of them have long since dropped out of use. Dive-dop, for instance, was an Old English name for a grebe or diving duck; attercop was an old name for a spider, literally meaning ‘poison cup’; mire-drum was a fourteenth-century name for the bittern, a bird of the heron family, thought to refer to its unusual booming call; and angletwitch was a wonderfully evocative Old English word for a worm used as bait on a hook. Ten more unusual and imaginative animals’ names are listed here, many of which make similar reference to some supposed characteristic or ancient use for the creature in question (FATHER-LASHER, WART-BITER) whilst others refer to its shape or appearance (HELLBENDER, SNAKELOCKS).
A father-lasher is either one of two species of North Atlantic fish, Taurulus bubalis and Myoxocephalus scorpius, native to the seas around Britain, Ireland and much of the rest of northern Europe. First recorded in English in the seventeenth century, the name father-lasher refers to the fact that the male fish are known to lash out with their tails when threatened, especially whilst guarding their eggs during development. Also known as the long-spined and short-spined sea scorpions, despite these somewhat alarming names the creatures are in fact harmless to humans and grow little more than 10 to 15 cm (4 to 6 inches) in length.
Goatsucker is an old English nickname for the nightjar, Caprimulgus europaeus, a peculiar nocturnal bird of Europe, Asia and Africa with incredible camouflaged plumage, a large gaping mouth and an unusual ticking or ‘churring’ song. The name pertains to the once widely held belief that the birds drank the milk (or even blood) of livestock at night, a misconception apparently based on nothing more than the birds’ fondness for nesting in the same fields in which livestock are grazed as they like to feed on the flies and other insects that they attract. Dating from the early seventeenth century in English, the name goatsucker has its origins in Ancient Greece and Rome when the notion that the birds fed on cattle was first propagated by scholars including Aristotle and Pliny the Elder.
The hellbender is a species of giant salamander, Cryptobranchus alleganiensis, native to a large stretch of the eastern United States extending from New England down to Georgia, Alabama and Mississippi. Typically growing to more than 60 cm (2 ft) in length, with a round, flat head and a squat, bulky body, the hellbender is the third largest salamander in the world and one of the largest amphibians in all of North America. The origin of its name, which was first recorded in English in the early 1800s, is open to considerable debate but seems likely to be somehow intended to reflect the creature’s ugly appearance.
Hundred-pacer is a common name for Deinagkistrodon acutus, a stout, well-camouflaged 1 to 1.5 m (3 to 5 ft) nocturnal pit viper, also known as the sharp-nosed viper, which is native to parts of Vietnam, southern and eastern China, and Taiwan. The snake’s unusual name refers to the fact that its venom is supposedly so potent that once bitten, a victim will only be able to take around a hundred paces away before dying; indeed, in some locations the creature is even referred to as the fifty-pacer.
Dating from as far back as the early 1600s, pick-a-tree is an old northern English dialect name for the woodpecker (and in particular the green woodpecker, Picus viridis), which alludes to the bird’s habit of poking holes into the trunks of trees – the word pick here does not mean ‘choose’, but rather is an old English variant of peck. The green woodpecker is perhaps one of the most plentifully named of all British birds, with other alternative English names for it including rainfowl (mid-1400s) and rainbird (1550s); woodwall (late 1400s), hickwall (early 1500s) and witwall (mid-1600s); woodspite (mid-1500s); yaffle (1700s), yuckle (1800s) and yaffingale (early 1600s); and popinjay (1800s).
The descriptive name shovelnose is shared by a number of predictably blunt-faced creatures of several different species, including a type of sturgeon found in the Mississippi and Missouri rivers, a burrowing frog of tropical sub-Saharan Africa, and a type of salamander native to North America’s Appalachian Mountains. The earliest of all shovelnoses in English, however, is an otherwise unidentified species of shark first mentioned in 1707 in a work by the English seafarer William Funnell recounting his travels around the world as chief mate to the explorer and circumnavigator William Dampier. According to his account, Funnell spotted a ‘shovel-nos’d-shark’ as they were sailing south down the coast of Guatemala, and described it as having a head ‘like a collier’s shovel’, with ‘two extreme parts (at the edge of which on each side are his eyes) . . . a great deal broader . . . than his body’. Although the exact species of shark to which Funnell was referring remains unknown, based on his description it seems likely that it was one of the five species of hammerhead shark that are now known to inhabit the coastal waters of Central America.
Skeletonizers are insects – or, more specifically, insect larvae – that feed so voraciously on leaves that they have earned their impressive name from their ability to reduce a leaf to just its skeleton in a short space of time. In English, the name was first recorded in an American dictionary of 1891 that referred specifically to the apple-leaf skeletonizer (Choreutis pariana), a moth native to much of North America and Europe. A number of similarly named creatures exist, including the maple-trumpet skeletonizer (Catastega aceriella), the skullcap skeletonizer (Prochoreutis inflatella) and the Western grapeleaf skeletonizer (Harrisina americana), which can prove particularly destructive to grapevines in North American vineyards.
The snakelocks is a type of sea anemone, Anemonia viridis, native to the north-eastern Atlantic Ocean including the waters around the western side of the British Isles and the Mediterranean Sea. Its name makes reference to the anemone’s long, snake-like tentacles, which are typically green or pale brown in colour with purple tips, and can reach more than 20 cm (8 inches) in length. Unlike many other anemone species the snakelocks’ tentacles are almost always extended into the water.
The sunangel is any one of several species of tropical hummingbird native to a broad expanse of the westernmost fringes of Amazon rainforest, stretching from Colombia in the north to Bolivia in the south. The common name sunangel is mirrored by the name of the genus to which all nine known species of the birds belong, Heliangelus, which is ultimately derived from the Greek word helios, meaning ‘sun’. Other evocatively named hummingbirds include the visorbearer, the sabrewing, the firecrown, the thorntail and the starfrontlet.
The wart-biter is a large species of bush-cricket native to much of continental Europe – including a handful of sites in the south of England – and across temperate regions of Asia to China. Growing to around 3 to 4 cm (1 to 1.5 inches) in length, the wart-biter resembles a grasshopper in appearance but tellingly, like all bush-crickets, produces its singing call by rubbing its wings together rather than by rubbing its legs against its wings as do grasshoppers. Its fairly gruesome name – which is reflected by the creature’s taxonomic name, Decticus verrucivorus, derived from the same Latin root as verruca – originates in the Swedish name vårtbitare, as the cricket’s powerful jaws were once widely used in Scandinavia to remove warts from the skin.