What's in a name in the animal world?
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IT was the caption to a photograph that set me thinking about the various names of mammals.
It was in a book on buzzards that I reviewed a few weeks ing and summago. It said: "Recently-emerged rabbit kits are prime food for buzzards and their broods in sprer."
It was the word "kits" that drew my attention as I had never heard this word used in connection with young rabbits before. The word "kits" reminds me of young pine martens, wildcats or beavers.
Some names are very old and refer back to ancient crafts such as falconry and hunting.
Finding a source for specific names is made much easier these days as there is an increasing number of books that deal with the subject.
One I refer to more than any other is The Language of Field Sports by CE Hare, first published in 1939. My copy is an edition of 1997.
This book deals specifically with names, while other books have them as part of the text as opposed to lists. A book that uses the latter is one I use a great deal – British Birds – their Folklore, Names and Literature by Francesca Greenoak, published in 1997.
Then there is confusion over the polecats and pine martens. While they share the same names for the adults, namely "hob" and "Jill", other individual names are different. The polecat is "foulmart" while the pine marten is "sweetmart" after their smells.
One surprise for me was "buck" and "doe" for rats which I would have put down to rabbits. "Boar" and "sow" for badgers are straightforward, going for pig and wild boar too.
CE Hare’s book gives "buck" and "doe" for a brown hare, but I have always thought of them as a "Jack" and a "Jill". The word for the young of brown hares, leverets, does seem to be peculiar to that mammal.
Even the breeding sites vary considerably. Squirrels live in dreys, badgers in setts and foxes in dens. Rabbit have burrows, otters holts and moles "fortresses".
In contrast, the brown hare is an interesting one as it mostly stays above ground. The creates a "form" – a depression in which it can flatten and remain camouflaged from predators.
There are variations with mountain hares and I have seen them use a hole in the ground. On the banks of the River Findhorn, east of Ruthven, I have seen mountain hares dart underground into burrows when a predator threatens.
I recall hares immediately darting underground when a golden eagle came over.
It is not clear from my books whether these holes have been taken over from rabbits or whether the hares dig them out themselves. Judging by the altitude of the holes, I imagine mountain hares would dig them out.
One aspect of names for mammals I have never really understood is the variation names for different species of deer.
This seems to vary from book to book and writers seem to get more confused over them. For example, even some of the names of the adults, let alone the young, are different.
The red deer and sika deer are stags, hinds and calves. Yet with the roe deer they are bucks, does and kids, as is the muntjac deer. But at least some names are similar with all the species. If the antlers are growing and they are covered with a velvet-like skin they are all known as being "in velvet", as in the photograph above of red deer stags.
Likewise, if the male deer has no antlers, in red deer they are known as "hummels". However, the names of different stages of normal antler growth varies.
Even the famous painting of 1851 by Edwin Landseer of Monarch of the Glen is confusing as it is supposed to be a "royal" with 12 points on the antlers. Yet in the past, it was the 10-pointer that was known as the royal. Confusing!
