A murder of crows: Collective nouns for birds
I love nomenclature like this. A “drift” of quail. A “siege” of herons. A “charm” of goldfinches. A “murder” of crows.
It all points to a time when people had a different connection with place, a complex knowledge of and taxonomy for describing flora and fauna.
For a great dictionary of these kinds of terms, not for birds but for general terrain, check Home Ground edited by Barry Lopez.
The following is taken from Wikipedia:
The standard collective noun for a group of birds of any type is a flock.[1]
For a number of individual birds, there exist collective nouns particular to the type of bird. Many of these collective nouns are fanciful and not in common use in English. The book A Mess of Iguanas… A Whoop of Gorillas by Alon Shulman is a good reference for the collective nouns and their etymology. James Lipton’s book An Exaltation of Larks is devoted to these collective nouns, many of which originated as hunters’ terms and have been in the language for centuries.
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love home ground. i can get lost in there for hours.
i feel like writing a companion to home ground that’s a taxonomy of emotions felt around different landforms.
of course it would have to be all made up words.
last night i was reading the section of “in patagonia” about the yaghan tierra del fuego language. how through synonym they seem to connect natural features to uniquely human experiences. e.g., “a tangle of trees that have fallen blocking the path forward = a hiccough.” “mussels out of season = old age.”
i wonder if similar relationships used to exist between english words but over time one or the other of the metaphorical meanings was forgotten.
Someone at work recently asked this question – What would be a good collective noun for bloggers?
Some possible suggestions: a babble of bloggers, a subscription of bloggers..