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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After yesterday’s post about placefinding, along with the immediate response I decided to cook up a really simple blog which you can find here: Placefinding.wordpress.com. The premise is really simple-it will explore the way people connect and reconnect to place via their lifestyles, writing, art, and other expressions as well as just placefinding as an ethic and ethos that seems to be somehow within, outside of, and underlying our cultural lexicon all at the same time.
Please subscribe and let me know how you like this project. I’m looking for ideas, perhaps starting with this one: how do you define your relationship to place?