Hymeneal Ducks

I just heard that there’s some big marryin’ going on tomorrow, so thought this might be fitting occasion to talk about one of my (many!) favorite ducks.

This lovely couple was perched in the middle of one of the impoundments at British Columbia’s Reifel Refuge yesterday afternoon. Even as I admired them–the rainbow-colored drake almost as much as the Cleopatra-eyed duck–I couldn’t help feeling sorry for them: what did these gorgeous birds ever do to deserve so humdrum an English name as Wood Duck?

Over the centuries since its discovery, this species has also been known, much more evocatively, as “summer duck” (they’re highly migratory), “acorn duck” (they eat a lot of mast), “tree duck” (they nest in tree cavities), and “Carolina duck” (they’re still most abundant in the eastern deciduous forest). But ever since Audubon codified it in the Ornithological Biography, we’ve been stuck–the bird has been stuck–with that blandest of possible names, the earliest use of which Latham appears to attribute to a certain “James Brown” (certainly not this James Brown, the friend and collaborator of Nuttall).

Fortunately, this duck’s scientific name does it more justice. The tenth, authoritative edition of Linnaeus’s Systema naturae describes the male Wood Duck under the name Anas sponsa, while apparently assigning the female (defined as “a gray duck, living in America, with a somewhat crested head and black and white spotted underparts”) to a different species, Anas arborea, the “tree duck.”

The name Linnaeus gave the male, sponsa, is much more interesting. The Latin word for “bride” is cognate with the English word “spouse” and the French “époux/se” and similar labels; they all come from the Latin verb “to promise,” which also gives us such words as “sponsor,” one who undertakes to make a promise on behalf of another.

Why did Linnaeus use the female term “bride” for a male duck, rather than the obvious sponsus, meaning “bridegroom”? This has been a source of confusion and embarrassment for some etymologers, but it’s actually simple: the genus name Anas, under which Linnaeus’s original description is included, is grammatically–if not necessarily biologically–feminine, and so, logically, is the species epithet, too.

Linnaeus’s Anas was a catch-all genus, including many waterfowl now assigned elsewhere. The German ornithologist Friedrich Boie’s 1828 revision of the anatids removed sponsa (and its closest relative, the Mandarin Duck) from Anas and created a new genus, Aix. In a footnote, Boie credits the name to Aristotle, who included the otherwise mysterious creature “aix” in his group of solid birds with webbed feet. Coincidentally or not, it is possible to read this passage in the De animalibus as suggesting that the aix breeds in trees–making the modern scientific name Aix sponsa a fine combination of the English “wood duck” and Linnaeus’s Latin “bridal duck.” In a neat twist, the German vernacular name for our Wood Duck is Brautente, a direct translation of Linnaeus’s old “Anas sponsa.”