Almost no birds today have vernacular names

Almost no birds today have vernacular names. Bird names have become standardized, homogenized, conscripted into what is considered proper by scientists for classification. A century ago a birder could have told what county, even what village, he was in by the folk name for a long-tailed tit. In his Treatise on the Birds of Gloucestershire, W. L. Mellersh collected no fewer than 10 local names for Aegithalos caudatus, the long-tailed tit, among them long Tom, oven-bird, poke-pudding, creak-mouse, barrel Tom, and in the south of the county, long farmer. For John Clare in Northamptonshire the long-tailed tit was, delightfully, the 'bumbarrel'.

J. Lewis-Stempel, Meadowland (2014), 97