Fróðskaparrit - 01.01.2005, Page 58

56 GREAT NORTHERN DIVER (GAVIA IMMER) IN CIRCUMPOLAR FOLK ORNITHOLOGY
Common loon as Canadian souvenir (Photo: Ingvar Svanberg, 2005)
names is of great importance for ethno-
biologists. It gives us the possibility to
understand how a people perceive, clas-
sify and cognitively process their world
(Diamond and Bishop, 1999: 17). It also
gives an insight about the historical depth
of a local tradition (Fridell and Svanberg,
2005).
During winter time the great northern
diver is a common visitor to northern
British Isles. In some areas, such as the
Orkneys, it is frequent at all seasons. Old
birds are being more abundant during the
winter season though. There was consid-
erable confusion among early ornitholo-
gists about the identification of the various
diver-species, because of the differences
between summer and winter plumage, and
the great northern diver was recognized
as a separate species as late as in the year
1634. This name - the great northern
diver - fírst appears though in 1766, in
Thomas Pennant’s book British Zoology,
Francis Willoughby having termed the bird
the greatest speckled diver or loon, in his
book Ornithology in 1678 (Swann, 1913:
106). In spite of the distinction made in
the 18th century between black- and red-
throated divers, the biack-throated diver
was still in some books of the 19th century
thought to be the young of the great north-
ern diver (Greenoak, 1997: 14).
In Gaelic the great northern diver was
called mur bhuachaill ‘sea herdsman’,
writes Charles Swainson without further
details (Swainson, 1886: 213). On the
Hebrides it was called bonnivochill, ac-
cording to Martin Martin’s annotations
from 1695 (Martin, 1884: 71). Lockwood
interprets this as the Gaelic buna-bhuach-
aill ‘dumpy herdsman’ (Lockwood, 1971:
58) or ‘herdsman of the bottom’ (Swann,
1913: 36). The shape of the bird, and the
wild, far-reaching call has motivated the