Birds Collective Names

Most people will know a handful of collective names for different species of birds. In the nursery we probably learn about a gaggle of geese, or in some places a gobble of turkeys. The general populace will probably understand what you mean by a charm of Goldfinches. On the other hand, some quite common generic terms for bird species are not well understood.

The general public knows that a group of cows is a herd, but are less likely to know that also applies to swans, for example. One or two scary or otherwise unusual common names are quite well known such as a murder of Crows or a parliament of Rooks. Watchers of wildlife documentaries maybe familiar with a murmuration of Starlings.

When I watch quiz programs, I’m always surprised how little an awful lot of ordinary people know about very common birds, not even their names. And a great many people can’t tell a Blue Tit from a Blue Jay and wouldn’t even know which are native to their own country. In the UK, in some ways that’s quite remarkable because the majority of households feed the birds that turn up in their gardens on a very regular basis.

Murmuration of Starlings – ©Tanya Hart, CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons

Below you will find explanations and in some cases links to lists of the collective names of a great many birds. Having said that, in some cases there are several terms applied and at others terms mistakenly applied. For example, the term for a group of Bitterns a siege in some times and places that has been corrupted and the term used is a sedge of Bitterns. There is also a growing tendency to create new collective terms for bird species that in the past or even currently are not generally known to the ordinary man in the street. The problem with this is that it is the construct of individuals, not an actual agreed term.

(NB I recently saw an online reference by AI saying that the names were interchangeable and that a ‘sedge of Bitterns’ comes from their association with sedges. This is completely incorrect. Bitterns like reed-beds and sedges are plants of the wet meadow, whereas Common Reeds Phragmites australis, are the main plant of reed-beds, a different sort of habitat.)