By Richard White

Recent events at Bukit Batok Nature Park have given many people the pleasure of seeing and photographing the scarce Van Hasselt’s Sunbird.

This enigmatic species fascinates me. It’s not rare, but neither is it common so when it does appear regularly at a location it always attracts attention. It likely breeds in Singapore but there are very few documented nests recently. And it has been recorded migrating in flocks, which is definitely strange behaviour for a sunbird.

But I’m also interested in the name. The scientific name is Leptocoma brasiliana – Leptocoma is from Greek meaning “fine-haired” which I’ll pass on for now but why brasiliana? Back in 1788 when the species was first described by the German naturalist Johann Friedrich Gmelin, he believed that the original specimen was collected in Brazil. And once a species has a scientific name, it’s very difficult to make a change no matter how incorrect it may prove to be.

And then how many of us refer to Van Hasselt’s without knowing who van Hasselt was?

I hadn’t thought about this much myself until I was on a birding trip to Java in 2016. With some time on my hands while waiting for a bus in Bogor I decided to explore the botanic gardens. Along with a few local birds I found a gravestone marking the resting place of Johan Conrad van Hasselt and Heinrich Kuhl. Of course, I recognised both these names – Kuhl is immortalised in the name the Javan endemic Kuhl’s Sunbird also known as the White-flanked Sunbird Aethopyga eximia – but did not know why they should be buried together in Bogor.

A quick search online and it became clear that these two Dutchmen had a tough time of it as naturalists in Southeast Asia between 1820 and 1823. Both men died of tropical disease; Kuhl in 1821 at the age of 23 and van Hasselt in 1823 at the age of 26.

The use of eponyms or honorifics in bird names is not without controversy. It’s become a hot topic in the United States recently where there is a movement to remove all eponyms from the names of birds occurring there. For some they are a hangover of a colonial era and sometimes celebrate individuals who did little to deserve the honour or who are judged (by modern standards) to be not very honourable. Others argue that they tell us nothing about the appearance of the bird and would argue that names should be more descriptive. Before the split of Van Hasselt’s Sunbird, the birds in Singapore were called Purple-throated Sunbird; that name is now almost fully restricted to the Philippines but is undoubtedly more descriptive than Van Hasselt’s.

Personally, I’m happy to keep using names that connect us to stories about our past. While I can recognise that not all aspects of our history should be celebrated, I don’t see rewriting this particular chapter as a priority or much of a win for those who have decided it’s important to them. That said, I’m equally happy for bird names to be changed and I can decide for myself if I’m going to use the new names – I don’t think I will ever get used to Medium Egret.

And for those interested to know more about Edward Blyth, Thomas Horsfield, Alexander Gustav von Schrenck or any of the others whose names appear in our local avifauna, there’s enough on Wikipedia and other websites to disappear down rabbit holes chasing their stories for many long evenings. And there are even multiple books on the subject; for example “The Eponym Dictionary of Birds” by Bo Beolens, Michael Watkins, and Michael Grayson. The Birds of the World’s Key to Scientific Names is also available freely here, and covers the meanings of every single scientific name in use today.