Birds all over the world are given nicknames, and although many of these are endearing, some birds can end up with pretty derogatory epithets, often due to their perceived behaviours. Flying rats or sky rats, for example, are terms commonly used to describe birds that are seen to be scavengers or make a nuisance of themselves, particularly in urban environments.
And another, rather more salty term, is shite hawk, used to describe certain birds of prey, but also gulls.
Shite hawk, also spelled shitehawk, as well as shit-hawk and shitty hawk, is thought to have originated from military slang by the British Army in colonial India and Egypt at the beginning of the 20th century, possibly as a play on the term ‘kite-hawk’. However, the earliest record of the term in print did not appear until 1944 in the Oxford English Dictionary.
The term was usually applied to the black kite, notorious for its coprophagia, and which was despised by soldiers for its habit of stealing food from their plates.
In the historian Charles Allen’s BBC Radio 4 series and subsequent book Plain Tales from the Raj published in 1975, he vividly describes this behaviour:
“At the transit camp the British soldier normally made his acquaintance with the kite-hawk [i.e. black kite], known familiarly as the ‘shite-hawk’. ‘There used to be thousands of them,’ remembers Charles Wright. ‘When one drew one’s food from the cook-house and went to take it across to the dining room to eat at the tables underneath the sheds, these kite-hawks would swoop down and take the lot off your plate if you weren’t careful. So you had to walk waving your arms above the plate until you got it under cover.”
Shawk, a contradiction of shite hawk, was also used to describe the Egyptian vulture, again because of its habit of eating faeces.
And military badges that depict birds of prey, such as the eagle badge on the sleeves of the 4th Indian Division of the British Indian Division of the British Indian Army, and the eagle on the left breast pocket of the Pathfinder squadrons in the Royal Air Force, are sometimes referred to as shitehawks.
Since its successful reintroduction to the UK, the nickname has also been used to refer to the black kite’s cousin, the red kite, possibly due to confusion between the two species, but there is no evidence that this is a historical term.
In Birds Britannia published in 2005, the authors, naturalists Mark Cocker and Richard Mabey state that the “red kite never suffered the indignity of its relative’s nickname” and was known for many centuries as the ‘glede’ or ‘gleade’ from a Saxon word for ‘glide’.
The misunderstanding has been perpetuated with the term used in the House of Lords in 1999 when Lord Burton announced that, “[p]ossibly one of the most highly protected birds today is the [red] kite, known by the British Army throughout the world as a shite-hawk”.
It also found its way into literature with an anthology of poems for children called Willing the Wolf, by Christopher Hodgson, published in 2005, describing the red kite thus:
And in Medieval times, with waste piled publicly,
Its habit of scavenging in sewage
Earned it the sobriquet, “Shite hawk”
And in 2011, a BBC Radio 4 programme, The Kestrel and Red Kite, was broadcast in which presenter Rod Liddle repeatedly claimed that the red kite was historically known as the shite hawk despite offering no evidence for his assertion.
Although red kites are now numerous in the UK, black kites are still a very rare visitor and have been for centuries. The first black kite to be trapped in Britain was shot near Alnwick in Northumberland on 11th May 1866. At first it as assumed to have been a marsh harrier, but after John Hancock from the Newcastle Museum washed off a lot of blood its identification was corrected from that of ‘moor buzzard’ to ‘shite hawk’, as noted by the British Birds Rarities Committee.
Gulls too are sometimes referred to as shite hawks, particularly in the Navy, due no doubt to their predilection for mobbing and scavenging behaviour, as well as shitting on anything that is unfortunate to be underneath as they fly overhead.
Visit any matelots’ forums and you will find numerous discussions about the best way to dispatch a shite hawk, none of which can be shared on a website for bird lovers. And in a punny reference to the colloquialism, HMS Nelson has a narrow boat, one of three that it rents out to raise money for its Leisure Amenities Fund, called Shy Talk.
One Response
the common and herring gulls also feral pigeons but never the red kite have always been referred to as shite hawks by me and most of my friends from as early as the 1960,s