I’m puzzled. (Yeah, I know that’s nothing new.)

What really puzzles me though, is how I can go for years accepting something without question (e.g., cardboard milk cartons that splash your milk all over the table upon opening, incompetent Tory governments, and the seemingly ubiquitous nature of Ant and Dec) until one day, for no apparent reason, it strikes me how strange that something really is, and I am then prompted to seek an answer.

I’m sure I can’t be the only one like this.

What’s intriguing me at the moment is the world’s most boring bird. No, not Clare Balding. No, I’m talking ’bout the collared turtle dove, that dull grey beaky blob of a bird with the monotonous three-note call. Not very mysterious to look at, I’ll grant you, but I’m baffled as to how it got its Latin name: Streptopelia decaocto.

Let’s break it down into simple stages.

Strepto is a prefix, from the Greek streptos, meaning ‘twisted’. Twisted, flexible or bent. So what’s bent about the collared turtle dove? So far, I’ve found no explanations, despite looking in numerous places; even the mighty Wikipedia doesn’t address the issue, and if anyone were going to make something up, whether correct or not, you’d think a Wiki contributor would have done. But no.

Pelia, I think, is skin, or in this case feathers. What have we got so far then? Bent feathers? Surely not!

The prefixes deca and octo mean ten and eight respectively. So, in the same way that a dodecahedron has twelve faces (‘do’ plus ‘deca’, see?) I surmise that the collared turtle dove has eighteen of something. But eighteen what? Can’t be brain cells, can it? I mean, that’s seventeen too many to have composed that yawn of a ‘song’ that it has. And the number eighteen doesn’t seem to be connected to its length or wingspan as far as I know.

Neither of my birdwatcher’s field guides can offer any explanation. So, as I said, I’m puzzled. I hope this doesn’t mean I’m going to have to phone up…

…Bill Oddie!

Update:
Shana did loads of online research and found this from Wild Birds Unlimited,

The scientific name, Streptopeleia decaocto, literally means a collar (streptos) dove (peleia). In Greek mythology, Decaocto was an overworked, underpaid servant girl. The gods heard her prayers for help and changed her into a dove so she could escape her misery. The dove’s call still echoes the mournful cries of her former life.

D’oh! So the first bit of the bird’s name simply means collared dove. Well, I did say my Latin was a bit incomplete, didn’t I? But what about all that Decaocto stuff?

Ornithologists who fancy themselves well versed in classical learning often cite Decaocto as a possible character in Ovid’s Metamorphoses but we have no firm evidence for that as yet and it may be it’s all wishful thinking in order to make a fairytale seem to have more history than it actually does. If anyone cares to trawl through Ovid’s book and let us know one way or the other, we’d be eternally grateful and will send you a free apple as a token of thanks.