Why Is It Called a Secretary Bird? The Name Explained

The quill-pen theory

The best-known explanation goes back to the French naturalist Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon. In 1780 he suggested that the name had been chosen because of the long feathers at the back of the bird’s head and neck, which resemble pens stuck behind the ear of a scribe.

The comparison is easy to see. The secretary bird has a loose crest of long, dark feathers that hang down behind the head and rise when the bird is excited or hunting. Add the gray “coat”, black “breeches” of feathers on the upper legs, and a slow, deliberate walk, and some writers have pictured an 18th-century office clerk striding about with pens behind his ears.

In those days, clerks really did write with quill pens and often kept spares behind an ear, so the image would have been familiar to readers in Europe.

The Arabic theory

In 1977 the British ornithologist C. Hilary Fry offered a different idea. He suggested that “secretary” came from the French secrétaire, which might itself be a corruption of the Arabic saqr et-tair, translated as “hawk of the semidesert” or “hawk that flies”. On this view, the name sounded like “secretary” by accident, and the pen story was invented later to explain it.

This theory became popular in books and online, but it has been criticized. The South African scholar Ian Glenn has argued that there is no evidence the name came into European languages through French, and that it does not fit the bird’s history in southern Africa.

The Dutch settlers’ theory

Glenn and others prefer an origin among Dutch settlers at the Cape of Good Hope in what is now South Africa, where Europeans first knew the bird well. The Dutch word secretaris means “secretary”.

The first scientific description, by the Dutch naturalist Arnout Vosmaer in 1769, was based on a live bird sent from the Cape. Vosmaer recorded that settlers called it “sagittarius” (archer), perhaps because its walk looked like an archer’s, and that farmers who kept tame birds to deal with snakes and rodents knew it as “secretarius”. He thought “secretarius” might be a corruption of “sagittarius”. Glenn suggests the opposite: that “sagittarius” was a mishearing of “secretarius”.

In short, the most likely story is that the name “secretary” was in local use at the Cape by the 1760s, and that the pen-like crest is the reason it caught on, even if no one can prove exactly who first used it.

What its scientific name means

The scientific name Sagittarius serpentarius combines two Latin words. Sagittarius means “archer”, a link to Vosmaer’s account of the settlers’ name. Serpentarius comes from serpens, “serpent” or “snake”, and refers to the bird’s famous habit of killing snakes, which it does with fast, hard kicks (see how secretary birds hunt snakes).

The species name came first. The English illustrator John Frederick Miller named it Falco serpentarius in 1779, placing it with falcons. In 1783 the French naturalist Johann Hermann moved it into a genus of its own, Sagittarius. Other names used over the years include Gypogeranus, from the Greek for “vulture” and “crane”, a neat summary of the bird’s raptor head and long legs.

A bird in a family of its own

The name is not the only unusual thing about it. The secretary bird is the only living member of the family Sagittariidae. It belongs to the order Accipitriformes, alongside hawks, eagles, kites and ospreys, but genetic studies show it branched off on its own long ago. Fossils of related birds from millions of years ago have been found in France, showing that the family once lived beyond Africa.

There are no recognized subspecies. In 1835 one naturalist proposed three species, including one supposedly from the Philippines, but there is no evidence that it ever existed.

A symbol of two nations

The secretary bird is well known in its African homeland and has a place on two national emblems. It forms the centerpiece of the coat of arms of South Africa, adopted in 2000, where its raised wings stand for growth and its snake-killing habit for protection of the nation. It has also been the central figure of the national emblem of Sudan since 1969 and appears on the Sudanese presidential flag.

Many African peoples have their own names for it. The Maasai call it ol-enbai nabo, often translated as “one arrow”, in reference to the crest feathers. In Xhosa it is inxhanxhosi, and in Zulu intungunono. Sadly, the bird behind all these names is now in trouble; see is the secretary bird endangered?.