Bird Names that Sound Like Insults (and Sometimes Are), Volume 3

Definition: the Old World coot (Fulica atra)

Coot refers to any of various slaty-black bird of the rail family that somewhat resemble ducks, and bald coot to a specific species with a characteristic white frontal shield. (Bald coot is also used as a common name for two other birds, the common gallinule and the purple moorhen, having frontal shields). The word coot dates back to Middle English, and over the centuries appeared in several less-than-flattering constructions as “stupid as a coot” before emerging as an epithet meaning “harmless simple person” in the late-18th century United States.

Bald coots (the bird, not the retired dog walkers) and mallards scooted over the surface of the water, reflecting the trees all around its edge.
— Kirsty Bosley, The Birmingham (England) Mail, 14 Feb. 2024

Definition: a small tropical bird (Coereba flaveola) that has a slender down-curved bill, gray back, black head, white eye stripe, and bright yellow underparts, feeds on nectar, fruit, and insects, and is found from Mexico and the Caribbean south to northern Argentina

While bananaquit might make a good, gentle put-down for someone who refuses to eat their fruits and veggies, the quit in bananaquit is not the verb meaning “to give up” but rather a noun referring to any of various small passerine birds (such as grassquits)of the West Indies, probably in imitation of their chirps and calls.

“They are adorable little birds. I just love watching them down in the islands. Hopping all about. What did you tell me their real name is?”
“Bananaquits. They’re called bananaquits. They fly down on your table while you are eating lunch, they eat the bread, they crap on the tablecloth …”
—Bob Morris, Bahamarama, 2007

Definition: any of a family (Dicruridae) of insectivorous passerine birds native to Africa, Asia, and Australia that usually have glossy black plumage and long forked tails

Drongo came to English in the mid-1800s from Malagasy, and in addition to referring to any number of related birds, is used insultingly in Australia to mean “stupid person.”

In the late afternoon I climbed from the beach to the top of the dune, past sea turtle tracks and nests along the way. At the top, a pair of drongos about the size of robins landed in a clump of heliotrope beside me, then flew off.
— Kevin Gepford, Smithsonian Magazine, 15 Apr. 2025

BRUNO DUNDRIDGE: Who do they think I am, some stupid Aussie drongo?
— “Bart vs. Australia,” The Simpsons (Season 6, Episode 16), 1995

Definition: : a bird of the genus Phoeniculus : wood hoopoe

Irrisor sounds like it could be a synonym of irritant. Both come from Latin, but have different roots. Irrisor in Latin means “mocker” or “scoffer,” and in turn comes from irrisus meaning “mockery” or “ridicule.” Irrisus also begat the now seldom-used English adjective irrisory, meaning “given to derision.”

The Irrisors are birds of generally metallic plumage, which have often bee placed … near the Sunbirds, or Birds of Paradise, but which are undoubtedly allied to the Hoopoes.
— Alfred Russel Wallace, The Geographical Distribution of Animals, 1876

Definition: a small Australian bird (Pedionomus torquatus) similar to the button quails

It’s not surprising that the preferred nom de “plume” for this endangered Australian bird is now plains-wanderer rather than the former plain wanderer. It’s bad enough to be known as a wanderer, but to be called “plain”?

The Plain-Wanderer is well named, because it is only found on grassy levels, and is thus separated from other quail-like birds, which are to be found in scrub, stubble or swamps. I have never heard, for instance, of one being seen in a stubble field.
— E. A. D’Ombrain, “The Vanishing Plain-Wanderer,” 1926

Definition: a crested large South American bird (Opisthocomos hoazin) with blue facial skin, red eyes, brown plumage marked with white above, and claws on the first and second digits of the wing when young

English speakers did this bird dirty when they dubbed it stinkbird, but to be fair they only did so after two centuries of using its Nahuatl-derived name, hoatzin, which is still more popular by far. Hoatzin ultimately comes from the Nahuatl huāctzin, which was used for a different bird, the laughing falcon.

Their faces are blue and featherless, their eyes are red and their tail-feathers gigantic, all the better to help these clumsy, stinky wonder-birds keep their balance when stumbling around the treetops. But why do stinkbirds stink? Well, they only eats leaves. A bit like a cow of the skies. Except stinkbirds are terrible flyers and regularly crash into trees or struggle to take off. That’s mostly down to their pendulous, oversized bellies that don’t leave enough space for well-developed flight muscles.
— Jason Temperton and Matt Reynolds, WIRED, 8 Dec. 2017

Definition: an African bird (Pluvianus aegyptius) that is related to the pratincoles

How would you like to be named for the grossest thing you’ve ever eaten? Thankfully, this bird also goes by other names, including crocodile bird and Egyptian plover, though both are misnomers. Leecheaters do not belong to the plover family, though they are related. Once thought to belong to a family of shorebirds including pratincoles, leecheaters now considered the sole species of the family Pluvianidae. And despite the account of Herodotus of the “trochilus”—sometimes thought to be the leecheater or one of several other birds—which flies into crocodiles’ mouths to feed, modern researchers consider the leecheater-crocodile relationship to be dubious.

Another of the plovers is the celebrated leech-eater … of the Nile, which was and is still said to act as attendant to the crocodile, freeing it from parasites of all sorts. This story appears in the writers of antiquity, but with some variations. The bird was said to live at peace with the reptile, and to go inside his mouth and pick off the leeches and pull the fragments of food from between his teeth.
— J. Sterling Kingsley, Nature’s Wonderland, or Short Talks on Natural History for Young and Old, 1893