No, this animal has nothing to do with the vine of the same name whose fruit cones, called hop cones, give the flavor to our beer. Hoopoe is a bird, and it gets its name from the sound it makes. The word ‘hop’ is therefore a so-called onomatopoeia, a name that refers to a sound.
It is a nice phenomenon, which we also find in many other animal species such as the cuckoo, the black-tailed godwit and the chiffchaff, who make it easy for the novice birdwatcher by simply calling their own name. So when you hear a piercing ‘hoop-oop-oop’ (usually three times ‘oop’) from a distance in central France or Spain in the summer, it is the courtship call of a hoopoe.
In English they call him fall asleepwhich is even closer to the sound and Linnaeus gave the animal the genus name in 1758 Upupawhich when you pronounce the ‘u’ as ‘oe’ also turns out to be perfect onomatopoeia.
Old World
Hoopoes are birds of the Old World. There are three species, of which the species that occurs in Europe and Asia has by far the largest distribution area. The other two have a smaller area, respectively in sub-Saharan Africa and Madagascar. ‘Our’ hops can be found from Portugal in the west to the coast of Russia north of Korea in the far east.
They are migratory birds, migrating south in early autumn and returning to breed in early spring. It does not come very far north – the Netherlands and Belgium fall outside the breeding area, but occasionally a vagrant can be found. Like on March 24 of this year, when a hoopoe suddenly appeared on the Klein Bylaer estate west of Barneveld.
It was the first observation of 2023 in the Netherlands. The early bird flew too far immediately resulted in thirteen entries on the website observation.nl and a news item in the Barneveld newspaper. Unfortunately, it will not come to a breeding case here, but with the slow warming of the climate you never know in the future.
The perfect bird
There is no arguing regarding taste, but personally I think the hoopoe is one of the most beautiful birds that we can see on our continent. Admittedly, bee-eaters and rollers may be there too, not to mention nuthatches, but the hoopoe forms with its enormous slightly curved tweezer beak, the large crest with black tips, the black and white of the wings and tail and the fifty shades of pink- like light brown of the rest of the body for me the perfect bird.
When the crest is folded, it almost forms a mirror image of the beak and that makes the head in side view a kind of pointed hammer. The hoopoe frantically pierces its beak into the ground in search of beetles, worms, leatherjackets, grubs, snails and other edible squirrels. A fanatically piercing hoopoe in the lawn in front of my tent on a small campsite in the Haute-Vienne west of Limoges is one of my fondest bird memories.
Jelle Reumer is a paleontologist. Every week he discusses an animal that makes the news for Trouw.
