A Teratological Pub Name

The other day in Stockport town centre, i noticed the curiously-named pub "The Swan With Two Necks". A quick google of the name reveals that there are several other pubs with that name in various places in England, seemingly centred around the Cheshire/Lancashire area (with outliers in Leeds and Staffordshire).

This intrigued me, as dicephalic (two-headed) vertebrates of many species have been documented - the commonest being snakes and turtles, but the condition (actually an extreme form of conjoined twins) has also been recorded in several mammal species, including cattle, sheep, cats and several human examples, the most famous (and the only one i know of to live to adulthood) being Abigail and Brittany Hensel. (In mammals, particularly cats, "two-headed" specimens are actually more often "two-faced" animals with craniofacial duplication, which are not "twins" and have a single brain; however, these lambs (as well as the Hensel twins of course) appear to be genuinely two-headed, with complete separate skulls and necks. Karl Shuker posts on "Janus cats" here, and on two-headed snakes here.)

However, i have never read a report of, or seen a photo of either a live or preserved specimen of, a two-headed bird. The double-headed eagle is a common heraldic symbol, and the Gandaberunda is a two-headed bird (of unspecified species, although the depictions of it i've seen look vaguely galliform to me) from Hindu mythology, but there is no evidence that either was inspired by real specimens of two-headed birds. There appears to be a report from 1894 of a two-headed partridge (unfortunately behind a paywall), and i vaguely remember a thread on a cryptozoology forum a few years ago about a possible sighting of a two-headed finch/sparrow/something similar in a US garden (with a blurry, inconclusive photo, and many people concluding the second "head" was actually some sort of abnormal feather growth producing a ball-shaped mass), but that's about all i've been able to find.

(There was also the spectacular fossil of a two-headed reptile found in 2006, which was erroneously called a "two-headed dinosaur" in some news stories, but was in fact a choristoderan, a fairly obscure group of extinct reptiles whose position in the greater reptile family tree is uncertain, but which are definitely not dinosaurs, avian or otherwise.)

Getting back to the pub name, this site claims that the origin of the pub name is not teratological, but comes from a tradition of marking ownership of swans by marking their bills and a corruption of "nicks" into "necks". This sounds a bit like one of those rather dodgy "folk etymologies" to me, but it does offer a possible explanation why it's "The Swan With Two Necks", as opposed to heads (which would seem to be the more obvious wording to describe a dicephalic animal, at least in English...)

The sign of "The Swan With Two Necks" in Stockport somewhat disappointingly features an "ordinary" (if somewhat tubby!), one-necked Mute Swan (Cygnus olor), which possibly favours the "nicks" theory for the name:



However, this sign looks relatively new, and there is also a stained-glass window on the front of the pub (presumably dating back to its original construction), which actually does show a two-necked (and -headed) swan, very much reminiscent of the Hyphalosaurus fossil:



(The one in Pendleton, Lancashire also seems to feature a dicephalic swan on its sign, as far as i can tell from this photo.)

So... could there ever have actually been a dicephalic swan? It seems unlikely that if dicephaly did ever occur in such a well-known species it would have gone unrecorded, considering the number of species it has been recorded in... but it doesn't seem theoretically impossible for such an animal to be born, given that the majority of the vertebrate species in which dicephaly has been recorded are egg-laying (although perhaps not with such solid eggs as those of a large bird). If dicephaly did occur in birds, one would expect it to have been documented in domestic chickens or ducks, and for this to be as common knowledge as it is in snakes, turtles, lambs, calves, etc. - so i'm inclined to conclude that the pub name is either a pun or derived from some historical fancy, rather than commemorating a genuine "Swan With Two Necks" that physically existed - but you never know...

Anyone know of any other pubs with teratological or cryptozoological names?

Greenshank or Marsh Sandpiper?

I saw and photographed this bird on April 2nd at Lymington in Hampshire. It's clearly a wader of the genus Tringa, which includes such species as the Redshank, Greenshank and various "sandpipers" (a generic term for any smallish, slim-built wader which encompasses species in many genera), but which one?



I posted the above pictures on BirdForum, saying:

Greenshank seems the nearest thing to this in my field guide, but i'm a bit uncertain because of the following:

a) the legs look grey rather than green

b) the field guide [The Hamlyn Guide to Birds of Britain and Europe, 1989 edition] describes Greenshank as "our largest and most robust Tringa". This bird was chased off by a Redshank, running right behind it, and looked just about exactly the same size, but if anything slimmer and more "fragile" looking (also slightly longer-necked and -legged, but my guess would be it weighed less than the Redshank).

When it flew away it had a very noticeable white rump and tail (looked all plain white, no visible barring, to me).

The other possible species suggested by people on BirdForum was Marsh Sandpiper, which is a fairly rare species in Britain, unlike the relatively commonplace Greenshank. However, the Redshank-sized bird i saw seems to fall awkwardly between Greenshank and Marsh Sandpiper in size (the Hamlyn Guide gives total length figures of 31cm for Greenshank, 27cm for Redshank and 23cm for Marsh Sandpiper).

There were lots of Redshanks about, which seemed fairly bold and aggressive, in contrast to this bird which seemed wary, timid and solitary.

I wasn't able to post my one photo with the "mystery Tringa sp." in the same frame as the Redshank on BirdForum because of their file size limits on attachments, but a BirdForum member called Pete Wragg sent me a message saying:

Hello,
I'm still not totally convinced this bird is not a Marsh Sandpiper.
Could you please e-mail me the picture with this bird and the Redshank in it.

Apologies to Pete for taking so long to respond, but here is the picture:


As you can see, the birds are at very different distances from the camera so a size comparison isn't particularly easy - however, i'll reiterate that when the Redshank chased the mystery bird off, they were beak to tail and looked very nearly exactly the same size, with the unidentified bird being perhaps a little taller and longer-necked than the Redshank, but making up for that with its slightly slenderer build.

After the responses my thought is that this bird was probably just a Greenshank at the small end of the species' size range (i'm assuming that birds, like people, do have "small", "medium" and "large" individuals within species, as i have observed in larger birds such as gulls and ducks), but it still seems like some doubt remains... any thoughts?

(edit: interestingly, not long after mine, there was another "Greenshank or Marsh Sandpiper?" ID debate on BirdForum here...)