I’d have guessed that “dowitcher”, like “finch” goes back to Old English, or at least Middle English, like “snipe”. It’s a fun word to say that seems appropriate for a shorebird that is slightly frumpy and can be extremely difficult to identify to species. According to the W2, the Webster’s unabridged dictionary of 1934, it is not an old English word at all but a borrowing from the Iroquoian language family.
I was interested that it took so long for the OED to catch onto this bird: the first edition takes no notice of “dowitcher” at all. The first supplement, of 1933, speculates, for reasons unclear, that the word comes from “Deutscher”, meaning something German. Finally the second supplement, which came out in the nineteen seventies and eighties, adopted the etymology of the W2. I’d like to know more about the Iroquoian word and how that connection was discovered, but I don’t think I have adequate sources to hand.
Witmer Stone (in Bird Studies at Old Cape May, published in 1937) writes that hunters on the Jersey Shore called it the Sea Pigeon. That’s another right sounding name, particularly so when people were still in the habit of eating them. He also refers to the two varieties, now held to be full species, as Eastern Dowitcher and Long-billed Dowitcher, and in his taxonomy called the Long-billed a subspecies scolopaceus of the nominate species Limnodromus griseus. Somewhere along the line, a committee decided that Short-billed Dowitcher paired better with Long-billed Dowitcher.
I have decided to meet the great renaming of North American birds with an open mind. The uncertainties and flexibility to be found in the most important ornithological and etymological sources fortifies me in this attitude. Stone is a wonderful source of old names, as well as birding anecdote. Perhaps sometime I’ll discuss his account of the Green Heron and the “offensive local names” alluded to as burdening that “interesting personality”.
Not Merely For Fun 