I added collective nouns to the animals featured in my last post and realise now that a lot of these names sound the way they mean, or describe how the group looks, or how they move or what they do. Had you heard that a group of crows or rooks or ravens is called “a storytelling?” Crows here, in Australia, are particularly talkative. I need to listen up!
Words have sounds, rhythms and quirkiness in them. As a ten year old, some of my weekly homework consisted of learning lists of words, by heart, from a cloth – bound edition of First Aid in English by Angus Mciver, a Scots headmaster (published in 1938 and still in print). Besides learning similes. plurals and tenses, we learned collective nouns. Fridays were test days and the competition was stiff. Here’s a few reminders –
A brace of deer ( two).
One jellyfish does not make a smack!
Living up to their name, a paddling of ducks.
Goats gather in trips. “Trip trap! Trip trap! Big Billy Goat Gruff?
A bale of turtles?
A school of dolphins – had these been porpoises this would have been a turmoil.
Lamentations of swans.
(6 swans a-swimming) 
A Springtime flock with the odd black sheep.
Is this a brood? Might it be a ‘cuddle’ of ducklings? I know they hatch from a clutch of eggs…
Thankfully, I have only ever seen a trogle of snakes on TV. During the North American Spring, harmless Garter snakes emerge from hibernation, en masse! If you’re brave, see it here
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D5B5a9pWPH0
And, just in case you’ve never seen a murmuration of starlings, here’s a clip from Gretna Green in Scotland.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M1Q-EbX6dso
All text and photos by Meg
Story Twigs the Imagination! by Meg Philp is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
