Springwatch presenter says she doesn’t like calling African animals by their English names

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Spring watch presenter Gillian Burke has said she prefers to call animals by their traditional Swahili names rather than their English nicknames.

Burke, who was born in Kenya and now lives in Cornwall, joined the Springwatch team in 2016, shortly after Martin Hughes-Games claimed he had been sacked over diversity targets.

The biologist admitted she was uncomfortable calling animals by their English names, but acknowledged that naming could be “a useful storytelling tool.”

To write BBC Nature magazine Burke said the English names for East Africa’s “iconic” wild animals tended to “shock” when spoken out loud. “At least up to my ear,” she added.

“In my own writing, I prefer to reintroduce these well-known animals under their Swahili names,” Burke said.

“Ndovu (elephant), twiga (giraffe), fisi (hyena) and my personal favorite because I liked how my dad said it: kongoni (hartebeest).”

However, the presenter added that Swahili is a mixture of other languages ​​and that she would have to “dive deeper” to find the “real names of native animals”.

Burke wondered whether “we are unconsciously exercising some form of power by naming wild animals” and said there was an “inequality” in “who gets to do the naming.”

The Spring watch The presenter added Latin names for animals that served as a useful “anchor point” because “no matter where scientists are in the world, they know they are talking about the same species.”

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“This is all well and good,” she said. “But… what we call living things matters.”

It comes after Burke’s Spring watch co-presenter Chris Packham said he would no longer drink Heineken after the company felled thousands of trees in one of its orchards.

The BBC reported that thousands of apple trees had been felled at Penrhos Farm in Wales, which Packham called a “tragic waste of a fantastic resource”.

Speaking to Sky News, the presenter said Heineken’s decision to fell the trees to sell the land was “immoral”.

“In a biodiversity crisis, I would say it borders on unethical and certainly immoral, because such resources should be passed on to people who can use them to enrich nature and human life,” he said.

“I don’t drink it anymore because I think we want to have companies in our lives that take care of our planet and our future and that of our children.”