The first English settlers to arrive on the shores of North America — after a long, grueling and dangerous voyage on the open sea — were greeted with a cacophony of unfamiliar sights, sounds, and experiences. They may have been relieved to have survived the trip but once on land and beginning the process of clearing trees and building shelters, one has to imagine the hollow desperation many of them must have fought to keep at bay.

In this wilderness, thousands of miles from homeland, tradition, and family, struggling perhaps with homesickness and depression, anything familiar must have been an incredible comfort.

Luckily for them, there were birds that would have provided those touchstones back to home.

As they neared the coast of the New World, the adventurers began seeing birds like Atlantic puffins, murres, and certainly herring gulls — all species that sailors and coastal inhabitants of England would have been familiar with since all of these species are still found in or near England.  Others that occur in both the Old and New Worlds include the common loon (though all loons are called “divers” in England), ducks like common goldeneyes and black and white-winged scoters, and the raven.

Some bird species were new to these settlers but would have reminded them of birds back home. The robin back in England was a familiar bird of yard and garden, and so they applied the name to the bird that we know today as the American robin, a bird more similar to some of the larger Old World thrushes like the fieldfare and the mistle thrush than their more bluebird sized “robin.”

At some point the name “buzzard,” which back in England was (and still is) the official name for certain hawks, was applied to the totally unrelated turkey vulture and black vulture here. And although the name was never applied as the official name for our vultures, it is still widely used by the general public here in the U.S. to describe them. The English “blackbird” is actually a thrush, while the name applied to mostly all-black birds here in North America has left us with a legacy of a family of birds found only in the New World that are also officially called “blackbirds.”

We can imagine that our beloved black-capped chickadee may have seemed incredibly familiar to new English settlers as the willow tit and coal tit of Europe; they look remarkably similar even if their calls are different. The barn swallow of Europe also looks virtually the same as the North American barn swallow, though it may not have been as widespread in those early years, before human-made structures, which they now use for nesting, were very common.

In contrast, although Europeans were familiar with doves, the first sighting of immense flocks of passenger pigeons that inhabited North America at that time must have been both breathtaking and perhaps shockingly unfamiliar. The sight of a ruby-throated hummingbird surely amazed people from a land where there are no hummingbirds. Turkeys are another bird that might have startled early settlers—at least until they realized that such a bird would make a life-saving meal. No doubt the site of turkeys after that became welcomed!

Jeffrey V. Wells, Ph.D., is a Fellow of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. Dr. Wells is one of the nation's leading bird experts and conservation biologists and author of the “Birder’s Conservation Handbook.” His grandfather, the late John Chase, was a columnist for the Boothbay Register for many years. Allison Childs Wells, formerly of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, is a senior director at the Natural Resources Council of Maine, a nonprofit membership organization working statewide to protect the nature of Maine. Both are widely published natural history writers and are the authors of the popular book, “Maine’s Favorite Birds” (Tilbury House) and the recently released “Birds of Aruba, Bonaire, and Curaçao” from Cornell University Press.