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It's an interesting one and my other special interest is birds, so it's especially interesting for me. I think there's just about enough to say that windhover is a later bowdlerisation; "fuck" has been offensive in English for a very long time.
Coda: There's a separate debate about "windsucker", which appears at almost the same time as "windfucker". Nobody is sure whether it's a bowdlerisation too, or whether "windfucker" is a misreading of a long s when it was written "windſucker", which was then the accepted style for non-word-final S.
Given the long history of fuck, I suspect the claimed derivation of windfucker is also bowdlerised, fwiw - it seems more straightforward to me that kestrels simply look like they're fucking an invisible mate in mid-air.
Jan 27, 2026 11:40Potentially. A lot of bird/nature terms were a lot less polite than we would consider to be proper nowadays - wheatear, for instance, is simply "white-arse".
