A Book Review
By · CommentsOver at the ABA Blog today, with a review of Thomas R. Dunlap’s In the Field, Among the Feathered. Let me know what you think.
Your Birding Ancestry
By · CommentsOne of the most interesting questions in modern birding is that of intellectual heritage: How and by whom are birding knowledge, culture, and ethics passed down?
Help me think about this by answering two easy questions:
1. Who was your birding mentor?
2. Who was that person’s birding mentor?
You may need to talk to the answer to the first before you can answer the second. But it will be worth it.
Birding Course at Westfield Adult School
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Want to enjoy birding even more? Join me this spring at the Westfield Adult School for a new course. We’ll be meeting two Monday evenings for lecture and discussion, followed by a Saturday morning field trip to try out our new skills.
You can register here. See you in March!
Cottontops
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Scaled Quail in Willcox, Arizona. Note that the habitat in this photo is lacking what one thinks of as certain critical features: no cars up on blocks, no abandoned washing machines, no steaming meth labs.
Callipepla squamata, to use the mellifluous scientific name, is the type species of its genus; “calli” means beautiful, as in “beautiful writing” or “calligraphy,” and “pepla” is from a Greek word for cloak, as in “beautifully cloaked bird” or “Phainopepla.” “Squamata” is the same as the English adjective “squamate,” of course, “scaled.”
In 1832, Wagler, unaware that the species had already been named by Vigors two years earlier, (re)described it under the epithet strenua, meaning active or bold, as in Horace’s famous oxymoron “strenua inertia.” Coincidentally enough, Wagler’s German name for the genus, “Schuppenhuhn,” takes up Vigors’s original epithet, which together give us the English name of the bird.
More than you wanted to know? Then get up from the computer and go birding!
