Archive for October, 2011
Over at the ABA Blog Today
Posted by: | CommentsA review of the new Stokes Guide. I like it very much.
More Rain, More Fungi
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Mills Reservation, Essex County. Looks like a gingerbread wafer, but I couldn’t tell you how it tastes.
Cooper, Wilson, and Trudeau Walk Onto a Bar…
Posted by: | Comments… a sandbar, that is, on the coast of New Jersey. What could they possibly find to talk about?
What Alexander Wilson, William Cooper, and James Trudeau have in common is that each provides the eponym for a bird first described from a New Jersey specimen.
Wilson gets a plover and a warbler. Cooper gets a hawk. And Trudeau, said by Audubon to have come from Louisiana (the sources make no mention of any banjo on his knee), is memorialized in the English and scientific names of a tern.
Trudeau’s Tern, now also known as Snowy-crowned Tern, presents a unique case in the history of North American ornithology. Audubon, in his description of the species in the Ornithological Biography, says that his “much esteemed and talented friend” had collected the bird he painted from a group of a few birds found at Great Egg Harbor, now in Atlantic County. Thus, the type locality for the species is Great Egg Harbor, New Jersey.
But here’s where it gets strange. The AOU Check-list Committee, after the species had been included for well over a century in the authentic avifauna of North America, removed it in the Seventh Edition to the appendix of “Species reported from the A.O.U. check-list area with insufficient evidence for placement on the main list.” As a result, Sterna trudeaui is cited from a type locality in North America–but not admitted to the North American list, thanks to doubts about the bird’s provenance.
I don’t know that there is a parallel case anywhere in the history of ornithological nomenclature. Can you think of one?
Thanks to Ted and to Jennifer.
King of the Dunes
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It’s no surprise that the dunes of Sandy Hook are a favored stopover for open-country birds such as the lone Vesper Sparrow that I found here yesterday. But I’m always taken aback at the variety of woodland birds that pass through these scrubby habitats.
Golden-crowned Kinglets were everywhere yesterday; my estimate at day’s end was 75, and that was surely low. I’m not sure I was ever out of earshot of their slightly annoying little lisps, at least not until I headed out to the open beach, where not even these feisty little creatures could follow.
I Saw A Bird I Couldn’t Misidentify
Posted by: | CommentsNo matter what the really good birders out there say, everybody sees birds they can’t identify. That spiky-tailed sparrow disappearing into the spartina marsh? The white terns popping in and out of the horizon haze? A swallow barely glimpsed as it falls beneath the distant treeline?
Today at Sandy Hook, I suppose I could have called the sparrow Le Conte’s (even though the only Ammodramus I had great looks at were two Nelson’s Sparrows), the terns Antarctic (even though Forster’s Terns were out there in decent numbers), the swallow a Mangrove (even though I scanned and scanned, but could find only Tree Swallows). In other words, I could easily have misidentified any number of birds.
That’s the way it is: even if we can’t strictly, rigorously, certainly identify a bird, we almost always see enough and know enough to misidentify it. But this afternoon, as I was scoping the horizon and enjoying Northern Gannets and Black and Surf Scoters, something flew through my field of view that I couldn’t figure out. At all.
The bird seemed to be smallish; it was clearly and significantly smaller than the Great Black-backed Gull that was in the same scope (but farther out)–but then again, what isn’t? It was all dark, above and below, with no contrasting wing linings, wing panels, rump patches, or belly. The tail seemed quite short, but I couldn’t make out the shape at all. The wings were moderately long, rather narrow and slightly swift-like but blunt-tipped. The wingbeat was powerful, fast, slightly fluttery, and elastic, all in all quite swallow-like; the bird flapped six or seven times just above the surface of the water, then arced up several yards above the horizon to glide back down, a pattern it repeated the whole time I had it in view.
And that’s all I saw, and that’s all I know. Suggestions, suspicions, scoffing all equally welcome.
There’s an awful lot of water out there.
