Tell Me Something New
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It’s not much more than a month and this globe will start its slow tilt north. With the gradually lengthening days, the birds will start to feel their oats, and by New Year’s, Northern Cardinals like this one will be in fine fettle, singing and dancing — and banging into windows and car mirrors across eastern North America.
You can set your calendar by it: come early January, my e-box will start to sprout exasperated notes from birders and others who want to know why their local cardinals are so intent on knocking themselves out. The answer’s the same every year, of course. It’s about sex.
As it turns out, cardinals have been at it (pecking on windows, I mean) for a very long time.
In fact, the first European illustration of the species, in good old Aldrovandi’s Ornithologiae, is accompanied by the account of a cardinal kept by his learned colleague in Pisa, Francesco Malocchio:
if the bird sees its image in a mirror, it behaves piteously. Making little noises, depressing its crest, raising its tail like a peacock, and fluttering its wings, it pecks at the surface of the mirror with its bill. [my translation]
So far as I know, this is the first report in history of a bird defending its territory against its own studly reflection. Aldrovandi doesn’t tell us, unfortunately, whether Malocchio rewarded the valiant warrior with a mate.
2 Comments
November 16th, 2012 at 7:09 pm
Send me one, will ya?
November 17th, 2012 at 7:23 am
Robb asks: “Any idea why he called it Coccothraustes Indica (“Indian Grosbeak”)?”
Here’s what he says [my translation]:
“A few days ago Francesco Malocchio, director of the Botanical Garden in Pisa, sent me a drawing of this bird, from life, as His Serenity Duke Ferdinand had ordered him to do. Malocchio says that in its native range, which is certainly the island called Cape Verde, it is popularly called Frusone, a name very similar to our Frisone, the bird described in the previous chapter, the Hawfinch. Its bill is very similar, but surrounded by a black mark, and, as Jerome Mercurialis reports, it is the size of a thrush. And so it was fitting to call it the Indian hawfinch, coccothraustes indica.”
Entirely logical if you accept that it’s similar to a hawfinch and that Cape Verde is in India!
Aldrovandi is also an early source for the name “Cardinal” for this bird:
“Mercurialis says that it is called Cardinalitium by the Portuguese, probably because it is scarlet and seems to be wearing a scarlet cap.”