The Experience of Birding
I can’t decide what I like more, the Bald Ibis eggs for $25 or Kennard‘s offer to trade some extra Heath Hen skins he has lying around for “first-class” Passenger Pigeons.
Here’s a quiz: What is the “575a” that C.W. Chamberlain is offering to exchange?
Philadelphia is a big city, larger than any other conurbation on the East Coast than New York, and I’ve never managed to create the sort of mental map required to make me feel genuinely at home on our infrequent visits.
I’m trying.
And I’ve always found that one of the best ways to figure a place out is to select a figure, an event, or an institution and trace it through time and space. For the birder, the obvious choice is the work of Alexander Wilson, the 200th anniversary of whose death we’ll be celebrating in August.
So far, our desultory explorations have had me sniffing out the Wilson specimens that survive in the Academy of Natural Sciences, running across surprise encounters between Wilson and other famous Americans, and watching with caught breath as Wilson risks drowning for an oystercatcher specimen.
But this is one of the weirdest things yet.
Samuel Rhoads listed in his 1908-1909 catalogue of natural history books three copies of Wilson’s poem “The Foresters.” One of them, for which Rhoads demanded the princely sum of $3.00, was a presentation copy, given to a Philadelphia dentist, C. Walton, in March 1880 by Hannah Wright Cassin, the widow of none other than John Cassin, one of the shining lights of nineteenth century ornithology in Philadelphia and anywhere else.
Mrs. Cassin made the gift in memory of a walk along the Susquehannah taken, years before, by her husband and his friend. By choosing precisely this work of Wilson’s — subtitled by the author a “Description of a Pedestrian Journey to the Falls of Niagara” — she made explicit the line of intellectual descent from Wilson, the Father of American Ornithology, to Cassin, the equivalent great of his generation (Cassin was born two weeks after Wilson’s death in 1813). The book eventually made its way into the possession of Rhoads, the Haddonfield collector, ornithologist, and bibliophile book dealer — himself one of the founders of the DVOC.
I don’t know where the book is today, but I hope it sits, cared for and appreciated, on a shelf somewhere, still bearing witness a century and a quarter later to the way that ornithological knowledge used to be passed down through the generations, in Philadelphia and wherever birders gathered.
As the brother of three immensely talented and enormously capable (and all very different, thankfully) siblings, I know what it’s like to be in the shadows sometimes. Between them, there’s nothing my brother and my two sisters can’t help us out with — generously enough, not one of them has ever come back to me with the request for one of my skills. I’m sure I’ve got some, somewhere.
It must have been even tougher for John Ridgway, the younger brother of one of North America’s most famous and most productive ornithologists. An accomplished taxidermist and illustrator, John Ridgway worked at the National Museum and for the USGS; he is best known today, if at all, for the series of cards he painted for Singer Sewing Machines.
The short obituary that appeared in the Auk — more than six years after Ridgway’s death in 1947 — provides a list of some of the ornithological works that he illustrated. The color plates in Turner’s 1886 Alaska seem to have been a cooperative effort, signed by both John and Robert Ridgway:
The younger Ridgway alone was responsible for the paintings — old-fashioned but often dramatic — in Fisher’s Hawks and Owls of 1893:
Oddly enough, Palmer’s obituary leaves unmentioned the one great work for which serious birders still remember Ridgway. Charles Bendire‘s Life Histories began to appear in 1892; the two volumes that were completed and published remained the authoritative work of their kind until Bent (and then, of course, BNA).
The paintings were produced by Ridgway, whom Bendire praises for his “skill and painstaking care.” Joel A. Allen wrote that the plates were “[un]equalled in artistic effect or in faithfulness of execution,” while J.C. Merrill said simply “no superior work has ever been done.” Those encomia and others were cited by Harry Harris in 1927, in his account of an interview with Ridgway, who was then at the Los Angeles County Museum.
Harris adds his own assessment of the egg plates, “the outstanding and pre-eminent achievement in the entire field of oological illustration.” He may well be right, as a look at Ridgway’s paintings of the eggs (numbers 1-6) of the Common Nighthawk shows.
Bendire calls “the egg of the Nighthawk one of the most difficult ones known to [him] to describe satisfactorily.” The eggs differ “endlessly” in shape, ground color, and markings, a range of variation Ridgway’s painting captures very well indeed — and probably better than his more famous brother could have done.
In January 1842, eighteen-year-old Spencer Fullerton Baird wrote to his brother William with a request:
[J.P.] Giraud here [in New York] has thought that there is a permanent distinction between the large & small Black heads and has commenced a description of the smaller kind as Fuligula Minor…. the small one has the black on the lower abdomen, about the anus finely undulate, while the large one has it in spots, & … the large ones have a white spot at the base of the under mandible on the chin which the other has not. These … two characters I want you to examine those in the Washington markets and let me know.
Before the late 1830s, it doesn’t appear to have occurred to anyone that the New World might in fact have two species of scaup.
In 1835, Audubon, in the Ornithological Biography, went out of his way, as so often he did, to point out the inadequacy of some of Wilson’s earlier work on the species:
The opinion, derived from Wilson’s account of the Scaup Duck, that it is met with only along our sea coasts, in bays, or in the mouths of rivers, as far as the tide extends, is incorrect. Had Wilson resided in the Western Country, or seen our large lakes and broad rivers during late autumn, winter, or early spring, he would have had ample opportunities of observing thousands of this species, on the Ohio, the Missouri, and the Mississippi, from Pittsburg to New Orleans. I have shot a good number of Scaup Ducks on all these rivers….
Wilson gave the length of his “blue bill” as 19 inches.
Audubon, thanks to his greater experience, was able to note “that specimens may be procured measuring from sixteen and a half to eighteen, nineteen, or twenty inches in length,” a significant range of variation in a duck — but he assures his reader nonetheless that scaup “seen in various parts presented no such differences as to indicate permanent varieties.”
Just a few years later, Giraud disagreed. In addition to the subtle marks William Baird was to confirm in the market stalls of Washington, D.C., Giraud had discovered that the size difference between the two apparently different species was consistent; he also showed Baird that
in the smaller ones the white band on the wing is distinctly of that color only on the secondaries & not extending to the primaries as on the large one…. the inside of the bill is dark in the small one & whitish in the large…. the small one is most tufted and has a purplish reflection on the head instead of a greenish one.
By 1844, Giraud had convinced himself that these differences rose to the level of a specific distinction, and his famous Birds of Long Island offers a full description of what he names the Lesser Scaup Duck, Fuligula minor.
What Giraud in those pre-internet days did not know was that another ornithologist had got there first. T.C. Eyton admitted in his 1838 Monograph on the Anatidae that he “entertained considerable doubts as to the propriety of making [it] into a species”; but the differences he discovered between this new bird and the familiar Greater Scaup were “constant”:
total length less; bill shorter and not so broad; nail much narrower, and not so much rounded at its sides; tarsi shorter.
And so, 175 years ago this year, Eyton described the “American Scaup” as new, under the weaselly name Fuligula affinis:
similar to the preceding species [the Greater Scaup] but with a shorter bill furnished with a narrower nail.
As late as 1922, Ludlow Griscom included the two scaup among the “birds which it is practically impossible to distinguish in life,” a remark — published in the Auk — that seems very curious indeed when we realize that almost a hundred years earlier both Giraud and Eyton had published precisely those characters birders routinely use today: head shape, bill shape, nail size, wing pattern.
But the real historic irony lurks in Audubon’s painting. There is only one species of scaup, he tells us — and then paints birds that are obviously Lesser Scaup avant la lettre.
The photograph at the top of this entry is of a flock of Aythya ducks at the Jersey shore yesterday. Can you identify them?
