Here’s to You, Mrs. Robinson

Anna’s Hummingbird

It’s no great revelation to point out that there are lots of birds named for women.

There are also lots of birds named for men.

Rivoli’s Hummingbird (remember?)

That seems only fair — but in fact there are some significant asymmetries in the ways that women and men have been assigned the role of eponym. The men thus honored have often collected or described or painted or identified the bird in whose name they are commemorated. It’s different for women: in the great majority of cases, the giving of their name to a bird is nothing more than a gallant gesture, a sentimental gift to someone who is thereby summed up as the wife or the daughter or the mother of an ornithologist or an artist.

To make matters worse, the men who named the birds almost invariably used only the first names of the women they meant to honor, infantilizing them and making it that much more difficult for us looking back to be sure in any given case that we’ve found the right Grace or Virginia or Anna.

Some of the brightest examples of such difficulties are provided by the names of hummingbirds. All through the nineteenth century, and into our own day, too, those feathered jewels have been more closely associated with the feminine than any other birds, a gendering that is immediately obvious just by a look at their nomenclatural history: there are dozens upon dozens of hummingbirds named for women, giving the family Trochilidae a higher percentage of female eponyms than any other.

Many of those women, too, are identifiable — if at all — only by their relationship to the namer. But every once in a while we run across one whose individuality has survived.

In 1895, the National Museum of Natural History at the Smithsonian received a lot of 200 bird skins collected on Venezuela’s Isla Margarita. Among the birds were eight specimens of an Amazilia hummingbird apparently unknown to science. The collector, Wirt Robinson, later recounted the circumstances of his discovery: on July 4, 1895, such birds

became more abundant until when I had reached the perpetual clouds that hung about the peak and entered an atmosphere of mist, they were seen in all directions. The type specimen, a finely plumaged male, I shot from a mango tree as I sat in its shade drinking the milk of a cocoanut. It [the bird, I assume, and not the “cocoanut”] fell within a few feet of me and was at once seized by a wandering chicken which made off at full speed followed by me in hot pursuit. Fortunately there were no thorns to impede me, and although I broke down a banana plant in my headlong chase, I pressed the chicken so closely that it finally dropped my prize.

At the Smithsonian, Charles W. Richmond wrote the formal description of the new species, which he named Amazilia aliciae, “in honor of Mrs. Robinson.”

A few years later, Ernst Hartert reclassified Robinson’s discovery as just a subspecies of the Copper-rumped Hummingbird, and Alice’s Hummingbird and Alice Robinson alike slipped from birders’ memories.

flickr photo: John van Noate

Anita Alice Mathilde Phinney Henderson (1860-1918) was thirty years old when she married Wirt Robinson; it was her second marriage. A woman of background and breeding — the New York Times regularly reported on her activities — she could have stayed at home while her husband, soldier, “ardent sportsman, fisherman, and naturalist,” traveled the Americas in search of birds.

She didn’t.

In 1892, Robinson and her husband (in the old days, we’d have written “Alice”) set out on a voyage to South America. The trip was (if we are to believe Wirt) her idea: tired one evening of listening to him complain about how dull the birding was around West Point, she responded simply, “Well, why don’t we go to the tropics sometime?” Her brother-in-law, Cabell Robinson, joined the party, and on June 11, the trio embarked for Colombia.

Only the men were seasick. Once ashore, though, everyone shared in all the discomforts of travel on the frontier: in one ironically named inn, the Consuelo, the Robinsons

were given a little room in which were two wooden frames with cowhides stretched over them for beds. These we found to be swarming with fleas, bedbugs, and a kind of flying roach an inch and a half long, so we spent a wakeful night, tormented by bites.

In those days before cipro, Cabell and Wirt were more or less continuously ill, but Alice, other than feeling faint and hungry after a sleepless, vermin-plagued night, seems to have been more robust — until, in mid-July, she contracted malaria. Quinine helped, as no doubt did the forced relaxation of the three days’ return voyage to Curaçao, and by the time the ship arrived there, she was well enough to join her husband on a sightseeing drive before reboarding for the homeward cruise.

At sundown on August 4, 1892, the Robinsons passed Barnegat Light, and their “flying trip” to South America ended in New York the next morning. Alice Robinson seems to have recovered from her fever, and it was back to society-page life as normal: dinner parties in Newport, visits to family, golf outings in Virginia.

I don’t know whether that normality included any more ornithological expeditions with her husband, and neither do I know how she died at so very young an age. Alice Robinson was not mentioned in her husband’s NYT obituary, most likely because he had remarried, and doesn’t appear to have merited one of her own. Only a little bird even reminds us that she lived.

Note that I have been able to find no evidence supporting Jobling’s identification of Alice Robinson as the eponym of another hummingbird, Aglaeactis aliciae. Stay tuned for more about that one.