Today marks the bicentennial of the death of Pierre Sonnerat, explorer and author of important early works on the natural history of New Guinea and Indochina.
Sonnerat was the nephew of Pierre Poivre (yes, the original Peter Piper) and the artistic assistant to Philibert Commerson, linking him to some of the most influential naturalists of his day.
Like Commerson and Poivre, Sonnerat was primarily a botanist — he even has an entire family of plants named for him (though apparently, fide our friends at Wikipedia, the Sonneratiaceae have now been lumped with the loosestrifes). The reports of his voyages to the east, though, are full of enthusiastic, colorful, and in part perhaps fictitious accounts of all sorts of natural phenomena, including, of course, birds.
Sonnerat gave us, for example, the first image and description of the bird Scopoli would later name Columba luzonica, the Luzon Bleeding-heart: “it looks as if,” he rather vividly writes, this snow-white pigeon
had been stabbed with a knife and its own blood stained the feathers around the wound.
He was equally impressed by the kingfishers of the Asian tropics (“Europe,” he notes,”I believe has only one species”). His account of the family’s dining habits reflects some close observation and considerable admiration for these birds:
They all live from fish, which they capture by diving rapidly from the branches where they wait until some fish appear at the surface of the water; whereupon the kingfisher drops with precision onto its prey and seizes it in its beak without letting any other part of its body so much as touch the water…. If by chance a perched kingfisher drops its fish from the branch, it is so quick in its movements that it can catch its prey again before it falls any great distance. There are no other birds so fast of flight, so rapid of movement, or so keen of vision.
Sonnerat’s observations on the puzzling distribution of parrots leads him to meditate on island zoogeography:
While on the Asian continent one finds the same species spread across great distances and covering a very wide range, each of the islands where one finds parrots harbors one or more species that are unique to it and not found on other islands even in the same archipelago, however short the distance from one to the other. But it is not as if these birds were sluggish or capable of only brief flights…. And how is it, moreover, that when the archipelagos were formed, which can only be parts of the continent torn off and separated by revolutionary events, and when the islands of which they are composed were separated one from the other, there were not at the moment of revolution individuals of a single species scattered throughout the areas that would form those separate islands? Should we say that those species perished in certain areas but survived in certain others? What possible support could there be for such an assertion? Should we look to the influence of the climate or food? Those two conditions are not and cannot be sufficiently different in areas so close to each other, sharing the same sky and the same fruits, as to produce the changes and alterations that one would have to attribute to them. There must be another explanation, but I leave the question to the debates of other naturalists….
In the case of some species, Sonnerat was of a decidedly practical bent. Noting that the Secretarybird, in spite of its chicken-like bill, happily hunted rats, he suggested that
it could be useful in our colonies, and would probably not be difficult to breed there.
In 1790, Sonnerat was named Commander of Yanaon, in French India; three years later, that city fell to the British, and Sonnerat was imprisoned in Madras. He was not released until 1813, when he returned to France — only to die on his return to Paris on the last day of March 1814.
Today, Sonnerat lives on in the scientific names given to the Greater Green Leafbird, the Banded Bay Cuckoo, and the Gray Junglefowl. His reputation has suffered as errors and outright fabrications have been discovered in his works: the Secretarybird, for instance, could not have come from anywhere near the Philippines, and that notorious Kookaburra — which Sonnerat claimed to have discovered in New Guinea — is now thought to have been based on a stuffed bird given to him by Joseph Banks.
But as Denys Lombard put it in the Bulletin de l’Ecole française d’Extrême-Orient,
The fact that Sonnerat was not an objective observer, sometimes even unscrupulous, hardly matters in the end…. [He was active] on the dividing line between two worlds, motivated by the desire for scientific discovery and anxious to join the learned societies of London and Paris, but at the same time pragmatic and eager for conquest.
As such, Sonnerat was a characteristic figure of his time, and one well worth remembering, at least once a year.
