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Cumbria memorializes a famous native son in a limestone tower, designed to recall a lighthouse but more closely resembling, to some eyes at least, a pepper grinder.
I’d like to believe that Sir John Barrow, who was born near Ulverston 250 years ago today, would appreciate more the feathered monuments to his long and richly varied life.
As most Northern Hemisphere birders know, Barrow is the English-language eponym of one of the handsomest of the mergine ducks. Richardson named the bird Anas Barrovii in the Fauna boreali-americana
as a tribute to Mr. Barrow’s varied talents, and his unwearied exertions for the promotion of science.
A high functionary in the British Admiralty, Barrow was a great promoter of Arctic exploration. Though he never saw the American high latitudes himself, his contributions are commemorated in a couple of famous place names, and thus, indirectly, in another bird of Alaska’s Arctic, the glaucous gull named barrovianus by Robert Ridgway in 1886.
Barrow’s career took him to China and South Africa, destinations every bit as exotic as the far north. After returning from Africa, Barrow wrote a memoir of his time there,
in which are described the character and the condition of the Dutch colonists of the Cape of Good Hope, and of the several tribes beyond its limits: the natural history of such subjects as occurred in the animal, mineral, and vegetable kingdoms; and the geography of the southern extremity of Africa,
among other topics. Of greatest interest to birders is the account of a kind of bustard,
much the finest bird we had hitherto met with in Southern Africa, and which, though sufficiently common, is not described in the Systema Naturae. It is called here the wilde pauwe, or wild peacock…. The bird in question is a species of otis, and it is nearly as large as the Norfolk bustard…. the spread of the wings seen feet, and the whole length of the bird three feet and an [sic] half.
It’s clear that Barrow was intimately familiar with this bird:
the flesh is exceedingly good, with a high flavor of game.
Sometime before 1823, John Latham discovered two “most beautifully executed drawings” of a hitherto unknown bustard in the collections of John Dent. Latham suspected that the bird depicted might be “the Wild Pauw, or Wild Peacock, of Barrow’s Travels.” He named it the blue-necked bustard, an English name taken over by John Edward Gray in the species accounts he prepared for Whittaker’s Animal Kingdom in 1829.
Gray, too, was uncertain whether Barrow’s description was of the bird seen in Dent’s drawings. Whether it was the same species or not, Gray named it after its (possible) discoverer, Otis Barrowii.
Barrow’s Korhaan (not “knorhaan” — that sounds like a soup mix) is now generally considered a subspecies of the white-bellied bustard. The trinomial, though — Eupodotis senegalensis barrowii — still recalls the life and the interests of a man who earned the respect of the natural historians and explorers of his day, and merits a mention even in ours, if not all the time, at least on his birthday.
