A century and a half ago today, on July 2, 1864, Elliott Coues was on his way to Fort Whipple, Arizona. “On the summit of Whipple’s Pass of the Rocky Mountains, not far from the old site of Fort Wingate,” New Mexico, he “secured the first specimen” of what would turn out to be a new wood warbler.
Coues found his pretty novum to be
a bird of particular and not unpardonable interest, being the only species of this beautiful genus that it has fallen to my lot to discover….
And he named it Grace’s warbler, after
one for whom my affection and respect keep pace with my appreciation of true loveliness of character.
Grace Darling Coues, five years younger almost to the day than her brother, would appear to have been one of the very few figures in the strong-minded ornithologist’s life with whom he never fell out.
The almost effusively fond words quoted above from Coues’s Colorado Valley would be followed in 1882 by the more subtle but still telling note in the second edition of his Check List, explaining the dedication of his Dendroeca graciae to
Mrs. Charles A. Page, née Grace Darling Coues, the author’s sister. Would more strictly be written gratiae (Lat. gratia, grace, favor, thanks).
Among those gracious favors for which Coues was thankful was the opportunity to move in with his sister in 1881, as Coues’s second marriage was dissolving.
Three years later, in November 1884, Grace Coues Page herself would remarry, this time to the Boston publisher Dana Estes; Coues’s most recent biographer quotes a letter to Baird in which he rather crassly alludes to the new relationship,
telling Baird that he had “not the slightest difficulty in getting published anything I write now.”
One suspects that that would have been true even without a helpful brother-in-law, but in fact, Estes and Lauriat — with whom Coues had already worked — went on to publish a number of his books in the 1880s and ’90s, both ornithologic and theosophic.
One thing often left unmentioned when this warbler’s story is told is that Coues was very nearly not the first ornithologist to collect specimens of the species. Dendroica graciae was given its formal name in Baird’s 1865 Review, and Coues followed up the next year with his own more extensive account in the Proceedings of the Philadelphia Academy. Just as that article was about to hit the press, Coues discovered
several examples of this species in a collection made by Mr. C[ristopher] Wood, at Belize, Honduras, where it is said to be quite common…. It is somewhat remarkable that the species has never been detected in the regions lying between these two countries [namely, Arizona and Honduras].
Fortunately for Grace Coues, Wood and Berendt had not bothered to describe those birds as new. Robert Ridgway would perform the task in 1873, naming that Central American population decora, the beautiful Grace’s warbler.
I can only assume that her brother approved.
