On Independence Day 1890, William Palmer, taxidermist and exhibits technician at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, was collecting for the museum on St. Paul Island in the Pribilofs. One of the birds that fell to his gun that fateful day was a Cuculus cuckoo, the first of its genus ever to be taken in North America. Palmer and Stejneger published the bird in the Auk as a specimen of Cuculus canorus telephonus, the common cuckoo of the Far East.
It took forty years for another Cuculus to meet up with an Alaskan collector. In the summer of 1930, “an Eskimo” secured a female common cuckoo on St. Lawrence Island; that bird, too, made its way into the collections of the National Museum, where Herbert Friedmann and J.H. Riley identified it as of the subspecies bakeri.
Friedmann and Riley also took the time to re-examine Palmer’s cuckoo. It turned out not to be a common cuckoo at all, but an oriental cuckoo.
Palmer died in April 1921, but Stejneger could still be consulted: he agreed that the St. Paul bird was in fact optatus, and the correction was made in the next, fourth edition of the AOU Check-list.
But the first Old World cuckoo for the New World had lain misidentified in its drawer for four decades. Or rather in its drawers. Good preparator that he was, Palmer had skinned the bird and skeletonized the carcass. The identification of the skin was corrected — but the trunk skeleton still appears in the Smithsonian‘s database as belonging to a common cuckoo.
Two for the price of one, I guess.
I am not inclined to believe that the cuckoo Palmer claims to have seen on June 13, 1890, was the individual he would shoot three weeks later — or even that that earlier bird can be identified.
