After all that, Prince Maximilian and his companions were mighty glad to be on terra firma again, and they spent the next nearly two years exploring the wildernesses of Brazil.
Thanks largely to the expatriate ornithologist Georg Wilhelm Freyreiss, Maximilian was able to record something along the lines of 400 bird species — as then understood — during his time in South America: 30 diurnal raptors, 8 or 9 owls, two dozen parrots, 5 toucans, 3 trogons, 11 cuckoos and barbets, 9 or 10 woodpeckers, 4 kingfishers, a jacamar, about 16 hummingbirds, about 10 woodcreepers, 2 xenopes, 9 orioles and caciques, 6 thrushes, 23 tanagers, and on and on.
Some of these birds, Maximilian writes, are also known from North America or even Europe, but others seemed to be unknown altogether, including this familiar bird of the tropical forest:
In a wild untouched forest of tall, tangled trunks we were startled by the odd choral singing of a bird that was new to us. The whole jungle echoed with its extremely weird, loud whistling, composed of five or six penetrating notes. These noisy forest dwellers had gathered here in whole flocks, and whenever one let its voice ring out, all the others joined in immediately.
Figured it out? Maximilian actually described this species twice, the second time including a helpful recording, à la 1830, of its voice:
The effect is most realistic, he says, if the phrases are played glissando on the A string of a violin. (The brace joining the two staves is an engraver’s error.)
Not to take anything away from Maximilian, Freyreiss, and their collectors, but the screaming piha wasn’t really quite as unknown as they thought.
Fifteen years before the prince and his party had set foot on Brazilian soil, François Levaillant described a bird he called the ashy cotinga. The Frenchman had never seen it in life, only as a skin in the collection of Louis Dufrêne, taxidermist at the MNHN; Levaillant admitted that he was fairly unimpressed.
Nature, who has shown herself so munificent towards the cotingas in general, seems to have forgot that this bird even belongs to the family; for there is nothing more humble and less varied than its plumage.
Be that as it may, Louis Pierre Vieillot gave the bird a scientific name in 1817, simply translating Levaillant’s as Ampelis cinerea; he would repeat the name, this time altered to cineracea, in 1822. Unfortunately for Vieillot, Ampelis cinerea was pre-occupied by another cotinga, the lovely Pompadour, and cineracea, obviously, must yield to Maximilian’s name by simple priority.
The prince called it vociferans, and if you’ve ever stood in the jungle and been deafened, you’ll agree that it’s the best possible name for the noisiest possible bird.
