Mike Baird, Wikimedia Commons
I need to spend more time birding California. Except for the gnatcatcher and the blasted mountain quail, I’ve been fortunate enough to see all of the state’s terrestrial specialties — but many of them, like the dark and lovely California thrasher, only a few times.
Among its other attractions, this sturdy earth-scratcher has one of the oddest scientific names ever assigned a North American bird. After a few changes of genus, the thrasher is now known formally as Toxostoma redivivum, the revivified sickle-bill.
Toxostoma, and the original generic name Harpes, are both straightforward enough. But why did this bird require resurrection?
When William Gambel named this species in 1845, he recognized in it a bird drawn by J.R. Prévost, Jr., for the report of the voyage commanded by the comte de La Pérouse, a hero of the American Revolution. La Pérouse and his expedition were in Monterey in September of 1786, when they shot and stuffed what they believed was an unknown Promerops, a sunbird.
Another expedition, that of Alejandro Malaspina in the early 1790s, returned to Spain with a painting of the species — but no clue to the identity of what they called simply the unknown bird.
In confirming the bird’s existence half a century later, Gambel fulfilled the hopes expressed by Louis-Pierre Vieillot and John Latham
that some future Naturalist may elucidate more fully what La Peyrouse has given a very imperfect description of.
Not everyone was sure that Gambel had actually revived the bird of the earlier explorers. John Cassin wrote that
whether it is the fact … that the figure in La Peyrouse represents the present bird, admits of some doubt,
and suggested that the French might instead have collected specimens of the curve-billed thrasher — a bird, of course, that is extremely rare anywhere in California, and improbable to the point of virtually impossible at Monterey.
Far easier to believe that Gambel was right, and that his collectors had in fact rediscovered the thrasher of La Pérouse. True or not, it makes a good story.
Even if it’s not a sunbird.
