On December 2, 1932, “following some heavy gales and a spell of zero weather,” Stuyvesant Morris Pell discovered a gray goose “floundering” on the ice of the Housatonic River in western Massachusetts. Pell captured the bird alive, and took it to New York City, where he showed it to John Todd Zimmer, who “positively identified it” as a graylag goose.
When found, the bird showed bullet marks on the primaries of one wing, its feet were a bright pink, showing no signs of recent captivity, and its behavior was that of a wild bird.
Pell modestly observes that his had been preceded by other reports in North America, but he hints broadly that this seems to be the first “authentic record” of this Old World goose in the New.
Pell, it would appear, was given to enthusiasms, and in the excitement of discovery, he neglected in the initial report to mention a couple of critical facts about his wild goose:
Later Mr. Pell became convinced that the bird had escaped from captivity, since it could not fly and was too heavy for a wild bird. This was also the opinion of Bartlett Hendricks, who saw the bird, examined the skin, and obtained this information.
The retraction, a sensible one, was issued not by Pell but by Dorothy E. Snyder, curator of natural history at the Peabody Museum, who published it “at the suggestion of Dr. Alexander Wetmore.”
The published record for this bird totals less than two pages in the Auk, but what a rich real-life story must have lurked behind it all: Pell slipping and sliding on the frozen river, then transporting the huge and no doubt cantankerous bird to New York; Zimmer looking up from his desk at the honking noise so different from that heard every day on Central Park West; Pell gleefully trumpeting the identification but ignoring the most important evidence of provenance; Wetmore raising an eyebrow and sending Hendricks out to have a look at the now-dead bird; Hendricks and Snyder deciding how to proceed without offending their colleague….
All very tangled and touchy, I’m sure. How nice that American birding is so much more straightforward nowadays!
