The Experience of Birding
The would-be type of Audubon’s Smith bunting provides a troubling example of how specimen data can be corrupted in the chain of publication. We know from Audubon himself that he saw this species alive only once, in 1820, when he failed to secure a specimen. Not until 1843 did he handle specimens in the United …
Continue reading “A Longspur Postscript”
There are but few things I miss from those long-ago years in Urbana, and this clown-faced calcariid is one of them. Like clockwork, end of March every year we would get out and walk the foxtail-choked stubble of last year’s corn, and there they were — the first northbound Smith longspurs of the spring. There was an …
Continue reading “Smith’s Painted Buntling”
One hundred seventy-five years ago today, John James Audubon boarded a train in New York City and began an eight-month journey that would take him up the Missouri River as far as what is now the Montana state line. The party also included the painter Isaac Sprague, the taxidermist John G. Bell, and Audubon’s friend …
Continue reading “Up the Missouri”
Well, if it isn’t, it should be. On June 22, 1805, Meriwether Lewis wrote in his journal that there is a kind of larke here that much resembles the bird called the oldfield lark with a yellow brest and a black spot on the croop. Lewis and the expedition’s crew knew the eastern meadowlark, “the oldfield …
Continue reading “National Meadowlark Day”
The story of the piecemeal discovery of the evening grosbeak is too well known to bear repeating here. One often overlooked piece of the puzzle, though, fell into place 171 years ago today, on the banks of the Missouri River in what is now South Dakota. On May 29, 1843, John James Audubon and colleagues …
Continue reading “Another Piece of the Grosbeak Puzzle”