Rick Wright – Page 108 – Birding New Jersey

January 21, 2014January 19, 2014

A Man, a Bridge, a Hummingbird: Panama

Eighty-six years ago today, George Washington Goethals died in New York City.

Here in our part of the world, he is best known as the eponym of the great bridge that spans the Arthur Kill to connect New Jersey and Staten Island.

A few people with longer memories recall Goethals’s heroic role as Chief Engineer for the Panama Canal, completed under his supervision a hundred years ago this year.

But very, very few of us remember Goethals’s Hummingbird.

Edward A. Goldman — the famous collector whose own name is borne by so many Central American birds — took the first specimens of this new hummingbird in March 1912, in the Darien region of eastern Panama. Goldman sent the Smithsonian three skins, a female shot on March 6, a male shot ten days later, and a second male taken in May; Edward Nelson chose to describe the species using the first male, “slightly immature,” as the type.

Nelson’s analysis determined that the new hummingbird was closely related to the Violet-capped Hummingbird, but differed from the birds of his genus Goldmania in certain characters of the wing, most notably the apparently “normal,” unmodified shape of the outermost primary. He deemed that difference sufficient for the erection of a new genus, which Nelson named Goethalsia,

in honor of Colonel George W. Goethals, head of the Panama Canal Commission, to whom the scientific workers of the Biological Canal Zone are deeply indebted for prompt and courteous assistance in prosecuting their work.

The species epithet Nelson assigned the bird, bella, is just the flattering icing on the cake.

The genus Goethalsia is still valid and still monotypic, including only Nelson’s species bella.

The English name, unfortunately, has been changed to Pirre Hummingbird, commemorating the locality where Goldman collected two of his three skins. But that shouldn’t stop us from thinking of Goethals once in a while, and the persistent connection between American science and our — shall we say — activities abroad.

January 20, 2014

Lecture Tonight

7:30 at the Pennington School, Pennington, New Jersey.

See you there!

January 18, 2014January 17, 2014

Birds of the Tropics

Not far off the coast of Tobago lies a smaller, even more intensely green island, Little Tobago. Even from the shores of Tobago, eager eyes can pick out the swirling white dots that can mean only thing: Tropicbirds.

Of all the many things to look forward to on last month’s visit to Trinidad and Tobago, I anticipated none more eagerly than the chance to finally see my first wild phaethontids, like bright white feathered suns against a tropical sky.

The Red-billed Tropicbirds of Little Tobago were busy indeed during our visit, hunting the open sea and flying in and out of their nesting cliffs — all the while working hard to avoid the depredations of the sinister-looking Magnificent Frigatebirds.

The frigates were remarkably good at hazing the tropicbirds into dropping their meal. The most dramatic episode was when a frigatebird swooped in to grab a tropicbird by the long tail; for several seconds, the pirate twisted the smaller bird’s feathers until finally it defecated — and the frigatebird dropped to partake of the stream in flight. Not overly appetizing, but still something no birder would want to have missed.

With so much bustle everywhere, it was obvious that the tropicbirds were in fact breeding, an assumption quickly borne out by the discovery of incubating birds right at our chosen overlook.

This individual was sufficiently nonplussed as to get up and turn its back to us, but the others simply faced us down, confident, I suppose, in the intimidation factor provided by that sharp, blood-red bill.

Only a frigatebird would mess with a face like that.

January 17, 2014January 16, 2014

Yummy Snipe

One more, and then I need to quit shooting fishiness in a barrel.

That same otherwise exemplary work notes that the specific epithet of the Wilson’s Snipe is delicata, which it translates as

paramour or favorite; unclear why the name was applied to this species.

This one’s easy. Alexander Wilson himself, the eponym of our common North American snipe, tells us that these birds

when in good order are accounted excellent eating.

Audubon records, approvingly,

that richness of flavour and juicy tenderness, for which it is so deservedly renowned.

We could go backward and forward, in the ornithological tradition and in the hunting literature, piling up testimonies to the tastiness of the snipe. But perhaps the easiest thing to do is simply to turn to the dictionaries.

The late Latin “delicatus” mean “exquisite.” It means “fine.” It means “delicious.”

January 16, 2014January 15, 2014

No, He Didn’t

I really shouldn’t have to stand up — again– for the Father of American Ornithology, but Alexander Wilson had the ill grace to die 201 years ago, so somebody’s got to step in and defend his probity from these vicious attacks.

Here is that grossest of calumnies, again, in an otherwise fine book published this past year: the Wilson’s Warbler was, I read,

first collected and named (for himself) by Alexander Wilson.

No. No no no.

It is true that Wilson was the discoverer of this warbler, a “neat and active little species … never met with in the works of any European naturalist.” But he did not, not ever, name this or any other bird “for himself.”

Wilson called his bird, deposited in Peale’s Museum under the catalogue number 7785, the “Green Black-capt Flycatcher,” and assigned it the latinizing binomial Muscicapa pusilla, in recognition of its small size.

Muscicapa, of course, was one of the catch-all categories of those days, like Motacilla and Falco. When Charles Bonaparte set out to revise the genera of North America’s birds in 1828 — fifteen years after Wilson had shuffled off his mortal coil — the princely ornithologist reassigned the little “flycatcher” to the warbler genus Sylvia, and changed its species epithet to wilsonii, in honor of his great predecessor.

A decade later, Bonaparte further subdivided the warblers, erecting the new genus Wilsonia and restoring (as was only proper) Wilson’s original species name pusilla to the small black-capped bird.

And so it was Charles Bonaparte who named the warbler for Wilson, first by using the (invalid) epithet wilsonii and then by creating the genus name Wilsonia. In his Ornithological Biography, Audubon was still calling the bird the Green Black-capped Flycatcher in English, but by the time he compiled his own Synopsis in 1839 — a much-needed index to the plates of the Birds of America — he had come ’round to refer to it as Wilson’s Flycatching Warbler, the English name it still bears, with a slight simplification, today.

So why, oh why do people otherwise of normal intelligence insist on accusing Wilson of the supremest of ornithological vanities?

It’s because they’ve never learned to read a scientific name.

Until recently, the name of the bird we call in English the Wilson’s Warbler was this:

The name in parentheses is the original author of the scientific name — but those parentheses, crucially, are the conventional indication that the genus name has been changed since the species was first described (and in this case, changed several times).

A sloppy or lazy or ignorant reader of might, just might, sloppily or lazily or ignorantly come to believe that our poor parenthetical friend was responsible for every nomenclatural element there, where in reality only that meek little pusilla remains from Wilson’s original name.

A plea to follow my rant: Next time you decide to repeat a twice-told tale, especially one with a faint whiff of the libelous about it, think. Just think.