Photographs of mounted birds are grotesque enough, but it gets downright uncanny when they talk.
This is much scarier than any “doleful notes” the living bird might utter.
Avis ipsa loquitur
Another Seafaring Owl
One of the earliest nature periodicals published expressly for use in the schools, Birds: Illustrated by Color Photography had a two-year run at the end of the nineteenth century. The promised photographs are indeed colorful — but they are all of stuffed birds, most of them in the collections of friends of the magazine’s Chicago publisher, W.E. Watt.
Each of the images is accompanied by two pages of text, one obviously addressed to the young reader:
What do you think of this bird with his round, puffy head? You of course know it is an Owl. I want you to know him as the Snowy Owl.
The other text, more densely printed and in smaller type, is intended for the teacher, and usually comprises a plumage description, a note about distribution, an account of the bird’s food habits, and, more interestingly, the odd (and always unattributed, alas) anecdote:
The large round eyes of this owl are very beautiful. Even by daylight they are remarkable for their gem-like sheen, but in the evening they are even more attractive, glowing like balls of living fire. From sheer fatigue these birds often seek a temporary resting place on passing ships. A solitary owl, after a long journey, settled on the rigging of a ship one night. A sailor who was ordered aloft, terrified by the two glowing eyes that suddenly opened upon his own, descended hurriedly to the deck, declaring to the crew that he had seen “Davy Jones a-sitting up there on the main yard.”
Watt’s apparent source for this story (and for much of his Snowy Owl text in general) paraliptically explains the allusion:
It is perhaps unnecessary to state that “Davy Jones” is the sailors’ name for the evil spirit.
I wonder how many teachers repeated the story to their young charges: nightmare stuff, it seems to me.
Citizen Nighthawk
Christmas of 1897 found a new and exciting book under many a young birder’s tree.
Citizen Bird was the latest offering from Mabel Osgood Wright, one of the turn of that century’s most important authors of bird books for children and novices. Written, as its subtitle promises, “in plain English for beginners,” Citizen Bird was a collaboration between Wright, Elliott Coues, and Louis Agassiz Fuertes — a high-powered team if ever there was one.
The book’s conceit is simple and straightforward: the Doctor, obviously Coues’s fictional alter-ego, takes his young daughter and her two cousins, along with the neighbor boy Rap, on a series of pastoral walks and leisurely carriage rides across Orchard Farm, where they encounter the wild birds and fall into conversation with Mammy Bun, a retired nurse, and Olaf, a fisherman.
Poor Rap always plays the bumpkin. One evening, when the party stops to admire a rural sunset,
a large bird that had been sailing about overhead dropped through the air till it was almost over the surrey, then turned suddenly and darted upward again…. “That’s a Nighthawk … he’s looking for small birds to eat,” [said] Rap.
The kindly Doctor corrects him, of course:
“his broad, shallow mouth is only suitable for insect-eating … and the beak is equally small and feeble, not at all like the strong hooked one of a cannibal bird.”
Interestingly, the Doctor characterizes the nighthawk as “belonging to the Ground Gleaners as well as Sky Sweepers.” Fuertes’s dramatic illustration of this “valuable Citizen” shows him engaged in the first activity:
I can’t recall ever having seen a Common Nighthawk tussling with even the largest insect on the ground, but apparently it happens, and not just at Orchard Farm.
Are Bald Eagles Really Bald?
It’s almost Thanksgiving, and time once again to trot out the old and long discredited chestnut about Benjamin Franklin and the Wild Turkey. That one’s been debunked enough by now, I think. But what about the other bird in the Franklin story, the one that actually became our national feathered symbol?
Franklinian irony aside, the Bald Eagle was a really good choice: big, powerful, “majestic.” And in the eighteenth century, the species was sufficiently widespread and sufficiently abundant that you could often as not just go outside, look up, and be reminded that you were a citizen (well, so long as you were white and male and owned property) of a country that aspired to some of those same slightly dubious qualities.
Admittedly, that name is a little awkward. But as generations of gullible American birders have been told (thanks, National Geographic!),
Hm. Hm hm hm. Shall we try to think this one through?
First, there is no such Old English word as “balde.” Second, the Middle English “balled” means not “white” but “marked with white on the forehead,” an excellent fit for, say the Eurasian Coot, but a bit strange for our eagle.
But why are we getting bogged down in philologicalities anyway? I find it very hard to imagine that the seventeenth-century ornithologists and explorers who coined the name “Bald Eagle” — a New World species unknown, of course, during the Old English and Middle English periods — would have sought out an English epithet that was already then obscure, oblique, and obsolete.
What I can or can’t imagine, of course, doesn’t matter nearly so much as what the early natural historians themselves had to say about the name. And not one of them — not one — makes so much as an allusion to any “Old English” word meaning white.
One of the earliest accounts of the birdlife of the English colonies in North America is that in a letter from the Virginia planter John Clayton to the Royal Society, published in 1693 in the Philosophical Transactions. Clayton was first and foremost a botanist, but he devotes nearly ten printed pages to the birds of Virginia, among them
the Bald Eagle … the Body and part of the Neck being of a dark brown, the upper part of the Neck and Head is covered with a white sort of Down, whereby it looks very bald, whence it is so named.
Clayton clearly means “naked,” not “white.” Twenty years later, Mark Catesby also uses the word “bald” in that same normal, modern sense:
This bird is called the Bald Eagle, both in Virginia and Carolina, tho’ his head is as much feather’d as the other parts of his body.
Alexander Wilson understood the word in exactly the same way:
The epithet “bald,” applied to this species, whose head is thickly covered with feathers, is … improper and absurd … and seems to have been occasioned by the white appearance of the head, when contrasted with the dark color of the rest of the plumage.
Audubon, perhaps mindful of Wilson’s scorn for the name, avoids it entirely in the Ornithological Biography, giving the bird instead the more literal moniker “white-headed” and remarking
that the name by which this bird is universally known in America is that of Bald Eagle, an erroneous denomination, as its head is as densely feathered as that of any other species, although its whiteness may have suggested the idea of its being bare.
We could yield to the temptation of internet abundance and go on piling up examples, but the point is clear by now.
None of the earliest and none of the most important ornithologists in the first two centuries following the English settlement of North America understood “bald” in the eagle’s name to mean anything other than “naked,” “bare,” “hairless.” None so much as hints at a (non-existent) Old English or an (obsolete) Middle English word meaning “white-blazed,” which would be a poor description of the bird’s plumage in any case.
This is another instance of a “solution” being cobbled together well after the fact — to a problem that never existed.
The harder thing to think about is who is responsible for that convoluted and illogical tale and how it became the standard explanation for what is likely, at its root, a gentle joke (you can always tell it’s a joke if Wilson gets exercised about it).
Choate is surely largely to blame for the recent popularity of the story, but alas, he simply reports it as if it were true, without attribution. So here’s the challenge: Find the earliest attestation of the story, and help me trace this bit of inane but influential folklore to its source.
Other People’s Bird Books: Audubon’s Birds of America
It’s comforting to think that once an object enters the collections of a major museum it’s safe, preserved for all time and all people.
Comforting. And false.
Museums and libraries, private and public, buy and sell and trade items from their holdings all the time, for all sorts of reasons. This coming April, the Indiana Historical Society will auction its copies of Audubon‘s Birds of America, along with the Viviparous Quadrupeds, purchased eighty years ago for the then princely sum of $4,000. The proceeds from the sale will be used to enrich the Society’s collections of books, papers, and artifacts more immediately connected to the history of Indiana.
Thus far, the Society’s president, John Herbst, appears to have succeeded in forestalling the (often irrational) outcry that usually follows the announcement that a collection will be de-accessioning a prominent object:
The revenue should further the historical society’s modern mission of focusing on Indiana artifacts. The society would have loved to have had the money to buy a 1961 letter penned by Indiana native Gus Grissom during a recent auction, but the item — which alluded to the competition among Mercury 7 astronauts — slipped away. The same goes for a letter written by a Civil War soldier from Indiana, who was part of the 28th Regiment, United States Colored Troops.
“We continually see Indiana-specific items on the market that we’d like to have,” Herbst said.
Much of Audubon’s work — and particularly his masterpiece, “The Birds of America” — is publicly available through the thousands of prints, posters and cards that have been made, Herbst said. And there’s another original [copy] of that book at the Indiana University Library in Bloomington.
And besides that, the IHS’s Birds and Mammals are both said to be in noticeably worn condition, after
years spent on the shelves of the Borden Institute, a private school in what was then called New Providence, Indiana. “They still are vivid colors, and there’s a lot of wonderful attributes that they still have,” Herbst said. “But they were materials that were in public libraries before we got them. They both had a lot of use before the society purchased them.”
As a result, Sotheby’s has set a modest reserve of only (only!) three million dollars for the Birds. If memory serves, the most recent complete sets of the Birds have brought three times that or more at auction. Somebody’s going to get a real bargain.
Given the poor-quality binding and the apparent rough condition of the plates, there would be nothing but sentiment to prevent that lucky purchaser from breaking the set up and selling the images singly, the fate of so many copies of this iconic book over the years.
With that prospect in mind, I hope that Sotheby’s and the Indiana Historical Society will make the effort to thoroughly document whatever signs of use are present on the plates. A pristine set of Audubons is a fine thing, but how much more valuable — intellectually, not financially — would be a copy, its binding shaken and its edges smudged, with the notes and arrows and marginal sketches of an early owner or user. I want to know what the boys and girls of the Borden Institute thought about this book, how they viewed it and what it meant to them. After all, what else are old books good for?