Rick Wright, birdaz@gmail.com, is a widely published author and sought-after speaker at birding events. He leads birding and birds and art tours for Victor Emanuel Nature Tours, and is the book review editor at Birding magazine.
A native of southeast Nebraska, Rick attended the University of Nebraska and Harvard Law School, and holds M.A. and Ph.D. degrees from Princeton University.
As an undergraduate, he taught laboratory courses in ornithology with Paul Johnsgard and worked as a collections assistant at the Nebraska State Museum. In 1985, he was a founding member of the Nebraska Ornithologists' Union Bird Records Committee.
Rick lives in northern New Jersey with his wife, Alison Beringer begin_of_the_skype_highlighting end_of_the_skype_highlighting begin_of_the_skype_highlighting end_of_the_skype_highlighting.
All conservation eyes are looking ahead to 2018 and the centennial of the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918, the legislation that even today, ninety-five years on, offers some sort of protection to every native non-game bird in the US and its neighbors.
Before the MBTA, however, came the Tariff Act of 1913, enacted one hundred years ago today. The happy result of years — decades — of effort on behalf of scientific and conservation organizations, Schedule N of the Act included a provision that
the importation of aigrettes, egret plumes or so-called osprey plumes, and the feathers, quills, heads, wings, tails, or parts of skins, of wild birds, either raw or manufactured and not for scientific or educational purposes, is hereby prohibited.
in the case of plumage worn by travelers as well as in the case of feathers imported for sale, and notwithstanding vigorous protests, all persons at ports of entry with prohibited plumage either in trunks or on their hats, were compelled to relinquish such trimmings….
William Dutcher, President of the Audubon Society — one of the key players in seeing the legislation through Congress — noted in Bird-Lore that
for several weeks [after October 3] the New York daily papers have contained many articles regarding the words and actions of indignant ladies who found it necessary to give up their aigrettes, paradise plumes and other feathers, upon arriving from Europe…. There is little doubt but what the cries of resentment and opposition raised by the distressed ladies along our New York water front will be quickly heard abroad, and it will surely deter other women from attempting to wear birds’ feathers to this country.
What was a modish lady to do? Enterprising milliners offered an alternative.
Dutcher pronounced the Audubon Hat, lacy and beribboned and entirely featherless, “becoming in every way.” Skeptical fashionistas were reassured by the motto on the hat’s label:
Audubon Hat. Save the Birds!
Naturally, there was resistance, then resentment, against the “obnoxious paragraph in Schedule N” on the part of the milliners whose trade had flourished during the plume days. But even for them there was a grudging silver lining. Reporting from Paris, the Illustrated Millinerpointed out that
the majority of the premier designers express themselves as highly pleased at the turn tariff matters have taken in America…. The fact that the same aigrette garnitures were used by their owners season after season interfered seriously with the business, and deprived many a milliner of a great many opportunities in showing her skill in inventing new forms of decoration; the fad for aigrettes also meant a considerable loss of profit to the milliner, as many of their customers required nothing but the shape to serve as foundation for the trimming she already possessed.
All the same, the editors couldn’t resist pointing out the “inconsistency” of “the Audubons,” who at the same time as they protest the killing of egrets and gulls and ibis urge that House Sparrows and feral cats be killed. More sinisterly, the Milliner hints at legal action against the conservation “faddists” with their “vast income and high salaried officials”:
Some day the American people will awaken to the fact that there are other trusts besides those which are being condemned for violation of the Sherman Anti-trust law and the restraint of trade.
It didn’t come to that, but emotions ran high. And the plumers and the milliners were right: October 3, 1913, truly was the beginning of the end for the feather trade.
It’s that time of year when lots of us get lots of photos of juvenile night-herons with the request to help: which one of the goofy, brown-spotted, sluggish-looking species is it?
That pair — Black-crowned and Yellow-crowned Night-Herons — is one of the many usually more easily identified in the field than in photographs, but given a reasonable shot, there’s a neat trick to quickly distinguish them even if you can’t see any of the generally reliable marks of plumage patterns and soft part colors. We call it The Tilt Test.
Here’s how it works: Mentally tip your puzzling night-heron’s body, all of it, back until the tail tip hits the tarsus, that long stretch of “leg” (foot, actually) that ends in the toes. Be sure to do this only mentally — you could easily lose an eye otherwise.
Where does the tail tip touch the foot? If the point of contact is just above the toes, you’re looking at a Black-crowned Night-Heron; if it’s just below the “ankle,” no more than halfway down towards the toes, it’s a Yellow-crown.
Obviously, this is nothing more than a rough quantification of the “relative” field mark we’ve known about for years, but it’s a quick and easy way to put it into practice without having to wait for the birds to take off to see how much tarsus protrudes beyond the tail in flight. And it’s a lot better than guessing.
If you find this hard at first, practice on adults, which are definitively identifiable with no effort at all. Then go on to the more subtle age classes, and I think you’ll be happy to see how well it works.
What do you think of the two birds in the photographs above?
The answer, as often as not, is a rail. And here in northeastern North America, it’s often the Sora, that pudgy yellow-billed denizen of muddy cattail marshes.
Even with so many of its breeding sites gone — especially in the southern portion of the species’ range — this remains a fairly common bird. But numbers are nothing like they once were.
New birders learn early on, sometimes to their startlement, that birds are not distributed generally across the landscape. There’s this thing called habitat, you see, and as a well-known birder once wrote,
You would never expect to see a Meadowlark in the woods, although the Flicker might leave its grove of trees to dig up an ant’s nest at the edge of a field.
With a little experience behind us, most of us most of the time can remember that and many other of the often subtle relationships between birds and their environments. At least, that is, in the breeding season. We are — by which I suppose I mean “I am” — less keenly aware of the habitat preferences of the birds we see in migration and winter. And that’s a shame, since even in fall, when many southbound birds are more catholic in their choice of stopovers, a careful eye for certain landscape features can still increase your chances of running into some of the sought-after migrants.
Looking for migrating Connecticut Warblers? Check open field edges with dense stands of goldenrod and ragweed.
Wintering Sagebrush Sparrows? Look for patches of inkweed among widely scattered mesquites.
On September 12, 1914, at West Grove, Chester Co., Pa., … I observed three Cape May Warblers … feeding upon ripe grapes…. for several days a few of them might be seen at almost any time in the tree over which the grapevine grew.
Isaac Roberts‘s observation might seem just an incidental curiosity. But exactly a year earlier, Frank Burns had found that species to be “a destructive grape juice consumer at Berwyn, Pennsylvania,” where two trees in his yard had been taken over by “fugitive” grape vines:
on September 12, 1913, I took a specimen … and on the 14th and 15th observed twenty and thirty adult and immature female Cape Mays…. six shots failed to drive the survivors from the tree…. on the 20th, I saw an individual alight on a bunch of Niagara grapes, deliberately puncture the skin and eat greedily; this and several other specimens were taken with dripping bills.
Cape Mays gorged themselves on Burns’s grapes until October 7, 1913, laying on important energy reserves for the rest of their flight south:
Specimens secured early … were rather lean, but after some days of feeding became fat, inactive and even sluggish; an adult female shot in the act of eating from a grape … was positively enveloped in fat, and the skin became so saturated with oil I had the greatest difficulty in saving it.
The following year, Burns found Cape May Warblers in his grapevines beginning September 6; within ten days, his entire grape crop, red, purple, and white, was “utterly destroyed.” The last bird was seen six weeks later, on October 20.
Like Roberts, Burns’s neighbors suffered the same depredations:
complaints of the ‘little striped yellow bird’ were many, and so far as I am able to learn, all unbagged grapes were ruined; the loss must have been many tons worth several hundred dollars.
A century later, I’ll be paying special attention to grapevines these next few weeks.
It’s mildly old-fashioned now, I think, but “Alice” was all the rage in the nineteenth century, a naming fad inspired in Britain, Germany, and the US by Alice Mary Maud, daughter of a British empress and mother of a Russian one. (I am married to one of her more recent namesakes, born of British and Hessian parents almost a hundred years after the Grand Duchess’s death.)
The popularity of the name coincided with a great boom in descriptive natural history, and today there are dozens, no, hundreds, of plants and animals named for one Alice or another. There’s the Alice sundew, the Alice wood-boring beetle, the Alice cream-spotted frog, and on and on. There are even a few birds.
A quick look at the Handbook of Birds of the World turns up something like twenty species named for an Alice, among them –unsurprisingly — four hummingbirds. One of them is the threatened Purple-backed Sunbeam, Aglaeactis aliciae.
Purple-backed Sunbeam, J.G. Keulemans
This lusciously beautiful Marañón endemic was first met with by the German collector Oscar Theodor Baron, who in March 1894found several of the birds in Succha, Peru, “above an elevation of 10,000 feet … feeding from parasitic flowers which abound on alder and other trees.” Before returning to Europe himself, Baron divided the large collection he made in Peru into two lots, “containing many novelties” besides this hummingbird, and shipped one set of specimens to Walter Rothschild, the other, jointly, to Frederick DuCane Godman and Osbert Salvin, then some 35 years in to their collaboration on the vast Biologia centrali-americana.
When Salvin published the formal description of Baron’s new hummingbird in early 1896, he named it Aglaeactis aliciae. Alice’s Sunbeam, a pretty name. But he didn’t bother telling us who Alice was
James Jobling’s unbeatable Dictionary, our first and usually last resort in such questions, identifies the mysterious eponym as
So it’s back to the drawing board, which in this particular case is already covered by a messy sketch of a very large haystack and a very slender needle.
Baron, the collector of the first specimens of the sunbeam, remains a little known figure even in lepidoptery, his apparent specialization. It would be almost as nice for us as for him if he was happily married to a lovely Alice, but I can discover no mention of any matrimonial circumstance anywhere in any of the sparse documents available from his life. Arguments ex negativo are the most dangerous kind, but there is further, if equally circumstantial, support for the belief that this well-traveled naturalist was without an help meet to him. See what you think of this.
In 1893, Salvin had described another hummingbird taken by Baron as Metallura baroni, the Violet-throated Metaltail. Had there been a wife in the picture, I suspect that Salvin, gallant Victorian gentleman that he was, would have honored her rather than her husband, if by nothing more then at least naming the bird baronae.
That’s a slim straw to grasp at, but there’s more. Ernst Hartert, Rothschild’s curator at Tring, named two hummingbird species for Baron, a Eutoxeres sicklebill in 1894 and a Phaethornis hermit three years later. Both bear the epithet baroni, a potentially inexcusable slight — and one that would certainly have been avoided by Claudia Hartert, co-author with her husband of the description of Eutoxeres baroni.
The Baron’sSuperciliated Wren, described by Hellmayr,and theBaron’s Spinetail and Yellow-breasted Brush-Finch, both named by Salvin, all commemorate a masculine eponym, too. Either Mrs. Baron did not exist, or she had somehow made herself persona non grata with much of the ornithological establishment of her time.
What about Osbert Salvin? We know that he was married, but we also know that his wife’s name was Caroline Octavia Maitland, and that they had one daughter, Viola. No jesuitical squirming and wriggling required here: our Alice was clearly not a member of Salvin’s immediate family.
But we’re not out of possibilities yet.
Recall that though Salvin was the author of the formal description of Baron’s new sunbeam, the specimens were not his alone. In the Novitates Zoologicae for February 1895, Salvin wrote that
during the past summer Mr. Baron, who is now traveling in Peru, sent to Mr. Godman and myself his first collection of birds made during the first half of the year 1894 in Northern Peru.
Godman and Salvin were the powerhouse natural history team of the second half of the nineteenth century.
these two distinguished men of science were intimately associated in research and the results of their labors form an important part of the treasures of the Natural History Museum. The friendship between them dated from the fifties of the [nineteenth] century, when they were both undergraduates at Cambridge, and lasted until the death in 1898 of Salvin, who was survived twenty-one years by Godman, the latter dying in 1919, in his eighty-sixth year. In 1876 [probably much earlier] the two friends conceived the idea of the monumental work entitled Biologia central-americana, which has been described as without doubt the greatest work of the kind ever planned and carried out by private individuals.
In 1885, Godman and Salvin decided to donate the specimens and library gathered in the course of their work on the Biologia, which they owned in common,to the British Museum; Science reports that the combined collection comprised more than 520,000 — that’s more than half a million — bird skins.
The memorial to the two ornithologists had been paid for by subscription. So great was the respect for their work that more contributions had been received than needed:
Lord Rothschild, in presenting the tablet on behalf of the subscribers, explained that the committee had decided that any subscriptions left over after the memorial had been paid for should be devoted to a collecting fellowship…. Such names, such acts, such memories and such lives should not be forgotten by those who looked at the specimens and collections the museum contained.
The Godman family agreed:
a further sum of £5,000 [was donated] to the Godman Exploration Fund
by his two daughters, Edith and Eva, and by his widow.
I think it more than likely that Salvin named the sunbeam for this Alice, his friend and colleague’s wife, who had borne their first child in summer 1895 (and would have the second at the end of 1896). Anyone with access to the correspondence between Salvin and Godman should be able to prove that supposition with ease. Meanwhile, I think she deserves her hummingbird, Aglaeactis aliciae. Don’t you?
