The Experience of Birding
They’re gone, the hordes of gluttonous Passenger Pigeons that were so startling a part of the eastern North American landscape until the nineteenth century.
But what if we could bring them back?
My friend Nick and I disagree about that notion, a difference of opinion that led to one of the best conversations I’ve had in a long time. Join in the debate here, and let us know what you think.
René Primevère Lesson, it seems, was given to bestowing the names of barbarian chieftains on his birds. In 1831, for example, he renamed Gmelin’s Muscicapa spadiceus—first described by Latham as the Yellow-rumped Fly-catcher—Atilla, identified rather sensationally by Jobling as the “ruler of the Hunnish tribes that ravaged Europe in the fifth century, who reve[l]ed in the appelation ‘Scourge of God’.”
Attila monument in Hungary’s Bükk Hills
As usual, Lesson doesn’t fill us in on his inspiration for this odd name, but if we are to trust the all-knowers of the all-knowing internet, it was simply an allusion to this big tyrannid’s aggressive nature.
There’s more to the joke, I think. Long discredited scientifically, one of the great naturalist’s lesser-known works, the Histoire naturelle de l’homme, may still offer a clue to this puzzle. In his discussion of the historical Huns and their putative descendants, the Magyars, Lesson quotes the fifth-century diplomat Priscus, who had served in a Roman delegation to the Hunnish court and who knew Attila personally:
Attila was short, with a broad chest, small eyes, a sparse beard, a flat nose, and a dark complexion.
In his authoritative description of the new avian genus, Lesson remarks on the bird’s bill, “broadened at the base,” its “bristly mouth,” and its “dusky olive-green” plumage. Is it just possible that he imagined a physical resemblance between the Hunnish king and his feathered namesake?
There is another hint in the name Charles Lucien Bonaparte assigned in 1857 to a genus of west African bulbuls. First described by Swainson thirty years before, the type specimen had been acquired from Sierra Leone by William Bullock, whose entire collection Swainson purchased and slowly worked through.
Swainson was excited by Bullock’s bulbul:
The very remarkable bird we are about to describe is, to the ornithologist, one of the most interesting contained in this volume…. To Dasycephala it is related by its lengthened, straight, and abruptly hooked bill; by a few incurved setaceous feathers and hairs over the nostrils, by the length of the tarsus and of the middle toe; and, by the great inequality between the lateral toes.
Of those characters, Swainson was most impressed by the “feathers and hairs” at the nares, and he gave his skin the English name African Bristle-bill, known today as the Red-tailed Bristlebill.
When Bonaparte came along, he rejected Swainson’s assignment of the species to Dasycephalus, deciding that it was sufficiently distinct to merit its own genus. He named it Bleda,
ainsi nommé du frère d’Attila,
“so called after the brother [and co-regent] of Attila.”
Maybe Lesson wasn’t joking, but Bonaparte most surely was.
Those of us in the east and midwest really have only one Chordeiles to worry about most of the time, the Common Nighthawk. In the deserts of the southwest, however, a second species, the Lesser Nighthawk, flies into the identification ointment.
Everybody knows the subtle plumage distinctions (though beware Henry’s Nighthawk!) and the differences in wing shape and vocalizations — but this time of year there’s another trick.
Common Nighthawks molt their flight feathers on the wintering grounds, far south of the US. Adult Lessers, in contrast, are shedding primaries this month, resulting in strange (but symmetrical) gaps and patches in the outer wing, as shown by the blurry bird in the photo. Neat, huh?
Who could not love a face like that?
Gone from much of its northern range, the fist-sized Corn Bunting is still hearteningly common on the roadsides of Provence, where its sizzling buzz penetrates van windows and birders’ hearts alike.
This species’ English names are blander than bland. Long known as the Common Bunting (would that that were still the case in England!), the bird now bears a name reflecting its historical fondness for cropland. More than 2,000 years ago, the Roman name miliaria was given a similar explanation:
Miliariae have their name from their food, because they grow fat on millet.
In those days, not all bird lovers were content to wait for the “millet buntings” to plump up by their own efforts. Varro writes that he has seen them fed in captivity, along with thrushes and quails, and that thus fattened for the table, they “go for a good price” in the markets.
Perhaps surprisingly, Jean Crespon, writing in the middle of the nineteenth century in Nîmes, says nothing about eating these birds, probably because, as he notes,
it is difficult to keep them in cages; they break their heads against the bars, and if they survive, it is quite rare to hear them actually sing.
Crespon calls this species the “bruant proyer,” a venerable French name dating to at least the fourteenth century and obviously related to words like pré and prairie (and, ultimately, Latin pratum). Strangely, Buffon derives “proyer” from the bird’s song, and declares himself
surprised that this species was not named “bunting of the fields,” as it rarely leaves the meadows during the warmer time of the year.
Even Buffon dozes, I suppose. The various Provençal names for the species — “térido,” “terlin,” “teri-teri,” “chi-perdris,” “chinchourla” — probably are echoic, though none of them does justice to the hissing sibilance of the real thing, which (I will point out again) you can hear and enjoy this coming April on my Birds and Art tour. Hope to see you then.
Ted set a quiz the other day:
What widespread and common bird has the number EIGHTEEN in its name? And for a bonus: Without googling it, WHY is that bird thus named?
The first question isn’t that hard. Though it’s not widespread or common in New Jersey yet, the Eurasian Collared-Dove bears the remarkable species epithet decaocto, “eighteen,” assigned to it in 1838 by the Hungarian botanist and entomologist Imre Frivaldszky.
As James Fisher reminds us, Frivaldszky’s odd choice of name was inspired by a story about the bird and its voice, said to be current in the 1830s in what is now Bulgaria:
A poor girl was in service to a very hard-hearted lady, who gave her only eighteen para a year as salary. The girl implored the gods to make plain to the world how miserably her mistress rewarded her. Zeus thereupon created this dove, which still today cries its recognizable deca-octo to the entire world.
That’s the story I “knew.” I can’t hear those syllables myself, and the chain of transmission — from the collector Carl Hinke, to Frivaldszky, to Johann Friedrich Naumann, to Fisher, to posterity — is uncomfortably attenuated, but I’ll buy it.
There’s more, though. Though this is the story made canonical by its endless (and irresponsibly embellished and unattributed) repetition on the internet, Hinke, in Naumann’s summary of Frivaldszky’s letter to him (see what I mean?), goes on to report another circumstance:
They are shot in the autumn, but by only a few of the Turkish inhabitants; most of the Turks spare them, as do to an even greater extent the Christian inhabitants, who even think them holy birds and never do anything to harm them. Thus I attracted considerable annoyance when I shot these birds at Filibe, not so much from the Turks as from the Christians.
The significance of the dove in Christian iconography is obvious, but is there something else going on here? Maybe.
There is a different story making the e-rounds about how this bird got its scientific name:
The Greeks say that when Jesus Christ was in agony on the cross, a Roman soldier took pity on him and tried to buy a cup of milk to ease his thirst. The old woman selling the milk asked for eighteen coins, but the soldier had only seventeen. There was no way to bargain: she kept repeating eighteen, eighteen, eighteen. Jesus cursed her, changing her into the dove that can say nothing but eighteen, eighteen, eighteen in Greek. When she consents to take seventeen coins, she will be changed back into a human being. But if she ever raises the price to nineteen, that will mean that the end of the world is near.
I haven’t been able to find an authentic source for this “Greek” story, which seems to be out there only in Spanish. If it is not entirely contrived, and Hinke/Naumann/Frivaldszky’s allusion to the bird’s odor of sanctity makes me think it is not, this tale suggests that there is more than one strand of Balkan folk narrative behind the very strange scientific name of what will soon be, if it isn’t already, one of the most familiar birds in your neighborhood.