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.
A “facebook friend” of mine reports being e-chastised for her “failure” to use four- or six-letter codes in her reports:
The most negative one was how inexperienced as a birder I appeared. Then there was the one offering to ‘teach’ me the abbreviations since I obviously didn’t know them….
Charming.
I’ve been guilty over the years of letting an “AMGO” or a “MODO” or a “PISI” slip past my lips, but like most birders I know (and want to know), I make a very careful effort in the field to use the full, official, unambiguous names of the birds I see. It avoids confusion–who doesn’t remember Bill Oddie’s riff on “the red-throated“?–but more than that, and more importantly than that, abbreviations and cutesy nicknames create yet another barrier for the new birder, the beginning birder, and the casual birder.
It can be hard enough when you’re starting out to figure out what that fluffy-tailed little duck is without having people around you shouting “peebie-jeebie.” Save the endearments for the bedroom, and give the good people birding with you or near you the information they need to understand what you’re seeing and to learn more about it later when they sit down with a field guide.
Even if it’s a Middendorf’s Grasshopper Warbler, or a Southern Beardless Tyrannulet, or even a Northern Rough-winged Swallow. Please.
This pretty little Tricolored Heron juvenile has been one of the stars of the show at Dekorte Park recently. Still common enough twenty years ago in New Jersey’s southern marshes, the species is declining rapidly in the state; Bill Boyle’s fine new S&D book reports barely three dozen birds in five colonies in 2009, while just ten years earlier Walsh et al. could still call it “fairly common” and “increasing” after its arrival as a breeding bird in 1948. In spite of this elegant bird’s propensity to show up, and even to nest, far north and inland of its usual breeding range, it’s never been anything but rare away from the coast in New Jersey, and this one has no doubt enriched many a Bergen County list since it arrived ten days ago.
The taxonomy of the herons, tiger-herons, bitterns, boat-bills, and night-herons seems to have settled down in the past couple of decades; it’s a good thing, too, given that, as Frederick Sheldon has noted,
over the last 100 years, the number of recognized species in the Ardeidae has varied from 60 to 93 and the number of genera from 15 to 35.
That’s a lot of varying, even for an ornithological classification, and those of us who have been birding for more than even a couple of years have had to adjust more than once. “Green-backed Heron,” anyone? No North American heron has undergone as much taxonomic change as the Tricolored Heron, though, which has had two English names and two scientific names just in my lifetime–and more before that. (By the way, go ahead and click on that link; it will take you to a pretty cool resource.) Just about the only combination we haven’t suffered through is the one in the title of this post. But we’ll get there someday, I’m sure.
The onomastic history of this bird starts with a posthumous publication. On January 5, 1776, the professor of (among a wide range of other subjects) natural history at Erlangen, the imposingly named Philipp Ludwig Statius (Statius!) Müller, died, suddenly and “in the best of his years.” Fortunately, Müller had just delivered to his publisher the manuscript of the index and supplement to his German translation and commentary of the twelfth edition of Linnaeus’s Systema, and that volume appeared in Nuremberg not long after the author’s untimely death.
Drawing on recent updates published by Linnaeus and on discoveries reported by the other famous naturalists of the day, Müller’s Supplement offered the first published descriptions of a number of animals, including a heron he calls “der dreyfärbige Reiher. Ardea tricolor.” He describes it briefly:
The bird is blackish-blue, white underneath, and has blue tail coverts. Its range is in America. – Buffon.
Terse as it is, Müller’s description answers one question I’ve heard over and over at Dekorte: what are the heron’s three colors? For years I’d assumed that they were red, white, and blue, the signature palette of the attractive juveniles, but not so: this description is of an adult.
Today, Müller is credited as the “author” of the current scientific name of the heron, Egretta tricolor (Müller). What that means in practice is that he was the first to publish for the species a Latinized binomial formally acceptable under the criteria of the ICZN–but what about that citation at the end of Müller’s description?
We have given this name, Demi-Aigrette, to a bluish, white-bellied heron from Cayenne, shown in our Plates; the name designates a characteristic that seems to be intermediate between egrets and herons: unlike the egrets, this species does not have long, airy plumes on the back, but rather only a cluster of sparse strands that extend beyond the tail and represent a smaller version of the tufts of an egret. These strands, which other herons do not have, are reddish in color. This bird is less than two feet in length. The front of the body, the neck, and the head are dusky bluish, and the underparts are white.
The caption in these Planches enluminées gives our bird yet another name: the “bluish heron with a white belly from Cayenne.” The painting itself leaves a lot to be desired as either an aesthetic or a scientific document, but it matches neatly with Buffon’s description, right down to the rusty bustle. Müller’s copy of the plate must have been poorly colored for him to concentrate on the blue tail coverts instead.
Like all of Wilson’s birds, the heron and its platemates are awkwardly drawn to the point of ridiculousness; but this is the oldest painting showing a bird readily identifiable as a Tricolored Heron. Wilson can be forgiven, I think, for not recognizing that his bird and the Cayenne bird of the older descriptions were in fact conspecific: he says that the “Demi Egret … seems to approach near to the present” “rare and delicate” species, which he named, in honor of the place he first found it below New Orleans, the Louisiana Heron, Ardea ludoviciana.
Twenty-five years after Wilson’s publication, his colleague and champion Charles Bonaparte moved the Louisiana Heron into Forster’s genus Egretta. In 1858, Spencer Baird shifted this species, the Reddish Egret, and Peale’s Egret (now known to be the white morph of the Reddish Egret) to Demiegretta, a genus said by Baird to have been coined by Blyth, in obvious reliance on Buffon and Latham, to include the Western Reef-Heron. But Baird is skeptical: he has
a strong suspicion that the American birds, with Ardea ludoviciana as type, are entitled to a new generic appellation, for which Hydranassa would be exceedingly appropriate.
Baird leaves it at that, without bothering to explain why his suggested name would be so fitting. It would remain for Elliott Coues–who else–to unravel the “ornithophilologicality” of Baird’s proposal. Coues points out that the name is not to be analyzed as the bland “hydra” + “nassa” = “water duck,” but rather as the much more poetic “hydra” + “anassa” = “water queen.” And then, in one of those casual displays of memory and erudition to which the great man was given, he identifies Baird’s source in Audubon’s Ornithological Biography:
Delicate in form, beautiful in plumage, and graceful in its movements, I never see this interesting Heron, without calling it the Lady of the Waters.
Audubon’s painting (much of it done by his gifted assistant George Lehman) does the nickname justice, depicting a bird that seems almost to wear the elegant feathers it is so carefully arranging.
Coues’s own 1873 list of North American birds, the immediate forebear of the AOU Check-list, provides one of the clearest examples of the muddiness of this species’ taxonomic history. The Buffonian-Müllerian name is nowhere to be found, but neither is Wilson’s or Baird’s. Instead, Coues calls the lady of the waters “Ardea leucogastra Gm., var. leucoprymna (Licht.) Cs.”
Hypercorrecting for gender (as if “leucogaster” were an adjective rather than a noun in apposition), Coues adopts the name given the species in the Systema naturae of Gmelin’s 1788 edition, Ardea leucogaster. Lichtenstein, professor of zoology in Berlin, had assigned the epithet leucoprymna (with no further published description) to a specimen in his care, a nomen nudum that Coues (the “Cs.” of the full name citation above) re-purposed to designate the subspecies (“variety,” as we called them back before the trinomial controversy was settled the first time) that occurs in the southern United States.
Coues was the head of the committee constituted by the AOU in 1883 to prepare an official checklist of North American birds. When the first edition appeared in 1886, it eschewed Coues’s name for the heron and demoted Baird’s Hydranassa (which Ridgway had flirted with nearly ten years earlier) to a subgenus; for the first time, the Check-list joined Wilson’s English name Louisiana Heron with Müller’s scientific moniker Ardea tricolor. In keeping with the committee’s determination to “amplif[y], increas[e] the effective force of, and len[d] a new precision” to ornithological naming, the Louisiana Herons of the northern part of the species’s range are further defined by the addition of a subspecific epithet, ruficollis, originally the specific name given by Gosse in 1847 when he described a juvenile Tricolored Heron as a new species, the Red-necked Gaulin, Egretta ruficollis.
The name Ardea tricolor stood until 1905, when the Twelfth Supplement to the AOU Check-list elevated almost all of the heron subgenera to genus status. Baird’s suspicion was validated, and Hydranassa lasted for three quarters of a century, until the next revision of the herons was adopted in the thirty-fourth supplement, published in 1982. The Little Blue Heron, the Reddish Egret, and the species under discussion here were all moved (back) into Egretta, a reconstituted genus they shared (and share today) with another ten or so small, slender herons.
That same supplement changed the English name of the old Louisiana Heron to Tricolored Heron, a nod to the range of the bird, which extends far beyond the lower Mississippi, and to its new and old specific epithet. If I’d been asked (I don’t remember getting a call), I would probably have gone all the way and called it the Tricolored Egret (along with Little Blue Egret and so on). But Tricolored Heron it is, and likely long will be.
An egret by any other name–
I for one am sorry to have lost another “Louisiana” bird. I know the arguments against honorific patronyms and geographic designations, and they sometimes seem fairly persuasive, but when I see the bird and call it, as I am still likely to do when I’m feeling tired or perverse, a Louisiana Heron, I think of Wilson and Audubon and Lehman, of the swamps of Charleston and the big woods of the Mississippi Valley. The “new” name, even though it is also an old name, conjures up no visions, no affections or remembrances; it’s logical and sensible, but hardly evocative. And names should evoke, shouldn’t they?
This Streptopelia pigeon was the source of a few moments’ excitement this morning in Somerset County. Eurasian Collared-Dove is still a rarity in New Jersey, and I don’t think it has been recorded yet so far north and inland.
Unfortunately, this bird’s small size, pinkish tinge, and plain wing, without the contrasting dark primaries of Eurasian, identified it quickly and handily as an African Collared-Dove, the beloved prop of stage magicians and the often ill-caged pet of careless door shutters.
Ah well. It won’t be long before the “right” collared-dove gets here too.
Hardly a day goes by that I don’t read about some birder fussing at a state legislature to change that state’s official bird. Floridians want the Osprey or the endemic Florida Scrub-Jay, Nebraskans have proposed the Sandhill Crane, Oregonians suggest the Spotted Owl, Washingtonians have nominated the Great Blue Heron, Georgians would prefer (get this) the Chicken.
The second most common response: “Sacrilege!” (The most common, of course, is “Don’t bother us, we’re busy.”) How can we just throw off the weight of all that history? How can we second-guess the venerable traditions of the Founders?
It turns out that there’s nothing divinely ordained about The State Bird. And like all human institutions, this one has a history that’s a lot more recent, and a lot more interesting, than we might suspect.
Under her leadership, the Society exercised its influence to have wildlife preserves established, bird protection laws passed, and a state game commission created. And in 1925, Tippetts and her colleagues conducted the election in which Florida’s schoolchildren elected the Northern Mockingbird as the state bird.
Seven years later, Tippetts published an important article in Nature Magazine. The title, I think, is self-explanatory.
Note (if you can read the very small type) that Tippetts here gives her affiliation as the General Federation of Women’s Clubs, an organization that in the 1920s and 30s took the lead in encouraging states to select an emblematic bird. As Chairman of the Federation’s conservation division, Tippetts was able to get state Women’s Clubs to distribute ballots to the schools. Sometimes the results were surprising. In the Florida election, for example, she noted that
one boys’ school went solid for the vulture, because they had been building airplanes and studying this bird in the process.
Alabama’s state bird, the Northern Flicker, was selected for more insidious reasons.
It turns out that that choice was made not out of any particular fondness for the bird itself, but because Alabama’s Civil War soldiers were known as “yellowhammers.” The poor brown woodpecker is an underhanded political statement, a sort of feathered bars and stars–which makes sense if you look at its plumage. Similarly (but much less sinisterly), Delaware’s Blue Hen was chosen not because of its prowess as a layer or even its tenderness in the skillet, but rather for the association of the rooster of the breed with the state’s soldiers during the American Revolution.
Pushed hard by the women’s clubs, most of the states appear to have selected their state birds in the late 1920s and 1930s. The process in Nebraska, described by Jon Farrar in his Birding Nebraska, was probably typical:
At the October 1928 Nebraska Federation of Women’s Clubs convention in Kearney, a resolution passed that ‘a bird typical of the prairies and abundant in all parts of the state be chosen by this convention assembled and the result combined with the vote of the school children of the state and interested societies to be presented to the State Legislature for acceptance’.
The Federation prepared a slate of five species for the schoolchildren to vote on; the winner (just as it would be in Kansas, Montana, North Dakota, Oregon, and Wyoming) was the tuneful Western Meadowlark. The Nebraska Ornithologists’ Union, after some very interesting debate about just what purpose might be served by having a state bird–education, conservation, sentiment–endorsed the choice, and the Unicameral passed a bill that was promptly signed by the governor.
Two states joined the Union a couple of decades after the Women’s Clubs put so much effort into this matter. Hawaii, with its wealth of endemics (fewer and fewer each year, alas), settled on (or maybe for) the Nene, that handsome ground-dwelling goose found nowhere else in the world; Alaska, probably eager to remind “sportsmen” of its many allures, chose the Willow Ptarmigan. What impresses me most is not the selections but their timing: according to that invariably accurate source of infallible wisdom the internet, both jurisdictions selected their avian emblems in 1955, four years before either attained statehood.
A curiosity. But a measure, too, of how successful Katherine Tippetts and her sisters in arms were, and of how important the role of women was in all aspects of birding and nature study in pre-1934 America. By the mid-1950s, if you wanted to be a state, you had to act like one–and that meant having a state bird.
Todd Forsgren‘s photographs of birds in nets are as breathtaking as they are violent. As the artist puts it,
the birds inhabit a fascinating space between our framework of the bush and the hand. It is a fragile and embarrassing moment before they disappear back into the woods, and into data.
