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The Santa Cruz Flats

The birds weren’t overwhelming, but the birding was great on the Santa Cruz Flats Saturday morning with Michael. We started out with the largest flock of Eurasian Collared-Doves I’d ever seen in Arizona, 260 birds perched on wires in Marana. It was a puzzling sight at first, but the nearly total absence of that species at Red Rock suggested that the survivors of a recent pigeon-shoot there had merely relocated to safer spaces. They are charming and beautiful birds, and you can’t help admiring the “success” of this exotic, but I find the day troubling when I see more of them than Mourning Doves.

Eurasian Collared-Dove, Bulgaria (where they belong!)

Under the influence of my earliest birding companions, I’ve long espoused the most puritanical of views when it comes to introduced species. I can find them fascinating, admirable, dazzlingly beautiful; but they don’t belong here, and I’ve done my share of, ahem, removal. As I grow older and the world grows more complex, though, I’m finding it all less clear-cut.

In a way, we know where Arizona’s Eurasian Collared-Doves came from. The species was introduced to the Caribbean 30 or 40 years ago now, and taking advantage of that same pioneer spirit that had let it spread, apparently on its own, from the Balkans to Iceland in the 1950s, a few ecdos made the short flight to Florida in the 1970s; from there, adhering to what seems to be a pre-programmed predilection for flying northwest, the species has colonized pretty much all of the continental US outside of New England the Mid-Atlantic, and seems to be looking forward to cozy winters in western Canada and Alaska, too.

Collared-doves reached southeast Arizona with this new century, and have since become abundant around feedlots and rural settlements. I suppose we can’t rule out the possibility of secondary introductions–one possible explanation for the local population explosions we’re still seeing–but even so, it’s almost certain that some of the doves in Arizona are the descendants, 30 or 40 generations removed, of the introduced Bahamas birds: and so ultimately, of course, ours are of introduced origin, but the birds of 2008 have come much farther on their own from that tainted source population than did, for example, the state’s first Inca Doves a hundred years earlier, or the White-winged Doves that are now breeding in the midwest.

I’m not suggesting that any exotic species, plant or animal, be left to thrive just because of the antiquity of its introduction or its self-powered success once it got here; gracious, then we’d have, oh, Norway rats and red foxes eating island seabirds or something! There can be no statute of limitations when an introduced organism starts munching on the habitat and its native denizens; no sign yet that Eurasian Collared-Doves are engaged in anything like that, but introductions of any kind are rarely so benign as they’re thought to be at the start.

Just around the corner, at one of their “secret” sites on the Flats, Michael and I found a pair of Burrowing Owls, perched up to absorb the morning sunlight.

Both birds were remarkably active, flying up and down the concrete-lined ditches they call home, chirping and bobbing when a car went past. Too bad they don’t eat collared-doves!

We moved on to Red Rock and its endangered feedlot: the signs are up announcing the zoning hearings, and it won’t be long before that bit of flat desert is houses, too (with preternaturally green lawns, I bet). There were massive flocks of icterids: Red-winged, Yellow-headed, and Brewer’s Blackbirds, Great-tailed Grackles, Brown-headed Cowbirds, and a couple of Western Meadowlarks; but no small doves and virtually no large ones. A glorious Prairie Falcon was perched on a telephone pole, but we didn’t find any other of the “special” raptors of the Flats in the couple of hours we spent out there. But it’s good birding, not necessarily good birds, that makes a good day, and we had lots of the first and enough of the second.

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The Peterson Centennial II: Two Lives

I didn’t know Roger Peterson, and the closest I can recall having come to meeting The Great Man was a damp morning in Princeton, when there were so many reporters and television cameras in the Institute Woods that we turned around in a righteous huff and went elsewhere.

Or rather: Of course I know Roger Tory Peterson. I’ve known him since my first birdbook (the 1961 Western, a longitudinal misunderstanding on my part ), and I’ve got to know him better and better over the years, obsessively obsessing over the field guides, the prose books, the interviews, the prefaces and forewords, the never-ending flow of words from a man I never met. Over the decades I’ve deduced–or perhaps I’ve constructed–a lifesize picture of Peterson and his life; I’m good at such things, by temperament and by training, and I’m sure that broad swaths of that portrait are as accurate as they are plausible. And I’m sure that even broader swaths are neither.

I remember the eagerness with which I seized on the Devlin and Naismith “biography,” and I remember the disgust with which I put it down: even at 13 I smelled that mouldering whiff of hagiography (remember the scurrilous story of the bloodied dustjacket?). Not the television interviews, not the coffee-table albums of paintings and photos, not the increasingly repetitious essays and forewords gave me what I really wanted–a check on the fantasy vita I’d created, a little historical truth against which to measure years of surmise and suspicion.

As the Peterson centennial approached, two new experiments in biography appeared: the one a “lite” collection of anecdotes, the other a well-researched and solidly written piece of historiography. To my surprise, I’ve enjoyed both, and each has forced me to adjust certain components of my image of Peterson, generally in favor of the man; but both together have rather confirmed a long-held suspicion: that Peterson reached his estimable peak early, and that apart from the wonder that was the 1947 Field Guide, there was a great deal of frustration in Peterson’s efforts.

I don’t remember now just why I was so ready to dislike Elizabeth Rosenthal’s Birdwatcher, but only when Susan Drennan told me that she had been involved in the refereeing of the manuscript did I find myself moved to pick the book up. And I’m glad I did; it’s a delightful read, a gracefully written compilation of stories and anecdotes largely unburdened by argument. Rosenthal relies heavily on long quotes from interviews conducted with Peterson’s family, friends, and acolytes; for the most part, these are neatly integrated into her larger text, with only the occasional editorial officiousness (my favorite: “stable chemicals” is emended to “stable [of] chemicals”!).

I don’t mean at all to suggest that the book is aimless or unstructured. It begins with Peterson’s birth and ends with his death; in between we learn about his fortes and his flaws, his childish relationships with women and his profound friendship with his polar opposite, James Fisher. We encounter a hopelessly abstracted and slightly creepy Peterson–voiding his bladder in public, “rating” strange women on train platforms–and a gloomy, moody Peterson whose fear of age and death took him to the plastic surgeon more than once. More fascinating, perhaps, are the portraits Rosenthal sketches of many of Peterson’s associates, friends, and partners, their names familiar to birders from decades of printed acknowledgments but their lives and personalities until now pretty much lost. The three wives in particular gain dimension in Rosenthal’s accounts; Barbara Peterson turns out–as any careful reader of Wild America must have guessed–to be strong and engaging and intelligent (not to mention long-suffering), to my mind at least as rewarding a subject for biography as her famous husband. Virginia Peterson, on the other hand, comes off as the Lady Macbeth she’d long been rumored to be; at times her depiction descends almost to caricature, and I find myself  wondering whether the picture painted here is entirely fair–especially given the occasional positive comment about her from the lips and pens of Peterson’s later acolytes. The first wife, Mildred Peterson, remains a relative mystery. Rosenthal is able to provide some details about her family and background–distinguished and privileged, respectively–but this great-great…niece of George Washington disappears from the biography as surely as she seems to have disappeared from her ex-husband’s life, surfacing only briefly on her accidental death many years later.

To the extent that Birdwatcher presents an argument, it is found in the central 100 pages of the book, where Rosenthal treats Peterson’s conservation activities in, especially, the 1960s, identifying him as among the prima mobilia of a burgeoning world-wide environmental movement. Peterson’s own early work, conducted for the US Army in the 1940s, on the effects of pesticides was incidental and inconclusive, but he was an early and influential supporter of Rachel Carlson in her search for a publisher for Silent Spring; the Petersons also provided support and assistance to researchers seeking the causes of the decline of the Osprey in coastal Connecticut. Peterson’s visit with Guy Mountfort to the wild Doñana raised worldwide awareness of the threats to one of Europe’s most important landscapes, ultimately resulting in its preservation.

These are great accomplishments, but Rosenthal’s accounts of Peterson’s role in them are somewhat undermined by comments she reproduces from others involved: the recurring remarks that Peterson was always willing to lend his name to a worthy cause begin to sound rather like back-handed compliments. I have no reason at all to doubt Rosenthal in this matter, but especially given those comments, I would like to have seen in the supporting documentation for this section more citations to primary archival materials than to popular articles from Peterson’s own pen. My suspicion remains that Peterson’s active and direct contributions to conservation may be a little overstated here, even as his influence–the influence of his field guides–even now on many of the leaders of the environmental movement can hardly be exaggerated.

The field guides, both those Peterson created and those he edited, weighed heavily on him in the last decades of his life. Rosenthal’s final chapters recount an unending conflict between what he considered the responsibility to update the guides and the desire to indulge himself in photography and travel. For the reader, those stories are made the more melancholy by our knowledge–shared, and forcefully expressed, by some of Peterson’s friends as early as 1980–that however strenuous his efforts, the bird guides had been rendered largely obsolete, and that from many birders’ perspectives, Peterson was honoring an imaginary obligation in devoting so much of his time to them. Saddest of all is the notion, given voice repeatedly in the last three decades of Peterson’s life, that the field guide work was keeping him from pursuing his studio painting, a complaint Rosenthal reports without comment or irony.

The tension the older Peterson experienced between his art, his field guides, and his indulgences is at the center of Doug Carlson’s fine Roger Tory Peterson: A Biography. Folk wisdom to the contrary, you can tell a book by its cover, and where Rosenthal’s shows the young Peterson at the top of his game, confidently and slightly ridiculously assuming the pose of Goethe in the Campagna, Carlson’s dust jacket depicts Peterson not long before his death, eyes empty, smile vague, dwarfed by the longest of long lenses. No field guides, no paint brushes, no birds in sight–just an old man pondering his legacy.

I’ll review Doug Carlson’s book soon in a final entry commemorating the Peterson centennial.

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Let’s Get Metaphysical

There are some great birds on this week’s Arizona RBA, everything from Sinaloa Wren to Yellow-throated Vireo, from Ruby-throated Hummingbird to Plain-capped Starthroat; but what has most caught the eye of discerning locals is the report of a very young juvenile Short-tailed Hawk above Madera Canyon. This is still a very rare species in the southwestern US, and the thought that this bird might have been hatched in the Santa Ritas is an exciting one, potentially extending the breeding range of the species quite a ways north and west from its strongholds (a relative term in connection with a bird this scarce!) in the Chiricahuas and Huachucas.

There can be no doubt about the identification, of course (the observer is one of the very best), but it is nice that he was able to photograph the hawk, too. And here’s where things get interesting, to me at least. The RBA, well and conscientiously crafted this week by a couple of excellent and thoughtful birders, pronounces this photograph the first “physical documentation” of the species in the Santa Ritas.

Wait a minute. “Physical”? Did Dave shoot the poor thing?

Of course he didn’t. What the compilers meant to do here was to contrast photographic documentation and written documentation. I won’t belabor the fact (as I usually do) that photographs should be viewed as only supporting material for written documentation, but I will point out that there is nothing “physical” about a photograph–or a sound recording–or at least, that whatever “physicality” those forms of representation participate in is shared by written documentations.

What’s “physical” and what’s “immaterial” in this photo?

It’s my belief, my assertion, my unyielding insistence that only the paper-towel-shrouded corpse (a House Sparrow that gave its life, reluctantly, for science) is ontologically “superior” to the written documentation, and that the photo on the cd and the image on the slide and the recording on the cassette tape (remember cassette tapes?) are in fact less “physical” than any of the other objects and artifacts they share the screen with.

Anyone who disagrees with me is, hm, wrong.

Obviously, I hope that my readers (both of them) are skilled at detecting irony and (slight) overstatement; but I’m equally hopeful that someone “out there” will propose a better, more precise formulation than “physical documentation” for the sorts of evidence represented by photographs and sound recordings. Be prepared: I’ve already thought of the obvious alternatives, and am ready to reject them all with vehemence.

A big smile for the rest of the weekend!

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When Is a Robin not a Robin?

Does this look like a robin to you?

Depends on where you live, I guess: “robin,” like “sparrow” and “chat” and “bunting” and so many other English bird names, means different things to different people all around the English-speaking world. But it isn’t the notorious ambiguity of such words that’s bugging me; it’s whether in a very specific case that polysemy is natural or imposed, “naive” in the Schillerian sense or contrived.

Does this look like a robin to you?

It doesn’t to me, and I’ve always through there was something more than a little fishy (fishwormy, perhaps?) about the story we learned as kids: “Robins were named by homesick European settlers for their beloved and familiar little Robin Red-breast, which has a color pattern brighter but somewhat similar to our robin, though the two species are not closely related” (this from a website for schoolchildren called “Journey North”).

Sounds like an extra-wide load of sentimental claptrap to me. It must have taken an almost debilitating case of nostalgia to make anyone think of the demure little European Robin when they first saw this great boisterous ground-loving thrush. The decidedly chat-like Eastern Bluebird, yes, similar to Erithacus in posture, in plumage, and even, if your ears haven’t been home for a good long time, in vocal tone.

But American Robin? No way. There was no need for the first European Americans to reach for so far-fetched a comparison when they had plenty of experience of obviously more similar thrushes at home. American Robin calls like a European Blackbird (see Audubon), sings like a Song Thrush (see Swainson), acts like a Fieldfare, and for all I know, probably tastes like a Mistle Thrush. So what did they really call this spectacular new bird?

A definitive answer–or more likely answers, given that birds as conspicuous as this almost always have a number of names–is to be had only after a thorough review of all the earliest lists of North American birds and other natural historical sources of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; if you’ve got the time, I’ve got the ear. But even just sitting here at my desk, with the OED and the AOU Check-list at hand, I can start it off. And I think I can see where it’s going.

The earliest attestation of “robin” in reference to the bird we know as Turdus migratorius is from 1798–and tellingly enough from an English, not an American, publication. Not for another decade would an American source adopt the name; Alexander Wilson cited the “robin” as an early singer. But Bartram, a generation before Wilson, called the bird “field fare,” and so in the 1730s did Catesby, whose well-known painting of a robin lying dead on its back atop a stump is labeled “The Fieldfare of Carolina.” This painting of a “fieldfare” was the source for Linnaeus when in 1766 he described and named Turdus migratorius.

Without digging a bit deeper, I won’t suggest that no one before 1798 ever called our red-breasted thrush (Swainson’s name for it) a “robin,” but even the few historical milestones set down in the OED and the Check-list suggest strongly that at least until the turn of the 19th century “fieldfare” was a common and familiar name for this common and familiar bird. It’s also a much more sensible, much more logical name than “robin,” and I suspect that a little more research will show that the latter was imposed on the bird much later than the former. “Robin” for Turdus migratorius will turn out to be a contrived name, a “book name,” that displaced the real name, the folk name, “fieldfare,” some time in the late 18th century.

The real question: why, and by whom? Stay tuned, and maybe someday I’ll work it out. Or maybe you already know the answer.

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The Peterson Centennial I

A hundred years ago tomorrow, Roger Tory Peterson was born in Jamestown, New York. Houghton Mifflin is marking the centennial of one of its most valuable authors with the publication of a new Field Guide, fusing in one handsome, generously formatted volume the old eastern, western, and Texas guides. The new book will please and instruct most of those who use it, and destined for bestsellerdom, it will ensure the seaworthiness of the Peterson juggernaut for another generation at least.

Those birders likely to use this guide will rely in the first instance on the plates. I’ll leave to others a full analysis of the travels and traditions of the paintings included here, but will note that most are, unfortunately, from the editions letzter Hand of the eastern and western books. I, for one, miss the brilliant little smudges illustrating Peterson’s earliest guides, and I wish that the editorial team had risked the worthy experiment of introducing their startling eloquence to a generation that has learned to think of Peterson not as an outstanding illustrator but as a poor painter. A number of Peterson’s images have been digitally corrected under the supervision of Michael O’Brien; O’Brien also contributes new paintings of species not included in earlier editions of the guides and supplementary images of some taxa, such as jaegers, originally depicted only in flight.

The familiar Petersonian pointers draw the user’s attention to each species’ field marks. In this version, the designer’s quiver bristles with arrows of widely different lengths, making plates where they are mixed look poorly planned; arrows are not consistently placed, either, making the user wonder, for example, why the leg color of Stilt Sandpiper should be marked at the “ankle” and that of Wilson’s Phalarope at the toes. In my review copy, at least, the arrows are thicker, heavier, and blacker than in earlier editions, and intrude badly on some figures: look at the face of the lower Philadelphia Vireo, for instance, whose (badly painted) dark lore nearly merges with the clunky head of the arrow pointing it out.

The paintings themselves are large and bright, crisply reproduced and generally pleasing to the eye. This guide’s new format allows the images to be reproduced some 20% larger than in its most recent predecessors. The effect is frequently stunning for those used to the small images in, say, the “big Sibley” or even the National Geographic guide–and almost literally stunning for those of us who grew up with the 1947 Peterson. Paradoxically, in a few cases (the Calidris sandpipers, most notably), the superior size of the images reveals their disappointing blandness, as the eye seeks feather details that just aren’t there; this seems to me a missed opportunity for enhancement, digital or analogue.

As they have in Peterson bird guides since 1980, the plates in this new volume share the opening with the corresponding species accounts. Notoriously, the facing-page format reduces the space available to the text, and some pages that have to squeeze in several species run dangerously close to the bottom edge; other modern field guides have dealt with this problem by slightly reducing the print size (as in NatGeo) or by making brilliant use of captions (as in big Sibley) or both (as in Mullarney/Svensson/Zetterstrom/Grant). No such effort to pack information in is apparent here; indeed, there are vast white spaces where the text apparently runs out of things to say, even about such challenging groups as gulls, gadfly petrels, and rails. The two text pages devoted to the skuas and jaegers are fully half blank–surely one or the other member of the editorial team could have filled those creamy acres with a simple essay introducing the techniques that many birders (not, I hasten to add, those of us who grew up on the Great Plains and live in the desert southwest) now use to identify these difficult birds.

The identification material we are given in the texts is generally accurate and helpful, likely to satisfy most of the time most of those who reach for this guide. A quick scan finds less new information than old resignation: female Archilochus hummingbirds, for example, are simply “very difficult to separate.” To be fair, the treatment of the gulls here is more extensive than in any previous incarnation of the Peterson guides, and the fall parulids are no longer “confusing,” a discouraging label they were forced to bear for 75 years. Ambitious users of the guide will find occasional references to more thorough identification guides, too, making it easier for them to take the next step to sophistication if they wish.

While most of the text is hippocratically harmless, there are a few passages that may mislead the user, especially in matters of taxonomy. The words “wader” and “shorebird” are, or should be, synonymous, the former more frequent in European usage, the other current in North America, as the general introduction to the families concerned notes; but the headers to the plates and the separate family introductions switch back and forth without motivation, and in one case seem to draw a distinction between “snipelike waders” and “sandpipers.” The beginning birder can be forgiven her confusion on trying to tease these sloppily applied terms apart.

More seriously and more pervasively, the new guide is hopelessly muddled in its approach to geographic variation. This is sadly ironic, of course, as the 1947 Peterson remains (alongside Pyle) perhaps the best source for information on the identification of subspecies in North America. The new guide reveals both its eastern bias and a lack of taxonomic awareness when it labels the Song Sparrows of the east “typical”; they are no more “typical” than any other subspecies or subspecies group of that species.

The Introduction’s brief discussion of the subspecies concept is equally inaccurate. It is nonsensical to write that “When the distinct geographic forms of a species reach a point when [sic, for: the point that] the population is dominated by individuals that are recognizably different from typical individuals of the ‘parent’ species, the local group is formally designated a subspecies of the parent species.” Members of a subspecies differ consistently from members of other subspecies of the same species, not from “typical” individuals of the species. The same illogic renders incomprehensible this sentence: “Often a subspecific group is so distinct from the parent species that several members can be easily recognized in the field….” Huh? Subspecies and subspecies groups are by definition identical to and part of the parent species that they make up. (And I have no idea what “several members” is supposed to mean here: several “members” of “a subspecific group”? several “members” of “the parent species”?) This is poor thinking clouded by a weird Platonic notion of what constitutes a species, and Roger Tory Peterson would roll in his grave to hear such nonsense imputed to him.

Apart from such goofs, the language of the texts in the new guide is noticeably less lively than in earlier editions. Peterson was never much of a stylist, at his best attaining a sort of even-toned weekly-reader clarity; but I wish that the editorial team responsible for this new edition had retained the occasional bits of humor and poetry that flash through the earlier guides. In 1947, Lincoln’s Sparrow was “a skulker, ‘afraid of its own shadow’,” and displaying Common Nighthawks could be seen “zooming up sharply … with a sudden deep whir that sounds like the well-known ‘Bronx cheer’.” Sixty-one years later, the charm of the birds is no longer reflected in the charm of the language; Lincoln’s Sparrow is now simply and pleonastically a “somewhat skulking species [that] prefers to be near cover,” and Common Nighthawks have learned their company manners. At least Prothonotary Warbler is still “a golden bird of the wooded swamps”!

If the new guide disappoints in some respects, the large-scale maps–gathered in the back of the book and reproduced as thumbnails in the species accounts–are a great and greatly appreciated improvement. Created by Paul Lehman, the large and clearly visible maps are both precise and accurate; the few quibbles one could raise are matters of degree, not of fact. American Black Ducks, for example, are probably too rare nowadays in southeast Nebraska to merit mapping. Conversely, the range of White-winged Dove across the continent could have been painted much more lavishly. Telegraphic notes on the maps indicate vagrancy patterns for many species; while completeness would be an unrealizable goal, there are occasional instances where records worth mentioning are passed over in silence: the vagrant ranges of White-eared Hummingbird and Sulphur-bellied Flycatcher, for instance, are understated here. But few are the questions that these laudable maps do not answer, and authoritatively; I am especially pleased to see many species’ ranges in northern Mexico and the Caribbean limned with the same care given their distribution in the US and Canada.

With the publication of this new single-volume guide, the Peterson legacy is assured. And now it’s up to a new generation of birders to decide whether that legacy is a living one, or merely a tribute to the book that in some ways started it all.

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