October 20, 2012: Sparrow Workshop Note that this follows my October 4 lecture to the Brooklyn Bird Club, “Sparrow Tales.”

November 10, 2012: Sandy Hook

April 27, 2013: Brigantine

The trips are free, but registration is required and the group size is limited. To get complete information and to sign up, check the registration page about two weeks before each trip.

After two exciting days at a couple of the hottest spots around, I decided to duck the binocular-brandishing crowd today and try someplace new. I didn’t exactly close my eyes and point at the map, but I did settle on a green blotch in the atlas I’d never heard of, and so set off for Nutley’s Memorial Parkway.

It turned out to be exactly what I’d hoped for: a nice strip of trees and bushes along an urban watercourse, and I had it all to myself until the earliest of the dog walkers and the promptest of the morning joggers showed up. And there were birds: half a dozen species of warblers, both eastern orioles, and my first Swainson’s Thrush of the spring. I was impressed to see a pair of Northern Rough-winged Swallows investigating a mossy cavern in the bank of the creek.

Of all the new things I saw, this is the one that brought me up short.

Look at that last name listed among the Trustees. I was birding hallowed ground.

In his splendid new photographic guide to the North American tubenoses, Steve Howell laments the nomenclatural and taxonomic “clusters” that hound so many of these birds. He’s absolutely right: it’s a mess, as even the quickest glance (and who could stand more?) at Coues’s bibliographical notes on the history of tubenoses will prove.

Take, for example, the beautiful and rarish Black-capped Petrel. The AOU Check-list tells us merely that this bird was named Procellaria hasitata by Heinrich Kuhl in 1820. But a look at that original description suggests complication. Kuhl attributes the discovery of the species to the great Johann Reinhold Forster, who, says Kuhl, depicted it on two of his plates, once as Procellaria hasitata and once under the name leucocephala.

But Forster’s ornithological records were still unpublished in 1820 (they would not appear in print until 1844, nearly 50 years after Forster’s death), so Kuhl gets the credit for naming the species. It turns out, however, that Kuhl somehow got his petrels mixed up, and that Forster’s name hasitata actually referred to the Gray Petrel, nowadays known (rather prosaically) as Procellaria cinerea. Thanks to the rules of publication and priority, though, Kuhl’s name is the one that stuck.

But what about this name hasitata? There’s no such Latin word, and the emendation to haesitata–made by many, including Coues himself, without comment–isn’t much of an improvement. Instead, I suspect that Kuhl followed Forster in a different misspelling.

The perfectly good Latin word “hasta” means spear or blade; “hastatum,” which comes into botanical English as “hastate,” means “bladelike,” sharply pointed or angular. In ornithology, the adjective is used to describe the shape of the angular spots on the Indian Spotted Eagle and on the southwest Mexican subspecies of the Middle American Screech-Owl. I think that Forster used the word, with the insertion of a barbarous -i-, to indicate the sharp, bladelike wing shape of his bird, which he thus named “bladelike stormbird.” Evocative, isn’t it? And maybe even plausible.

How much easier it would all have been had Lafresnaye got there first! In 1844, working from a manuscript by L’Herminier (who–small world–provides the eponym for the Audubon’s Shearwater) and echoing the Creole name “diablotin,” the French naturalist renamed the species Procellaria diabolica, a fitting name for a bird whose taxonomic history is so devilish.

Want to enjoy birding even more? Join me this spring at the Westfield Adult School for a new course. We’ll be meeting two Monday evenings for lecture and discussion, followed by a Saturday morning field trip to try out our new skills.

You can register here. See you in March!

It turns out to be just as straightforward but infinitely more amusing: a fiscal is a treasury official, assigned oversight of wealth.

Wikipedia offers an alternative explanation, suggesting that Afrikaans fiskaal can refer to a public executioner. That’s plausible and neat, but I have to say I prefer the lectio slightly difficilior by which the fiscal shrikes are bookkeepers of a grisly sort, their currrency bugs and rodents.

A Loggerhead Shrike in Arizona the other day.

Under the promising title “Of Fishes, Birds, and Reptiles,” it promised masterpieces of natural history illustration from the imperial collections–just up my alley, and how nice to get to spend some time in that familiar library someplace other than the dingy old manuscripts room.

And in fact there were some nice paintings hanging and some fancy early prints in the cases. Giorgio Liberale’s works for Ferdinand II were splendid, and the leaves from the Musaeum belonging to Rudolf II let us look into the private library of one of the early Baroque’s most interesting natural history collectors.

So why did we leave feeling like our 12 euros could have been better spent on coffee and cake? (As an apostate academic, I don’t get in free anywhere anymore.)

There are shows whose individual objects are so spectacular that they carry the entire experience. And there are shows whose ingenious narrative structures can get you through even the otherwise dreariest of exhibits. “Von Fischen, Vögeln und Reptilien” was of neither sort. The images on display were all show and no tell, and the simple chronological structure of the whole thing let even the specialized interest flag after a while. It shouldn’t be up to the visitor, for example, to somehow just know that one of the paintings was among the earliest ever to show actual feet on a bird-of-paradise; that’s the job of the curators, who should be responsible for pointing out odd facts like that and telling the stories that will make a trip to the exhibit memorable. The catalogue didn’t do it for me, either, and I buy exhibit catalogues almost like an addict buys, well, coffee and cake.

A couple of days later we found ourselves in Vienna’s grand old Natural History Museum.

I’ve loved this place for years, decades, now, in spite of–no, precisely because of–its resolutely old-fashioned, exhaustively systematic take on the natural world.

There aren’t many museums left that dare present, say, half a dozen rooms of neatly hand-labeled rocks in mineralogical sequence, and the sheer nineteenth-century confidence of it all is overwhelming and ultimately seductive. Here’s nature, have a look!

Since my last visit, though, there have been many innovations, some small and clever, some big and imposing. There are far more “mockups” now than there used to be, from dinosaur models dressed in chicken and turkey feathers

to an animatronic beast roaring and weaving its frightening head above the delighted crowds of mock-terrified toddlers. (Click for video.)

My favorite this time was a temporary exhibition called “Katzengold und Silberfisch,” full of whimsical reminders that some minerals are named for animals and some animals for minerals. Words, things: right up my alley.

And this time it was. There wasn’t much to it: no ooh-aah rarities, no clever texts, just Ruby Topazes and rubies and topazes. And a Lazuli Bunting lying innocently beneath a slab of lapis lazuli.

Three cheers.

Hooded Merganser and Red-breasted Merganser

The scientific names of the saw-billed ducks lead in all sorts of interesting directions. Take the Hooded Merganser, possibly the loveliest of a very lovely group of birds; its current genus name, Lophodytes, is as pleasant to say as it is meaningful.

“Lophos” is from the Greek word for crest, and “dytes” means “digger, diver.” So our cute little hoodie is a crested diver, a point only reinforced by the specific epithet cucullatus, meaning, well, hooded, or cowled.

There are somewhere between many and gazillions of birds with loph- in their name somewhere, and cucullatus/a/um is nearly as frequent. The “dytes” part is more interesting. Two penguin species–the consummate divers–share the genus Aptenodytes, meaning “wingless diver,” and the name “troglodytes,” familiar even to many non-birders as the genus name of the mouse-like wrens, has also been applied to species and subspecies of nightjars, swifts, waxbills, and cisticolas, each of which typically (and sometimes maddeningly) disappears from the birder’s view by diving into the darkness.

The other bird in the photo above is a drake Red-breasted Merganser, Mergus serrator. “Serrator” is easy enough to figure out: like the English word “serrated,” it has to do with “serra” or “secra,” a toothed saw, in reference to the pointed projections on mergansers’ bills, which help them hold on their slippery prey. Oddly enough, “serrator” is rumored to also be an obsolete English name for the Ivory Gull–I don’t believe it, or even understand it, but such are the things one can run across on the internet.

Mergus, the genus to which all other mergansers but the Smew are assigned (and that’s simply Mergellus, a little teeny tiny Mergus) is a bit more mysterious. The word is obviously related to the Latin  ”mergo,” “I dive,” on the same impulse as “dytes” (and the old genus name for the loons, Urinator).

But it is only recently that the noun “mergus” has been restricted in meaning to the mergansers. In Antiquity, the word referred to a number of ill-defined, perhaps unidentifiable waterbirds; Arnott notes that Pliny used “mergus” to translate Aristotle’s Aithyia, which is used nowadays (in a slightly different spelling) as the genus name for the pochards. To heap confusion onto mix-up, Arnott concludes (quite cogently) that Pliny and a few later Latin writers used “mergus” to denote the Great Cormorant, while in many other cases the name means simply “diving piscivore,” perhaps including Great Black-backed and Yellow-legged Gulls.

The name “merganser” (which doubles as the specific epithet of the Common Merganser or Goosander) is easily analyzed as a combination of Latin “mergus” and “anser,” meaning goose; it apparently first appeared in the neo-Latin of Conrad Gesner’s Historia animalium.

Gesner’s cut is plainly of a Common Merganser, but in its earliest English usage, the word “merganser” was explicitly restricted to the Red-breasted Merganser. Sir Thomas Browne wrote in 1668 that the “gossander… is a large well colored and marked diving fowle most answering [closely corresponding to] the Merganser.” It seems to have taken nearly two centuries for the name to be applied more generally to all the saw-bills–first, apparently, by MacGillivray in his History of British Birds. Charmingly and sensibly and perhaps slyly, MacGillivray suggested that the larger species be called “merganser” and the smaller “merganas,” “diving duck.”

The species names of most of the remaining Mergus mergansers are fairly straightforward. The extinct Auckland Merganser went by the name australis, “southern,” a reference to its range. Miocene miscellus, described from a Virginia specimen, shows a mixture–a miscellany, as it were–of primitive and derived characters, while the European Mergus connectens, a Pleistocene species, “links” other species. The Chinese, or Scaly-sided Merganser is named simply squamatus, “scaly.”

The critically endangered Brazilian Merganser has the most descriptive name of all its relatives. Mergus octosetaceus was named by Vieillot in 1817; the French name he gives it, harle à huit brins, reveals the meaning of the scientific epithet: this species, writes Vieillot, has a crest comprising eight narrow vaneless feathers.

Great name, that one; but eight years later, Vieillot, having discovered that the crest in other specimens was made of more than eight feathers, changed both the vernacular and the scientific name, this time giving it the equally logical but inestimably more colorless name brasilianus.

The change created a confusion that persisted for nearly a century, with various authorities going back and forth over the years between some form (often enough mangled) of octosetaceus and brasilianus/brasiliensis. In 1850, Pucheran proposed a new, or rather an old, epithet, lophotes, which he had discovered on the label prepared by Cuvier and attached to Vieillot’s type specimen in Paris; Pucheran also took the opportunity to propose for the first time the synonymization of Latham’s Mergus fuscus. But Pucheran’s new name was pushing the idea of priority too far, and Vieillot’s (inaccurate!) octosetaceus has prevailed.

Pucheran’s–or Cuvier’s–specific name for this rare bird takes us back to the beginning: “lophotes” means simply “crested,” from the same word that gave us Lophodytes. Next time you’re standing around balancing a drink and a horse doover, try some of this stuff out on the other guests: you may never have to worry about being asked out again.

By the way, who doesn’t love the Biodiversity Heritage Library? It’s impossible not to while away an entire day following even the most whimsical thread.

The high point of a pleasant day on the shore with Alison was, of course, getting to spend a day on the shore with Alison. A close second was finally running into our first Ipswich Sparrows of the winter, two birds in the dunes at Stone Harbor.

Quite apart from its frosty beauty and its worldwide scarcity, the Ipswich Sparrow has a fascinating human history, too. Known to old-time Sable Islanders simply and aptly as “the Gray Bird,” this rare emberizid was formally described to science (as the Large Barren Ground Sparrow) just 140 years ago, on the basis of specimens collected by the famous taxidermist C.J. Maynard in Essex County, Massachusetts, in the winters of 1868 and 1870.

Maynard’s description and name did not appear until 1872. For once, the delay was caused not by the vagaries of publication schedules, but rather by a case of mistaken identity. Confronted with his puzzling novum in the sand-hills of Ipswich, Maynard naturally sought an identification among the known birds of North America. The collector apparently sent his specimen to Baird, who compared it with the type–and only–skin of the sparrow Audubon had named for him in 1843.

Baird, in a rare lapse, pronounced Maynard’s bird “in all essential points” identical, and suggested in a letter that the differences between the Massachusetts specimen and Audubon’s type were due to the fact that Maynard’s bird was in fresher, basic plumage.

Maynard was so delighted with his find–even in the 1860s, recording a new species for heavily birded Massachusetts was a major accomplishment–that he commissioned a woodcut by his frequent collaborator E.L. Weeks to serve as the frontispiece to the 1870 edition of The Naturalist’s Guide. Maynard provides a full description of his Massachusetts specimen and a comparative table of the measurements of that bird and Audubon’s, which was taken in present-day North Dakota.

Not until Maynard visited the Smithsonian himself in spring 1872 with his 1868 specimen and two others collected in 1870 did he recognize that his birds were in fact not Baird’s Sparrows but representatives of an undescribed sparrow taxon (a suspicion apparently communicated to Coues before the publication of the 1872 Key).

While in the 1870 Naturalist’s Guide Maynard had insisted on the clear distinctness of his bird from the Savannah Sparrow, in the 1872 article he considered them “closely allied,” and thus assigned his sp.nov. to the genus Passerculus, giving it the specific epithet princeps. Baird, the eminent second Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, ratified Maynard’s diagnosis in his 1874 History of North American Birds, agreeing that the Massachusetts specimens were after all clearly distinct from Baird’s Sparrow.

In the 1877 revised edition of his Naturalist’s Guide, Maynard shows himself decidedly less than gracious in claiming that he was not to blame for the earlier misidentification of what he now calls the Pallid Sparrow, but had been “misled by others”–meaning, we must assume, Baird–before he had the chance to examine the true Baird’s Sparrow himself.

Weeks’s original woodcut frontispiece was colored for the new edition–Dwight in his 1895 study calls it a “wretched color plate”–and moved proudly to the beginning of the catalogue of New England birds that makes up the second half of Maynard’s Guide.

All this is interesting enough. But there’s a fine twist to this story: it turns out that there is a very real possibility that Maynard’s discovery of the Ipswich Sparrow is pre-dated some sixty years by a bird collected by Alexander Wilson at Great Egg Harbor, New Jersey. Wilson (like Maynard and like Baird) misidentified his specimen, this time as the male of the “typical” Savannah Sparrow, and labeled his painting of the bird as such.

What Wilson illustrates, however, as was pointed out 120 years ago by Norris De Haven, is a lovely pale Ipswich Sparrow avant la lettre–collected just a few miles from where Alison and I enjoyed our sightings yesterday.

Bendire's Thrasher, a Sulphur Springs specialty

Join me for my Friday lecture and for some excellent birding in the Sulphur Springs Valley.

See you there!