Birdwords – Page 10 – Birding New Jersey

June 14, 2014January 18, 2015

It’s Not Easy Seeing Green

I can’t see it. No matter how many I’ve watched in the field, no matter how many skins I’ve handled, I just can’t see the green on a green heron. And I’m not alone: this name regularly shows up on those lists of “worst bird names of all time,” and I can’t count the times I’ve had to soothe sputtering colleagues in the field who, like me, can see blue and gray and purple and red, but not green.

It’s just a name, of course, and names don’t “mean” in the same way that real words do. There’s nothing to stop us from calling this bird the orange heron or the apricot egret or, for all I care, Hortense. Names can’t be “bad.”

But that doesn’t stop me from wondering why we call it green.

Hans Sloane seems to be the first European to have described this bird, which he encountered in Jamaica in 1687/88.

Sloane’s description of his “small bittern” leaves no doubt as to the species under discussion, but he has very little to say about his bird’s colors — and he never mentions any shade of green. He does half-apologize for the engraving:

I know not but that some part of the odd Position of the Neck may be owing to the carrying of it, after it was kill’d.

It was Mark Catesby who, in word and in picture, first convinced the scientific world that this bird was green.

A Crest of long green Feathers covers the Crown of the Head. The Neck and Breast of a dark muddy Red. The Back cover’d with long narrow pale-green Feathers. The large Quill-Feathers of the Wings of a very dark Green, with a Tincture of Purple. All the Rest of the Wing-Feathers of a changeable shining Green….

Given that description to rely on, it only made sense for Linnaeus to christen the bird Ardea virescens, “a heron with a somewhat crested crown, a green back, and a reddish breast.”

Catesby, like Sloane, still knew the species under the name “small bittern,” as Mathurin Brisson confirmed in 1760 in the Ornithologie. Rejecting the binomial Linnaeus had published two years earlier, Brisson assigned the bird the Latin label Cancrofagus viridis, which he translated in his French text as “le crabier verd,” the first time, so far as I know, that such a name was used in a European vernacular.

Martinet’s illustration is not what one might call overly successful, combining as it apparently does the body of a green heron with the legs and neck of another species or two. He does much better with the bird Brisson calls “le crabier verd tacheté,” occasionally considered in those long-ago days a distinct taxon or, later on, the female of the green heron. Martinet’s drawing is as delightful as it is readily identifiable, as a juvenile green heron.

Twenty years later, Buffon retained Brisson’s “crabier vert” in the heading for his account of the species, and he continued, too, to recognize the “spotted green heron” as a distinct species.

So far as I can tell, the first ornithologist to have rendered Ardea virescens or “crabier vert” in English was Thomas Pennant, in his Arctic Zoology of 1785. Not content just to call the bird “green,” Pennant goes lavishly, extravagantly out of his way to justify the name, describing the little wader as a

H[eron] With a green head, and large green crest … coverts of the wings dusky green, edged with white….

Pennant’s name appears to have been made canonical by its use in John Latham’s General Synopsis and Index ornithologicus. One holdout was William Bartram, who in his 1791 Travels used “green bitern” or “lesser green bitern” for the bird — an obvious nod in the direction of Catesby, whose itinerary largely inspired Bartram’s journey.

Bartram’s friend and disciple, Alexander Wilson uses the name “green heron” as the title of the species account in his American Ornithology; no doubt as a compliment to his patron, though, the text itself refers to the bird as “the Green Bittern.” Wilson also alludes in disgust to the “very vulgar and indelicate nickname” with which the bird is saddled by “public opinion”; “shitepoke” and similar names are still current today over much of this species’ US range, a rare example of the survival of a genuine folk name.

Bartram and Wilson were on the wrong side of onomastic history. It has been green heron ever since, except for that brief period when this species and the striated heron were “lumped” under the English name green-backed heron (intentionally or not, a direct translation of Linnaeus’s Ardea dorso viridi).

Once again, though, green heron it is, and green heron it will remain. Whether I can see it or not.

June 12, 2014June 12, 2014

Looking for Chapman

Mark Twain saw a lot of the outdoors over a long life that took him from the Mississippi to California to Connecticut. As I think back on what I’ve read of Twain, though, nature — Nature — doesn’t play much of a role at all. Landscape, even so dominant a feature as Huckleberry Finn’s river, never seems to be more than narrative convenience or metaphoric convention.

I was surprised, then, to find a notable selection of natural history titles among the books Twain donated to the library in Redding, Connecticut, in the last years of his life.

It turns out that most had been gifts to his daughter Jean.

On her early death in 1909, Jean Clemens’s father wrote that

She was a loyal friend to all animals, and she loved them all, birds, beasts, and everything — even snakes — an inheritance from me. She knew all the birds; she was high up in that lore.

And she learned her bird lore the way most people did in the first years of the twentieth century: from the works of Frank Michler Chapman.

Jean Clemens owned Chapman’s Warblers and his 1903 Handbook, two works that remained standards for birders (and ornithologists) for decades.

Today, however, on Chapman’s 150th birthday, even those of us who remember those books and his many others can forget how prominent this ornithologist, conservationist, and author was in his day. In the first decades of the twentieth century, natural history hobbyists referred to their “Chapman” with the same matter-of-factness with which we today cite our “Sibley” or our “Peterson,” and by 1900, as he would later write,

so many were the requests for lectures … that it was not possible to accept all of them.

Think about it this way: if Frank Chapman had lived into our celebrity-tainted age, it’s easy to predict which bird bloggers would be elbowing their shrill way to a “selfy” with him.

Chapman’s contributions to the culture and development of the American Museum, where he served — and eventually reigned, as “The Chief” — for a full 52 years, are well discussed by, among others, François Vuilleumier, who wrote on the sixtieth anniversary of Chapman’s death

Chapman was a truly remarkable individual, whose full mark on ornithology remains to be documented,

a rewarding task for a young historian with time on her hands.

Meanwhile, in this sesquicentennial year, I’m more interested for the moment by Chapman’s life on this side of the Hudson. Even most New Jersey birders seem to think of him as a New Yorker, but Chapman was born in West Englewood, just back from the Palisades, and he was buried in Englewood’s Brookside Cemetery on his death in November 1945.

So what do Frank Chapman’s boyhood haunts look like now?

“I lived,” Chapman wrote in his Autobiography, “in the place of my birth until I reached middle age.”

A fine house it was, too, built by Chapman’s wealthy parents a year before his birth. This house, and the one that replaced it after a fire in 1890, occupied an old fruit farm on Teaneck Road at West Englewood Avenue.

On forty suburban acres, the family kept horses, pigs, poultry, and cows (and though Chapman neglects to mention it, the staff to care for them). The house and barn and other outbuildings were “the scene of many boyish adventures” for the privileged only child.

If I read the maps correctly, part of the Chapman estate is now part of Argonne Park in Teaneck.

The Chapmans’ neighbor to the south was William Walter Phelps, owner of the largest estate in the area. Phelps served as a congressman and as envoy to Germany and to Austria-Hungary, but his great love was trees. Chapman writes

This estate was posted and became, in effect, a bird sanctuary years before this term was used. Whether as gunner or bird student, this was the hunting-ground of my boyhood.

The Phelps mansion, too, burnt, in 1889, but was not rebuilt. The ruins were finally demolished in 1925, and Teaneck constructed a new municipal complex on the site of Chapman’s boyhood playground.

West of the Chapman farm,

there were extensive forests penetrated only by wood roads, and a brook where trout could be found. Beyond, on the slopes reaching up to the crest of the hills overlooking the valley of the Hackensack, were fields partly grown with red cedar, bayberry and sweet gum.

The forested lands around the train station, Chapman recalled, were

as good collecting ground as there was in the New York City region. The woods surrounding it stretched for miles north and south, forming a highway for the diurnal journeys of migrating birds.

When Chapman showed those woods to a respected older colleague one June evening, John Burroughs listened to the chorus of veerys and wood thrushes and turned to his companion to say simply,

No wonder you love birds!

Two slender slivers of wooded parkland now flank the railroad station where the Sage of Slabsides disembarked. Neither remnant is especially promising for the birder.

Chapman himself saw the future.

Sadly I saw the forests fall and the fields erupt flimsy cottages… I had not the heart to witness the rapid dismemberment of haunts on which I had held a “rambler’s lease” so long that they seemed to be mine.

The ornithologist abandoned his boyhood home and moved a couple of miles east into the city of Englewood. There, too, though,

the changes came so rapidly that each week-end found some cherished shrine invaded or destroyed,

and the Chapmans “took refuge in New York City,” with periodic escapes to the Catskills or to Panama. Not until death overtook them — Fanny Embury Chapman first, in September 1944, followed by her husband in November 1945 — did the Chapmans return to Englewood for good.

Mark Twain and Jean Clemens had been dead a full generation by then. Roger Tory Peterson’s Field Guide was almost a dozen years old.

But Frank Chapman even in death remained a powerful force in American conservation and birding. He deserves to be remembered, especially by those of us who live in the state where he first saw the light of day.

June 10, 2014June 9, 2014

The Birder In the (Semantic) Field

A gratuitous and unmotivated picture of a beautiful little semipalmated sandpiper. Just because.

But seriously, folks.

I love new birders. And often enough, it’s not hard to tell when a birder is new. It isn’t that he makes identification errors, or that she appreciates only the big, colorful birds; it’s the words they use.

I’ve grown more and more interested in identifying which words are appropriate to a discussion about birding and which are not. We can say, for example, “pair,” but we can’t properly say “couple.” We rightly say “hatched,” but we really shouldn’t say “born.” We speak of a bird’s “parents,” but less readily, I think, of its “father” and “mother.” (I forbear any mention of “Mr.” and “Mrs.” and “Junior.”)

Can you provide additional examples? What makes a word inappropriate in this very precise context? Who decides?

June 6, 2014April 2, 2015

Scrawlers

As James and I work on our new Birds and Art tour, I’ve been putting in the odd moment learning the names of some of the many (very many!) birds we can hope to see in lovely Catalonia next April.

: Yellowhammers, William MacGillivray

Naturally, I started with my favorites, the emberizid buntings, and was startled to find several species of these best of all birds given one of the strangest of all names in Spanish: escribano, the copyist.

With that name, these birds join the host of clerical fowl, from lettered aracaris and secretary-birds to, just perhaps, prothonotary warblers. But what’s so literate about a bunting?

The sources I have been able to run down all agree — both a good sign and bad, that — that the Spanish name, varied sometimes to “escribidora” or “escribiente,” refers to the irregular dark markings on the egg, which resemble carelessly written letters and words.

: Reed bunting eggs, MNH Toulouse.

And that stirs a dim memory, a memory confirmed with just a little sniffing around in the old books. In English, “writing bird,” “writing lark,” and “writing master” are all attested as names for the yellowhammer and the corn bunting.

In his 1875 Rambles and Adventures, George Christopher Davies explains in no uncertain terms why: his energetic schoolboys

found two or three larks’ nests and some yellowhammers’ or “writing masters,” as the country lads sometimes call them, from the scribblings on the egg shells.

Ten years later, Charles Swainson also listed the names “scribbling lark,” “écrivain,” and “schryver” for the yellowhammer, all of them due, he writes, to “the curious irregular lines on the egg, resembling writing.” Swann adds “writing linnet” and “scribbler,” again “from the scribble-like markings on its eggs.”

Wonderings never come alone. Might this also be the explanation for the strange epithet of the lark sparrow, grammacus? It’s a clever idea, but like so many other clever ideas, it doesn’t pan out at all. Thomas Say’s original description of this “pretty species of sparrow” makes it plain that the eponymous grammee, the “pen strokes,” are the heavy markings of the “lineated head” and, alas, have nothing to do with the sparrow’s eggs at all.

See what you learn once you get started?

May 18, 2014May 18, 2014

Flatulent Field Ducks

Now here’s one I haven’t quite figured out. Betty and Lorinda and I were watching little bustards last week near Eyguières when I happened to ask a French birder if he had any idea where the odd vernacular name “canepetière” came from. Just making conversation, don’t you know, and I hardly expected an answer — but he had one. A convincing one. “Cane,” he told me, was a name for “duck” (as in “canard,” for “drake”), and “petière” — well, let’s just say that that word refers, indelicately, to the reedy buzz, the “pet,” uttered by the bird on taking flight.

“Farting duck,” in fact, is precisely the etymology given in most of the standard modern reference works. But the wrinkle is this: the earliest attestation of that name is found not in a medieval glossary, not in an early ornithological text, but in one of those exuberant lists so beloved of that most original of French writers, François Rabelais. In his Gargantua, published in 1534, Rabelais tells of the modest supper served to the aptly named Grandgousier:

six roasted cows, three heifers, thirty-two calves … 140 pheasants, some dozens of wood pigeons, river birds, teal, bitterns, curlews, plovers, partridges, daws, redshanks, lapwings, shelducks, spoonbills, herons, coots, egrets, storks, “cannes petières,” flamingos, turkeys….

It pays to be careful when reading Rabelais. Though all of the other bird names on the menu seem to be “genuine” — that is to say, they are well attested in earlier sources — it’s eminently possible that here, buried in this avalanche of words, is a specimen of our author’s famous carnivalesque wit, an example of the verbal playfulness that makes reading Rabelais so much fun and so much frustration all at the same time. I wonder, in other words, whether Rabelais didn’t make the name up.

The fact that it does not appear in print again for another twenty years (in the ever-so-serious Pierre Belon’s Observations) suggests at least that “canne petière” did not enjoy great currency in the written language; Belon did use it, though, without etymological comment, in the species account he prepared for his 1555 Histoire naturelle des oyseaux.

Buffon, in the Histoire naturelle, doesn’t blame any individual author for the name, but he does suggest how it might have arisen. Quoting François Salerne’s remarks in his 1767 translation of Ray, Buffon argues that “petiére” is actually a “corruption” of the original

“canepetrace,” [a name given the bird] because it prefers to live in rocky places,

such as, for example, the steppes of the Crau.

Buffon expressly rejects any etymology

from the bird’s “flatulence” … which seems to be based solely in the similarity of the word “pet” [to the word “petrace,” for “rocky”]: no naturalist has ever brought up anything of the kind in his account of the bird….

I suspect that Buffon and Salerne are right, and that “canepetière” has its origin in the transformation of the genuine name “canepetrace.” The question remains whether that distortion was an intentional literary pun or the result of the phenomenon known as folk etymology. Myself, I wouldn’t put it beyond Rabelais.