Birdwords – Page 13 – Birding New Jersey

February 9, 2014January 25, 2016

“Junco”?

We forget how strange most birding conversation must sound to the occasional eavesdropper of more normal habits and predilections. Many of the words and the names that trip so easily from our tongues sound strange at best, and silly at worst, in mixed company.

I don’t mean just the obvious ones, the sapsuckers and the flowerpiercers and the boobies, but even names that seem perfectly usual to “us” — but entirely foreign to “them.”

Nuthatch.

Bittern.

Junco.

Especially this time of year, when fields and feeders are aflutter with those sturdy gray sparrows from the north woods, we birders say “junco” all the time without a second thought.

But if we do think twice, it’s a funny name, isn’t it? English words don’t really look like that, and it’s hard to figure out what on earth this one could mean.

Hard, it turns out, not just for the average birdworder like me, but for just about everyone, it seems. Still our great coryphaeus in such matters, Elliott Coues sets a rare question mark next to the etymology from “juncus, a rush,” and Choate sniffs that this is

a singularly inappropriate name for a genus whose habitat is not among the reeds.

Terres is always good for an often good alternative, but here he offers only the speculation that the name in question refers to the color of reeds. I’m not buying it.

Not even Johann Georg Wagler, naming this genus in the Isis in 1831, provides a clue as to why he should have chosen the name Junco for the new “Finkammer,” and his promise of a more detailed investigation to come was left unfulfilled when he died, at the age of 32, a year later.

But the name “junco” was not new in 1831. It had in fact already been applied, in Latin and the vernacular, to birds of the Old World well before Wagler appropriated it for his new genus of Mexican sparrows.

If we go back nearly three centuries before Wagler, we find that the sixteenth-century Saxon poet and antiquarian Georg Fabricius knew “Junco” as a name for one of the wagtails.

In 1789, Cornelius Nozeman and Maarten Houttuyn used “junco” as a scientific name — but as a species epithet, not a genus designation. In their Nederlandsche vogelen, those authors named the bird we now know as the Eurasian Reed Warbler Turdus junco, “reed thrush.”

In 1668, Charleton included two entries for the junco in his Onomasticon.

This bird, he so reasonably says, is called the “junco” because it “readily passes its time among the reeds.” The French call it the “sea lark,” the English a “stint.” This junco seems to have been a shorebird.

And, at the same time, a bunting.

That second usage goes back at least to William T urner, who, working from Theodorus Gaza‘s translations of Aristotle, determined that this was what The Philosopher must have meant with his “junco”:

Since I do not know any small bird living in the rushes and reeds other than the one called by the English “rede sparrow,” I believe that that must be the “junco.” It is a small bird, a little smaller than the House Sparrow, with a rather long tail and a black head. The rest is dusky.

Turner’s identification was sufficiently cogent as to be taken over (probably by way of Charleton) into Phillips’s New World of English Words, which — a good century and a quarter before Wagler — defines “junco” as precisely that same “Reed-Sparrow, a Bird” we now call the Reed Bunting. Phillips’s definition, quoted in the OED as well, probably provides the evidence backing James Jobling’s concise entry in the Helm Dictionary: “Junco Med.L. junco Reed Bunting (>L. juncus reed).”

How, though, did the name shift from an emberizid out in those vast Old World beds of juncaceous vegetation to our demure gray sparrow of open woodlands and winter suburbs?

There is a clue, I think, in one of the alternative names of the Reed Bunting. Swann tells us that this species is also known, misleadingly enough, as the “Black-headed Bunting,”

frequently so called provincially on account of its black head.

For Turner, too, the black head was this bird’s distinctive plumage character — indeed, the only plumage character he mentions at all.

My theory is that Wagler, confronted for the first time with the skin of an unknown dusky-plumed bunting-like bird with a black head, recalled that familiar European bunting. Wagler did not know the habitat preferences of his new bird, and was not thinking of reeds and rushes when he named it. What he did know was that in its most conspicuous plumage mark, the dark-hooded head, it resembled the Reed Bunting — and most importantly, he knew that the slightly odd word “junco” was available for scientific use.

And today, nearly 200 years later, available for the rest of us, too, when we look at the window and wonder what those little gray birds at the feeder could possibly be called.

February 3, 2014February 3, 2014

The Prognosticating “Seahawk”

We didn’t watch or listen to or — heaven help us — attend any football games yesterday. No surprise there, but it seems that we did miss out on one of the most inspired bird misidentifications of the year.

I’m told that the mascot of one of the teams involved is the “Seahawk,” a bird I’d always assumed was the Osprey. But apparently the television graphics showed not that familiar fish-eating kite but an entirely different bird, an Augur Buzzard from Africa.

And that got me thinking. Somewhere in the back of my mind lingered the notion that this species had its name from some association, real or fancied, with the Roman practice of augury. But as so often, a moment’s reflection puts paid to that easy connection: why would the ancient auspices have looked so far afield?

They didn’t.

In his original description of the species he named Falco (Buteo) Augur, Eduard Rüppell explains:

The principal food of this hawk is small birds and mice; it pursues the latter especially when the animals are chased out of their hiding places by the burning of dry grass or the noise of a large troop of people passing by, such that these birds often sail ahead of armies or merchant caravans. That may well be the reason that the Abyssinians credit this bird with a special gift for prognostication….

Years earlier, Henry Salt — not an ornithologist — appears to have witnessed the same behavior, but he told a slightly more complicated story of the locals’ “singular superstition respecting this bird”:

When they set out on a journey and meet with one of them, they watch it very carefully, and draw good or bad omens from its motions. If it sit still, with its breast towards them until they have passed, it is a peculiarly good sign, and every thing is expected to go on well during the course of the journey. If its back be turned towards them, it is considered an unpropitious sign, but not sufficiently so, as to create alarm. But if it should fly away hastily on their approach, some of the most superstitious among them will immediately return back to their homes.

I don’t know who won yesterday. But if I’d had the sense to watch the seahawk before the game, I bet I could have told you before it even started.

January 24, 2014January 24, 2014

Other People’s Bird Books: Howard Saunders

Howard Saunders was a big name indeed in British ornithology in the late nineteenth century. Co-editor of the Ibis, editorial executor of the last two volumes of Yarrell, and the author of any number of still useful papers, Saunders was a particular expert on the larids, one especially lovely species of which still bears his name.

In the late 1870s and early ’80s, Saunders was a member of the BOU group charged with assembling an official list of British birds “in accordance with the most approved principles of modern nomenclature.”

His own copy of the list, which was published in 1883, now resides in the library of the University of California at Davis, and the annotations reveal a man not always satisfied with the results of committee work.

Among Saunders’s co-authors, Henry T. Wharton, responsible for, among other things, the book’s etymologies, comes in for some particularly withering criticism.

Saunders honestly (and often rightly) disagrees with some of the derivations offered here, but he seems to have had a more fundamental objection to the whole enterprise, writing at one point, when Wharton has gone on a bit too long,

Is this a Latin Dictionary?

At times, Saunders reproaches Wharton for being too tentative. Where Wharton derives the epithet curruca “perhaps” from curro, “I run,” Saunders writes in bold pencil that

Curruca was the derisive title of the lover of the adultress — he had to “cut and run,”

an amusing and helpful reminder of the relationships, etymological and ornithological, between Lesser Whitethroats and Common Cuckoos and common cuckolds.

Neither does Saunders have much faith in his colleague as a bibliographer. Along with correcting simple transcription and spelling errors in the citations, he calls Wharton’s attribution of the genus name Linota to Bonaparte

Nonsense: it was used by Gmelin in 1788.

Dudgeon rises even higher when his fellow committeeman misreads or overlooks something in Saunders’s own work. The account of the Stock Dove avers that that species “does not occur in Scotland or Ireland,” a claim Saunders underlines and furnishes with an editorial exclamation point before adding at the bottom of the page,

Certainly it does, in both; as Saunders tells you, Mr. Wharton!,

a reference to the citation — “Saunders, iii. p. 8″ — in the account’s bibliographic header.

And then, inevitably, there are those cases where one of Saunders’s own contributions to the list was altered before publication. The published account for the Bonaparte’s Gull says that

this transatlantic species is said to have occurred in Ireland, and near Falmouth, Cornwall.

Saunders’s pencil underscores the verbs, then adds

Not my writing — I said it had occurred, for I had seen examples, but some people rush in etc.

He crosses out vigorously the statement of the range of the Ross’s Gull, writing in its place

“A circumpolar species,” I wrote, because I knew, but some sapiento-ignoramus must needs alter it.

In a note following the Glossy Ibis account — badly truncated by the binder’s knife and the scanner’s edge — Saunders explains what had happened:

I left for the winter, Dec’r 1882, at this point, and all the rest was rushed before my return in Mar [?] 1883.

I don’t especially have the feeling that Saunders would mind our reading these comments, nearly a century and a half later. But I’m going to be very careful about where my own books and their annotations end up, that’s for sure.

January 17, 2014January 16, 2014

Yummy Snipe

One more, and then I need to quit shooting fishiness in a barrel.

That same otherwise exemplary work notes that the specific epithet of the Wilson’s Snipe is delicata, which it translates as

paramour or favorite; unclear why the name was applied to this species.

This one’s easy. Alexander Wilson himself, the eponym of our common North American snipe, tells us that these birds

when in good order are accounted excellent eating.

Audubon records, approvingly,

that richness of flavour and juicy tenderness, for which it is so deservedly renowned.

We could go backward and forward, in the ornithological tradition and in the hunting literature, piling up testimonies to the tastiness of the snipe. But perhaps the easiest thing to do is simply to turn to the dictionaries.

The late Latin “delicatus” mean “exquisite.” It means “fine.” It means “delicious.”

January 16, 2014January 15, 2014

No, He Didn’t

I really shouldn’t have to stand up — again– for the Father of American Ornithology, but Alexander Wilson had the ill grace to die 201 years ago, so somebody’s got to step in and defend his probity from these vicious attacks.

Here is that grossest of calumnies, again, in an otherwise fine book published this past year: the Wilson’s Warbler was, I read,

first collected and named (for himself) by Alexander Wilson.

No. No no no.

It is true that Wilson was the discoverer of this warbler, a “neat and active little species … never met with in the works of any European naturalist.” But he did not, not ever, name this or any other bird “for himself.”

Wilson called his bird, deposited in Peale’s Museum under the catalogue number 7785, the “Green Black-capt Flycatcher,” and assigned it the latinizing binomial Muscicapa pusilla, in recognition of its small size.

Muscicapa, of course, was one of the catch-all categories of those days, like Motacilla and Falco. When Charles Bonaparte set out to revise the genera of North America’s birds in 1828 — fifteen years after Wilson had shuffled off his mortal coil — the princely ornithologist reassigned the little “flycatcher” to the warbler genus Sylvia, and changed its species epithet to wilsonii, in honor of his great predecessor.

A decade later, Bonaparte further subdivided the warblers, erecting the new genus Wilsonia and restoring (as was only proper) Wilson’s original species name pusilla to the small black-capped bird.

And so it was Charles Bonaparte who named the warbler for Wilson, first by using the (invalid) epithet wilsonii and then by creating the genus name Wilsonia. In his Ornithological Biography, Audubon was still calling the bird the Green Black-capped Flycatcher in English, but by the time he compiled his own Synopsis in 1839 — a much-needed index to the plates of the Birds of America — he had come ’round to refer to it as Wilson’s Flycatching Warbler, the English name it still bears, with a slight simplification, today.

So why, oh why do people otherwise of normal intelligence insist on accusing Wilson of the supremest of ornithological vanities?

It’s because they’ve never learned to read a scientific name.

Until recently, the name of the bird we call in English the Wilson’s Warbler was this:

The name in parentheses is the original author of the scientific name — but those parentheses, crucially, are the conventional indication that the genus name has been changed since the species was first described (and in this case, changed several times).

A sloppy or lazy or ignorant reader of might, just might, sloppily or lazily or ignorantly come to believe that our poor parenthetical friend was responsible for every nomenclatural element there, where in reality only that meek little pusilla remains from Wilson’s original name.

A plea to follow my rant: Next time you decide to repeat a twice-told tale, especially one with a faint whiff of the libelous about it, think. Just think.