Birdwords – Page 14 – Birding New Jersey

January 13, 2014January 12, 2014

The Jacobiness

It can be hard enough to figure out how we know what we know. But it’s almost impossible to retrace the byzantine mental wanderings that made us think what we once thought.

Somehow, when I was in junior high, I managed to tangle up what little I knew about the French Revolution (then not long past) with what little I knew about hummingbirds, and convinced myself, or let myself be convinced, that the dazzling White-necked Jacobin had taken its odd name from the faction that seized power in the Convention in spring of 1793 — and from the bright slash across the nape, white in the big hummingbird but tending rather to the scarlet in Robespierre and his gang.

Nonsense. Spun from whole cloth, all of it.

The Friends of the Constitution just happened to meet in a former convent in the rue St-Jacques, and the bird just happens to have a hooded appearance recalling the cowled habit worn by the Jacobin Dominicans of eighteenth-century France.

The hummingbirds haven’t always been called jacobins in English, however. George Edwards, whose plate and description provided the basis for the scientific name given the species by Linnaeus fifteen years later, called it simply the “White-belly’d Hummingbird,” noting with approval that

the Colours in this Bird, as in most of this Kind, seem to be mixed with fine golden Threads, which make the whole Bird appear very splendid, when exposed to the Sun-beams.

Edwards’s no-nonsense, descriptive name was taken over by John Latham, who used it for forty years, including the White-bellied Humming-Bird in both the General Synopsis of 1782 and his 1822 General History.

Latham also includes accounts of the “Spotted” or “Spotted-necked” hummingbird, based on the “colibri piqueté” of Brisson: by the time he came to write the General History, however, Latham could inform his reader that other ornithologists (most notably Audebert and Vieillot) had tentatively identified this and other “varieties” as the females or young of the White-bellied. This was not the first and would not be the last time that ornithology put asunder what God had joined together.

George Shaw, meanwhile, in the unjustly ignored General Zoology, took his nomenclatural cues from Brisson, rendering the French ornithologist’s “oiseau-mouche à collier” as the White-collared Hummingbird. William Jardine, too, adopted that very appropriate and very dull name for what was in its day probably the most-read English-language book on the trochilids.

Those British ornithologists ignored the fact that across the Channel, the Comte de Buffon and his collaborators had in fact given the bird two names. The nineteenth hummingbird species in the Histoire naturelle des oiseaux (completed six years before the fall of the Bastille) is “l’oiseau-mouche à collier — dit la Jacobine.” Says Buffon,

It is, obviously, the distribution of white in the bird’s plumage that gave rise to the idea of calling it Jacobine.

No surprise, of course, that an English hummingbird name should have its origin in a French hummingbird name. But look close: the French name is feminine, referring not to the Dominican monks of St-Jacques but to their female counterparts. In the French onomastic tradition, this brightly colored male hummingbird is named for the resemblance of its plumage to the habit of a nun.

Once sanctioned by Buffon, the name naturally caught on. Audebert and Vieillot used it in their monumental Oiseaux dorés,

as did Lesson in his Trochilidées, in the Traité d’ornithologie, and, in greatest detail, in the Compléments de Buffon, where this most prolific of trochidologists reviews the “variants” of “la jacobine” that over the years had been classed as distinct species.

Lesson’s classification, in which these hummingbirds formed the “13th Race,” was rendered into English in its entirety in the Penny Cyclopaedia of 1843. The translator, for reasons unstated, transformed the feminine and female “jacobines” into male and masculine “jacobins.”

By the time John Gould began the publication of his famous Monograph of the Trochilidae at the end of that decade, the name Jacobin seems to have become the standard in English works — always the masculine form, without the tell-tale terminal “e.”

Jobling, in an entry covering cuckoos and pigeons and, yes, hummingbirds, tells us that

the terms Jacobin and Dominican [are] applied as epithets to pied birds whose plumage mirrored the black and white vestments, hoods and cloaks of the Jacobin or Dominican friars.

It’s not as good a story as the wild and ignorant imaginings of childhood, and in the case of the hummingbird, it’s not quite right, either.

Next time someone tells you the bird is named for a monk, you can gently correct them. And if you want, you can join me in calling them jacobinesses.

January 8, 2014January 6, 2014

The Harlequin Hummingbird

Have you seen one yet?

Click over to the Biodiversity Heritage Library’s blog to read about the discovery of this, the world’s rarest hummingbird.

January 7, 2014January 5, 2014

Bush Tyrants and Freckled Mockingbirds

Among the birds from the final voyage of James Cook sent back to England was a new thrush, collected at Nootka Sound in what would later be British Columbia. The skins wound up in the collection of Joseph Banks, the naturalist on Cook’s first expedition, who passed them on to John Latham to prepare the formal description.

Latham named the bird the Spotted Thrush, a name taken over into scientific Latin a few years later by Gmelin as Turdus naevius, the “thrush with freckles.”

I’ve wondered for years just what those spots and dots were meant to be, and now, thanks to The Marvel That Is The Internet, there’s no reason to guess. We can know.

Latham says that the coverts of the wing are

ash-colour; the lesser ones plain; all the others marked with a ferruginous triangular spot at the tip: the prime quills dusky; each feather marked with two ferruginous spots on the outer web, one near the base, the other about the middle; the second quills have one of these marks near the end, but paler.

Those intricate wing markings are the only “spots” Latham’s account mentions. Gmelin, too, fidus interpres that he was, points out the same “macula” and no others.

Thomas Pennant, writing two years after Latham published his description, was apparently less impressed by the bird’s freckled wing and more interested in the overall pied aspect of its plumage. Pennant gave us both one of the least successful portraits ever of the species and its enduring English name, Varied Thrush.

Pennant’s plate is so bad, in fact, that it misled Swainson and Richardson, who had access only to a single, molting specimen, to deny that the bird was a thrush at all:

it exhibits unequivocal indications of those characters by which Orpheus [the thrashers, catbirds, and mockingbirds] is so decidedly separated from the true Thrushes…. This opinion is, in a great measure, confirmed by the figure of Pennant, where the tail is represented as rounded, and fully as long as the wings, a structure which precisely agrees with the American Mocking-bird.

In order to “express what appears to us its real affinities,” Swainson coined new English and scientific names for the bird, Orpheus meruloides, the Thrush-like Mock-bird.

Swainson’s view didn’t really catch on. Audubon, with “numerous specimens of this Thrush in [his] possession,” which he compared carefully to skins of the American Robin and “another new Thrush from Chili,” came to the

opinion that both these and the Chilian species are as nearly allied as possible, and therefore ought to be considered as true Thrushes….

With few and infrequent exceptions, such as the brief entry in Lesson’s Notices of 1840, ornithology has agreed with Audubon. In January 1854, though, almost three years to the day after the old man’s death, Charles Bonaparte went out of his way to take a cheap shot at his erstwhile friend:

Notwithstanding the efforts of the pen and the paintbrush of the famous ornithologist Audubon, Turdus naevius, Gm. (Orpheus meruloides, Sw.), is neither a Turdus thrush [Bonaparte: Grive] nor even a mimid [Chanteur], but a teniopterian bird, the type of my new genus Ixoreus.

That is simply mean-spirited, and Bonaparte deserved what he got when Philip Lutley Sclater pointed out that the ornithologist prince had been far more confused than either Audubon or Swainson:

The true type of Prince Bonaparte’s .. Ixoreus … is, as I know from its having been pointed out to me by the founder [viz., Bonaparte] in the Jardin [des] Plantes’ collection, the S[outh] American Taenioptera rufiventris….

If I’ve run the synonymies correctly, Taenioptera rufiventris is an obsolete name for the Streak-throated Bush-Tyrant. Thus, even as he ridiculed Audubon for his taxonomic naivete, Bonaparte was confusing the Varied Thrush with an entirely different bird, a lovely neotropical flycatcher.

Audubon’s old protégé Spencer Baird, on learning of Bonaparte’s confusion, decided to drop Ixoreus entirely, and coined the new and very pretty genus name Hesperocichla for the thrush. Not until 1902 did Charles Richmond restore the name Ixoreus:

it is yet plain that [Bonaparte’s] term was based upon Gmelin’s name.

His heart, in other words, was in the right place, and Ixoreus it has been always since.

January 2, 2014December 29, 2013

The Russet-clothed Brotherhood

I knew in advance how this one was going to work out: the OED would lead me to the earliest citations for the English hummingbird label “hermit,” and a little bit of e-drudgery would let me push the name back to its apparent source, probably among the French trochilidistes of the early nineteenth century. And along the way, perhaps I would find an unexpected motivation for the now opaque metaphor that compares these birds to the early desert ascetics.

That, after all, is how scholarship works — even when it comes to so trivial a question as that and so ephemeral a medium as this.

Well, not always. In this case, the citation hunters in Oxford fail us. The French ermite appears to be modeled on the English hermit. And if we trust John Gould, the name seems to be due entirely to the bird’s

frequenting the darkest and most retired parts of the forest … affecting dark and gloomy situations.

As far as I have been able to discover, it was Gould who introduced the name to ornithology. Interestingly, though, he makes no claim to originality: Gould’s Introduction to the Trochilidae expressly says that these hummingbirds, “remarkable for being destitute of metallic brilliancy,” are “popularly known by the name of Hermits.”

I was surprised to learn that hermits were “popularly known” at all in the English-speaking world of the mid-nineteenth century. As it turns out, though, Gould wasn’t referring to the streets of London. In the 1849 description of Phaëthornis eremita, he explains the source of the species epithet (later elevated by Reichenbach to generic status): this bird, he writes, is the

Little Hermit of the collectors of Para

in Brazil. And just who were those collectors?

The residents of many parts of Brazil employ their slaves in collection, skinning, and preserving them for the European market; and many thousands are annually sent from Rio de Janeiro, Bahia, and Pernambuco.

One segment of the clientele didn’t care much for dull hummingbirds, though: the Brazilian collectors

also supply the inmates of the convents with many of the more richly coloured species for the manufacture of artificial-feather flowers.

It is my guess — an especially safe guess, given that it can never be tested or disproved — that the Luso-Brazilian “eremita” originated at the door of one of those monasteries, where a monk or a nun declined to pay for a brown hummingbird, rejecting it as too drab, like the sackcloth-clad hermits of the wilderness, what Alfred Newton would later call “the russet-clothed brotherhood.”

December 31, 2013December 27, 2013

Surly Motmots, Pouting Jacamars, and a Gloomy Birder

On his long journey through the West Indies in 1888, the Canadian cleric Léon Provancher attended a reception in Trinidad at the home of the eccentric Sylvester Devenish, where he made the acquaintance of Dr. Léotaud, “an island celebrity of whom I had already heard,” and his son-in-law, also a physician.

Provancher, fully absorbed in his host’s collections of engravings, bronzes, photographs, relics, and “ornaments of all kinds,” has no more to say about the medical men in attendance, but I want to believe that they were relatives of an even more celebrated Trinidadian, Antoine Léotaud, author of what remains nearly 150 years after its publication one of the best and most ambitious, if necessarily imperfect, neotropical ornithologies ever written.

According to an obituary quoted by Junge and Mees, Léotaud was born on Trinidad 200 years ago this New Year; he studied the sciences in Paris, eventually taking a medical degree, and returned at the age of 25 to practice in Trinidad. Léotaud’s Oiseaux was published a year before his death on January 23, 1867 from “a painful malady of fourteen months’ duration.”

I don’t know whether it is poor health, frustration at his lack of scientific resources, or a literary tristesse tropicale that is to blame for the striking tone of disappointed nostalgia that Léotaud affects in the Oiseaux.

It would be the most offensive of positivisms to draw conclusions about Léotaud’s “real life” from the attitudes he strikes in his writings. But consider the fact that in 1865, while he was hard at work on the ornithology, Léotaud was awarded the gold medal of the Medical Society of Ghent for a study entitled “Sur les causes de dépérissement des familles européennes aux Antilles” — on the sources of degeneration in European families in the Antilles.

Somebody clearly missed Paris.

Whatever Léotaud’s own state, he had some pronounced ideas about the emotional and intellectual condition of the wild birds of Trinidad.

The Black Vulture, for example, moves in ways

destitute of gracefulness, revealing the bird’s insignificance; even its anger results in nothing more than an exhaled grunt which evinces its stupidity; its quarrels, lacking in energy of any kind, bear the sign of weakness…. Even in the pleasures of love it exhibits those sad characteristics that it reveals in everything else; it is silent, it is clumsy, its preparations are tedious and only with great effort does it manage to accomplish that act that is normally so effortless in almost all birds.

Projection? Pathetic fallacy? Or just a bad mood?

Léotaud writes with greater sympathy of the Snail Kite (the photograph here is from the South American continent — we did not see the species on our visit to Trinidad and Tobago).

This bird is rarely seen here…. It is always alone, no doubt because it finds no companions…. only a few individuals come to visit us around the month of July, and thus they find themselves in conditions contrary to their usual habits.

Loneliness, in fact, seems to be a problem for many of the birds of Trinidad, if we trust Léotaud. The poor little Tropical Screech-Owl sings a song that

inspires sadness, as this bird is heard only when everything in nature is ready for slumber; its song ushers in the dusk. No doubt he is calling his companion in this way….

Even the beautiful Trinidad Motmot moves Léotaud to melancholy contemplation:

He prefers the dimness of our forests, which seems to suit so well the sluggishness of his movements and the sadness of his call. Having perched for a long time on a branch, he leaves it only with reluctance. Even the fires of love can barely raise him above his apathy. His call … is in no way meaningful; it is a call not of gaiety, or of anger, or of passion. And beyond that, his posture is heavy, his shape graceless… he draws attention only with his tail, [the shape of] which is one of those secrets that man will no doubt never manage to unravel. The female accompanies him almost always, but she is incapable of bringing animation to his so sad life.

Yes, motmots are notoriously calm, but rarely have they been accused of having a flat affect. The reproach makes even less sense when Léotaud turns it on the flashy Rufous-tailed Jacamar:

he remains immobile for hours at a time, and hardly stretches out his beak to grab an insect that happens to stray within his reach…. His call is weak and plaintive…. His companion follows him almost always to share this life that seems so sad and monotonous.

The most poignant case of all seems to be that of the Green Honeycreeper.

I’ve always found these sturdy little frugivores a colorful delight, but Léotaud had a different impression:

Its form is not very graceful, and its posture is somewhat heavy…. Its plumage is worthy of admiration, but its weak, insignificant call draws no notice. He is not made for captivity, and deprived of his liberty, he soon converts his cage into a tomb. Nevertheless one can accustom him to his prison, but only at the cost of so much effort and patience that it is a triumph of which only some people are capable, namely those whose interest in birds is a true passion.

It is harder and harder not to imagine that the author is speaking of himself and his own circumstances in such descriptions.