It’s almost Thanksgiving, and time once again to trot out the old and long discredited chestnut about Benjamin Franklin and the Wild Turkey. That one’s been debunked enough by now, I think. But what about the other bird in the Franklin story, the one that actually became our national feathered symbol?
Franklinian irony aside, the Bald Eagle was a really good choice: big, powerful, “majestic.” And in the eighteenth century, the species was sufficiently widespread and sufficiently abundant that you could often as not just go outside, look up, and be reminded that you were a citizen (well, so long as you were white and male and owned property) of a country that aspired to some of those same slightly dubious qualities.
Admittedly, that name is a little awkward. But as generations of gullible American birders have been told (thanks, National Geographic!),
Hm. Hm hm hm. Shall we try to think this one through?
First, there is no such Old English word as “balde.” Second, the Middle English “balled” means not “white” but “marked with white on the forehead,” an excellent fit for, say the Eurasian Coot, but a bit strange for our eagle.
But why are we getting bogged down in philologicalities anyway? I find it very hard to imagine that the seventeenth-century ornithologists and explorers who coined the name “Bald Eagle” — a New World species unknown, of course, during the Old English and Middle English periods — would have sought out an English epithet that was already then obscure, oblique, and obsolete.
What I can or can’t imagine, of course, doesn’t matter nearly so much as what the early natural historians themselves had to say about the name. And not one of them — not one — makes so much as an allusion to any “Old English” word meaning white.
One of the earliest accounts of the birdlife of the English colonies in North America is that in a letter from the Virginia planter John Clayton to the Royal Society, published in 1693 in the Philosophical Transactions. Clayton was first and foremost a botanist, but he devotes nearly ten printed pages to the birds of Virginia, among them
the Bald Eagle … the Body and part of the Neck being of a dark brown, the upper part of the Neck and Head is covered with a white sort of Down, whereby it looks very bald, whence it is so named.
Clayton clearly means “naked,” not “white.” Twenty years later, Mark Catesby also uses the word “bald” in that same normal, modern sense:
This bird is called the Bald Eagle, both in Virginia and Carolina, tho’ his head is as much feather’d as the other parts of his body.
The epithet “bald,” applied to this species, whose head is thickly covered with feathers, is … improper and absurd … and seems to have been occasioned by the white appearance of the head, when contrasted with the dark color of the rest of the plumage.
Wilson, White-headed Eagle
Audubon, perhaps mindful of Wilson’s scorn for the name, avoids it entirely in the Ornithological Biography, giving the bird instead the more literal moniker “white-headed” and remarking
that the name by which this bird is universally known in America is that of Bald Eagle, an erroneous denomination, as its head is as densely feathered as that of any other species, although its whiteness may have suggested the idea of its being bare.
We could yield to the temptation of internet abundance and go on piling up examples, but the point is clear by now.
None of the earliest and none of the most important ornithologists in the first two centuries following the English settlement of North America understood “bald” in the eagle’s name to mean anything other than “naked,” “bare,” “hairless.” None so much as hints at a (non-existent) Old English or an (obsolete) Middle English word meaning “white-blazed,” which would be a poor description of the bird’s plumage in any case.
This is another instance of a “solution” being cobbled together well after the fact — to a problem that never existed.
The harder thing to think about is who is responsible for that convoluted and illogical tale and how it became the standard explanation for what is likely, at its root, a gentle joke (you can always tell it’s a joke if Wilson gets exercised about it).
Choate is surely largely to blame for the recent popularity of the story, but alas, he simply reports it as if it were true, without attribution. So here’s the challenge: Find the earliest attestation of the story, and help me trace this bit of inane but influential folklore to its source.
Or am I the only one who finds it hard to keep all those sapphires and brilliants and emeralds and rubies and topazes straight?
There are so many hummingbird species, and their classification has been revised so many times over the past two centuries, that the vernacular names have inevitably become a hodgepodge of historical relics and well-meaning neologisms, often enough reflecting neither relationship nor similarity.
In 1854, Ludwig Reichenbach, director of the royal zoo in Dresden, set out to clear the decks and introduce some of that good deutsche Ordnung into trochilid nomenclature.
The hummingbirds, like many another group of beautiful and popular creatures, have been worked on more in a spirit of pleasurable dilettantism than according to the stricter requirements of scholarship.
Firmly grounded in the powerful traditions of German Idealism and organicist aesthetics, Reichenbach lays out his taxonomic principles with great clarity:
It is necessary in a scientific work that we have always before our eyes the clear need to trace the development of the Type through its degrees of intensification, that we correctly evaluate the individual components in their significance to the whole, and that we be able to demonstrate the culmination of the Type as well as its deflection to heterogeneity.
Reichenbach goes on to observe that
Heaven and earth and all sciences and arts, even music in its chords and systems of tuning, are all four-parted, just as are all living things… and this quaternary system of divisions, whose accord echoes through all of Nature, … can be called a system that rests stable in itself.
All that theoretical hoohaw behind him, Reichenbach goes on to establish (you guessed it) four large categories –families, I suppose, though he doesn’t use that word — of hummingbirds: Nymphs, Fairies, Sylphs, and Gnomes.
Each of those four large groups is further subdivided into four smaller categories — subfamilies — one of which is “typical” and the other three of which are “deflected into heterogeneity” by their similarity to one of the other families.
Thus, for example, there are “nymph-nymphs,” but there are also “fairy-nymphs,” “sylph-nymphs,” and “gnome-nymphs.”
Each of those subfamilies in turn comprises four genera, each of which in turn can be broken into four subgenera (again, only loosely translating Reichenbach’s categories into modern taxonomic terms). All of the known species of hummingbirds are then fitted into this scheme.
Our White-chested Emerald, for example, one of the most abundant and familiar trochilids of Trinidad and Tobago, would be a member of the family Fayae, the Fairies, which Reichenbach defines as “creeper-like” hummingbirds without head ornaments and with arched bills.
That family “culminates” in the subfamily Ochrurae, the Fairy-Fairies, but the emerald and its close relatives apparently tend to the “heterogeneous,” making them members of the subfamily Hylocharinae, the Nymph-Fairies, the third genus of which is Amazilia.
Richenbach’s “perfect” hummingbird, the culmination of the Type, has to be a Sylph, a member of the “genuine or typical Trochilideae: adorned with helmet, crest, ear-tufts, or extensive brilliant iridescence.” Naturally (or artificially, one might say), there are sylphs and then there are sylphs, but the ultimate hummer should be a Sylph-Sylph, of the subfamily Trochilinae. The first genus listed there is Trochilus — and the first species Reichenbach cites is Trochilus Colubris Linn. 1766.
Audubon cites the Great Crested Grebe as being “not uncommon during autumn and early spring on all the larger streams of the Western Country….” Does anyone know anything about this?
Well, no, not really — not beyond the general observation that even Homer naps. And this time, the dozing was a doozy.
This handsome plate, number 292 of the 435 that would eventually make up the Birds of America, was engraved in 1835 from a painting about which I know nothing else. It seems likely that Audubon drew the birds during one of his sojourns in England, but we cannot be certain that this plate is not based on specimens he borrowed from one or another American collector.
The passage Nathan mentions is from the Synopsis of the Birds of North America, a much-needed taxonomic concordance to the plates and the Ornithological Biography, published in Edinburgh and London in 1839. Audubon provides a full description of the bird in the Synopsis, but has virtually nothing to say there about its habits in its putative North American range:
In contrast, the complete account in the Ornithological Biography, which appeared in 1835, is lavish in its detail. The technical descriptions, prepared with (or quite possibly by) MacGillivray, are as complete as any offered for any species, and include the measurements of eggs lent to Audubon by William Yarrell.
What startles is not that Audubon should have accounted this exclusively Old World bird an American species — an easy enough mistake in the days when specimens and their labels did not invariably keep the closest of company — but how, in the Ornithological Biography, he compounds his error with what we can read only as a series of scandalously precise fictions. On his own authority, Audubon tells us that “this beautiful species”
returns from its northern places of residence, and passes over the Western Country, about the beginning of September…. I have observed them thus passing in Autumn, for several years in succession, over different parts of the Ohio, at all hours of the day. On such occasions I could readily distinguish the old from the young, the former being in many instances still adorned with their summer head-dress…. on the Ohio’s rising I have observed that they abandon the river and betake themselves to the clear ponds of the interior…. When these birds leave the southern waters about the beginning of April, the old already shew their summer head-dress….
Audubon’s words paint the vivid picture of regular visible migration over the Ohio Valley, “in flocks of seven or eight to fifty or more” — by a species never before and never since reliably reported on the continent. To forestall any suspicion that he was mistaking this species for what was then the only other large podicipedid known from North America, Audubon assures his reader that the Great Crested and the Red-necked Grebes prefer different habitats.
All very odd indeed. But Audubon, it turns out, was not alone in assuming that this large Palearctic grebe also occurred in the New World.
The Great Crested Grebe received its formal binomial from Linnaeus himself, in the authoritative Tenth Edition of the Systema. But the bird, widespread and conspicuous in western Europe, had been known to science for hundreds of years. The descriptions of most of the diving birds given by the ancients can hardly be untangled today, but Severus Sulpicius, the fourth-century historian, is said by Conrad Gesner to have described a grebe with “red feathers like horns on its head.”
Gesner himself, writing in the 1550s, does his best to work out the identity of the larger divers. He appears first to describe the Red-necked Grebe, “known to the Venetians as the sperga,” before turning to a different “genus” found in Switzerland,
quite similar to the others, but crested with plumes sticking up around its crown and upper neck, black at the top and reddish towards the sides, like the hair of a fox.
Not a bad description of a Great Crested Grebe — or of Gesner’s illustration of the species. The Swiss naturalist, like his contemporary Belon, also points out that this, and all grebes, “has its feet at its tail,” an observation behind a great many names for these birds, including the latinizing podiceps, the Dutch arsevoet, and the Savoyard loere, which, Gesner, tells us, is also used as a pejorative for
a fat and lazy person, because of the well-known reluctance of this bird to walk on land.
At the end of the sixteenth century, Aldrovandi copies Gesner’s text into his Ornithologiae — but for some inscrutable reason replaces the perfectly serviceable woodcut there with his own, slightly less successful image of a Great Crested Grebe (Brisson, in a major lapse of taste, calls it “satis accurata”).
First recorded hybrid between a cassowary and a grebe?
We’re on firmer artistic ground with Francis Willughby’s “Crested Diver, or Loon,” a friendly-looking bird with perfectly creditable feet and bill.
Willughby and Ray are at pains to distinguish this bird –which they identify with the one described by Aldrovandi and Gesner — from another, “something less” in size, apparently our Eared / Black-necked Grebe. Unfortunately, the English names they assign each only add to the already enormous potential for confusion. The first they call “The greater crested or copped Doucker,” the second “The greater crested and horned Doucker.” It’s little wonder that even 150 years later Audubon could be confused.
All of these authors agreed on one thing: whatever the bird they were describing and depicting was, its range was Europe. George Edwards was able to cite specimens from Switzerland and England; the Dutch translator of Seligmann’s Recueileven named the bird “de groote Geneefsche Duiker,” the Great Grebe of Lake Geneva.
collapsing slightly the detail given five years earlier by Thomas Pennant in the Arctic Zoology, who had added “every reedy lake” in Iceland and Siberia to the species’ known range.
The first forthright assertion I know of of the Great Crested Grebe as an American bird actually antedates Pennant and Latham. In 1781, Buffon and his busy workshop of collaborators published the eighth volume of the Histoire naturelle des oiseaux, comprising accounts of — among many others — the grebes.
A comparison of the information provided by ornithologists shows that the Great Crested Grebe is found both on the sea and on lakes, in the Mediterranean and on our ocean shores: its species is even found in North America, and we have identified it as the acitli from the Gulf of Mexico of Hernandez.
It is not clear, of course, just what the so steadfastly anti-Linnaean Frenchman means when he speaks of “son espèce,” but Buffon appears to have arrived at the suspicion put forward by Willughby and Ray in their account of the “Water-Hare, or crested Mexican Doucker” described in Hernandez’s Thesaurus.
Between this and the precedent [species, namely, the Great Crested Grebe] there is so little difference, that I scarce doubt but they are the same.
And we can scarce doubt that the Thesaurus does, in fact illustrate a bird with feet set far back on the body and terminating in extravagantly lobed toes. Johannes Faber, the papal physician who provided Hernandez with the description of this bird, was himself not entirely sure what to make of it, as his extremely long, extremely learned, and extremely tiresome discussion shows. He finally concludes that the bird must be “the American Mergus,” a name that in fact tells us nothing, given its vast range of application over the centuries to essentially any bird that spends time in the water and dives. There is no positive indication in Faber’s dissertation that he considers this Mexican diver identical with the Great Crested Grebe of Europe (I suspect that the picture is a semi-fanciful rendering of a Sungrebe); but his use of the vague label “mergus,” coupled with the grebishness of the illustration, made it possible for Ray and Buffon — perhaps independently of each other — to take the next step.
inhabits the north of both continents: rare in the middle states, and only during winter: common in the interior and on the lakes.
John Richardson, in the Fauna boreali-americana, even goes so far in 1831 as to describe a specimen that he says was “killed on the Saskatchewan,” surely — surely — a misidentified Red-necked Grebe.
The extensive account of the Crested Grebe, or “Gaunt,” in Thomas Nuttall’s Manual probably led Audubon more strongly down the path of error than any other source.
Nuttall’s text relies especially closely on Pennant, carefully including Siberia in the species’ Old World range and even borrowing the pretty phrase “reedy lakes” to describes its breeding habitat. His most fateful borrowings, though, are from Richardson, and it is here, in some incautious copying, that we find the immediate inspiration for Audubon’s later misapprehensions.
The Fauna boreali-americana correctly and sensibly informs us that
the Grebes are to be found in all the secluded lakes of the mountainous and woody districts of the fur countries, swimming and diving….
Unfortunately, Richardson and Swainson’s printer set that paragraph, intended as an introduction to the general status of all grebes in the northern reaches of North America, beneath rather than before the header for the species Podiceps cristatus, the Great Crested Grebe, making it seem to the careless reader that the statement applies to that species alone.
A typographic infelicity in the Fauna boreali-americana …
Nuttall’s research assistant was, apparently, one of those careless readers, and this was the result in the Manual:
The Crested Grebe, inhabiting the northern parts of both the old and new continents … [is] found in all the secluded reedy lakes of the mountainous and woody districts, in the remote fur countries around Hudson’s Bay,
a neat compilation of Pennant and Richardson — but not true at all.
… and a substantive error in Nuttall’s Manual.
Audubon did not notice the error — he probably didn’t consult Richardson directly at all — and Nuttall’s statement seems to have been all it took to set Audubon to spinning the wild tale he tells in the Ornithological Biography.
And it took considerable time before that tale was refuted. George Lawrence, in the ornithological report of the Pacific Railroad Surveys, reports no fewer than five specimens of the Great Crested Grebe from North America, two from Shoalwater Bay, in present-day Washington, and three from the “Atlantic coast.” Spencer Baird owned one of those latter skins, said to have been collected by Audubon himself; it’s no surprise, then, that Baird included the species on the list of the birds of North America he published in 1859.
Not until 1881, nearly half a century after the publication of Audubon’s effusions, did a young Robert Ridgway suggest, tentatively, the removal of the species from the North American list. In the appendix to his Nomenclature, Ridgway annotated the name Podiceps cristatus, Lath., with a simple question:
Not North American?
Three years later, Baird and Ridgway provided a definitive answer to that query.
In the Water Birds of 1884, they give the range of the Great Crested Grebe as the “Northern part of the Palaearctic Region; also, New Zealand and Australia. No valid North American record!” The italics and the startling exclamation point are the authors’, and they go on to call
the occurrence of C. cristatus — which for half a century or more has been included in most works on North American ornithology, and generally considered a common bird of this country — …so very doubtful that there is not a single reliable record of its having been taken on this continent.
The American Ornithologists’ Union, graced by late birth, never really had to face the question. The Great Crested Grebe is included in none of the editions of its Check-List, and as far as I know, the nearest this species has been authentically — to use the Couesian term — recorded to North America is Gran Canaria, where a single adult appeared in December 1984.
Not to rule out the possibility, of course. Birds have wings and they fly, as someone long ago pointed out.
But it’s unlikely, at least on the scale of human history, that we will ever see Audubonian flocks of this lovely species flying south through the center of the North American continent. That was a possibility — an imaginary possibility — only thanks to some sloppy printing, some careless reading, and the unbounded fantasy of the greatest American ornithologist of his time.
A book about rocks might not seem the first place to look for ornithological information, but the great lapidary encyclopedia of the Italian physician Camillo Leonardi is full of bits and pieces of arcane bird lore.
Composed right around the year 1500, Leonardi’s book finally made its way into English translation two and a half centuries later; that text tells us that the stone called
Quirus is a juggling Stone, found in the Nest of the Hoopoop.
It’s clear enough what a “hoopoop” might be. But what is a “juggling stone”?
Fortunately, Leonardi wrote in a language more readily comprehensible than that of his eighteenth-century translator.
The quirinus, he says, or quirus,
is a tricky stone — praestigiosus — that has been found in the nest of the Hoopoe.
And sure enough, our friends at the OED confirm that the English adjective “juggling” was in use in the mid-eighteenth century to mean “cheating, deceptive, tricky.” And what is so underhanded about the quirinus?
Its quality is that if anyone places it on the breast of a sleeping person, it will force him or her to confess his misdeeds.
Kunstmann in his well-known hoopoe book records a similar belief, attested in the late fifteenth century by the German poet Hans Vintler; but Vintler attributes the power to the poor bird’s heart:
Some superstitious people, Vintler tells us,
place the heart of a Hoopoe onto sleeping people so that it will reveal hidden things to them.
In other sources, the hoopoe’s innards have exactly the opposite virtus. According to the fourteenth-century natural historian Konrad von Megenberg, the bird’s heart actually helps witches and secret evildoers keep their wicked deeds secret.
I long ago reached the point that I just don’t care if someone pronounces a bird name in a way different from mine. As long as you give two syllables to “phoebe” and observe the juncture in “nuthatch,” I’m perfectly willing to believe that reasonable tongues might differ.
Don’t we all have more important things to worry about?
That said, the stakes are higher when a bird bears the name of a historical person. I generally think we owe those eponymous souls a nod in the direction of the way they preferred their own names to be pronounced.
That information isn’t always easy to come by, of course. If you’re fortunate enough to know Vauxes and Bewicks and Bendires, they’ll be happy to help you out, but otherwise we’re cast on the tender mercies of family histories, most of them rare, obscure, and nearly inaccessible. Enter: Firestone Library.
In 1953, William Henry Waldo Sabine published his Sabin(e): The History of an Ancient English Surname, a typescript reproduced in 250 stenciled copies. One of those copies he presented to Princeton University, where it entered the library on November 18, 1954, and was shipped off in January 1955 for binding in the ugly gray card traditionally used for pamphlets and programs. It would be checked out for the very first time fifty-eight years later.
Most of the book’s hundred pages are filled with extracts from parish registers, pedigrees, wills, shields of arms — the usual miscellaneous debris of amateur genealogy. But here, on page 84, we have exactly what we’re looking for:
The correct pronunciation of SABINE in England is: SAB’ (short as in ‘cab’) and INE (long as in ‘wine’)…. The accent is placed on the first syllable, as marked.
For nigh onto 40 years now, I’ve been rhyming the name with the word “cabin.” And now comes an honest-to-goodness Sabine to tell me that I’ve been wrong. W.H.W., and thus almost certainly his famous relatives Edward and Joseph, pronounced their surname with a short vowel followed by a long. If we believe (we don’t necessarily have to) in honoring the practice of those who actually bear the name, many of us are going to have to change what we say when a pair of tangram wings flies past on a cold October morning.
W.H.W. Sabine goes on to add a note demonstrating abundantly the depth of his own feelings in the matter:
It is unfortunately necessary to insert here some remarks on the disagreeable practice of pronouncing Sabine as “Sabeen.” So far as this compiler knows, no Sabine in England does this, but it is very frequently done by other people…. If the people concerned would pause to think the matter over for a while, they might perceive that it would be just as reasonable for them to speak of the “feen Alpeen cleember who carried a carbeen on his shoulder and a bottle of ween in his pocket.” … In short, to borrow a phrase from H.W. Fowler, the pronunciation “Sabeen” shows ignorance of English more conspicuously than knowledge of French or Latin.
You know tempers are running hot when somebody trots out Fowler.
