Interestingly, the ornithologist who first discovered the species, Alexander Wilson, was born and spent his youth in Paisley….
But our warbler had been known to science for half a century by the time Wilson learned of its existence. In 1789, more than two decades before Wilson put pen to paper about what he mistakenly considered a “new and beautiful little species,” Gmelin knew the bird — and gave it the nicely descriptive name Motacilla tigrina in his edition of Linnaeus’s Systema.
The real eye-opener here is — or should be — all the earlier citations Gmelin is able to adduce. Edwards, Brisson, Buffon, Pennant, and Latham had all described this warbler in the mid- and late eighteenth century, a couple of their accounts even accompanied by paintings.
So much for the notion that Wilson — who died 200 years ago this year — was the “discoverer” of the species.
Indeed, not even Wilson himself, though laboring under the notion that the warbler was unknown when he first saw it, claimed the bird as his own discovery. In his American Ornithology, he puts it as clearly as anyone possibly could:
This new and beautiful little species was discovered in a maple swamp, in Cape May county, not far from the coast, by Mr. George Ord….
Of this beautiful species, which was first described by Wilson, very little is known…. I am indebted for the fine specimens … to my generous friend Edward Harris….
Now there’s an irony. Audubon devoted so much energy to denying Wilson‘s priority in other cases, but here, thanks to his profound disdain for George Ord (or to sloppy reading and even sloppier bibliographic work), he created a myth that is still being retold nearly two hundred years later.
But we all know better. Three cheers for Edwards and the rest!
It’s obvious enough to us now what this once-mysterious bird was — is — but two and a quarter centuries ago, when even the diurnal birds of North America were still imperfectly known, these tiny chocolate owls were a real puzzle to the first European naturalists who stumbled across them in the dim wildnesses of northern North America.
I don’t believe that this extremely small species of owl has ever been depicted or described before. It breeds in North America, especially in Canada. The female is thought to lack the white forehead that distinguishes the male. The White-fronted Owl belongs to that group in the genus which contains the birds called “smooth-headed” or “earless.”
Thomas Davies had commanded the British artillery in Quebec. On his return to England, he contributed to Latham’s studies not just a number of American specimens, but also several of his own extremely skillful watercolors of birds — not, unfortunately, including the owl.
this bird frequently erected two feathers over the eye,
a detail that may have inspired the first doubts about this owl’s status as a distinct species. In 1807, Louis Jean Pierre Vieillot placed the Hibou à front blanc among the “eared” owls, even though
its tufts are composed of only two or three feathers above the eyes and no longer than any of the others.
This bird is distinguished from all other small North American owls by its short tail and the distinct spotting on the remiges. Those characteristics make it impossible to confuse it with the smallest of our northern European owl (the true Strix passerina of Linnaeus), which seems nevertheless, in spite of the significant size difference, to hae happened so often…. Strix passerina (Linn.) is, I am entirely convinced, not found in America, and Latham’s Strix acadica, with which it has so often been combined, is, to judge by Latham’s description and by his illustration, in fact nothing more than the immature plumage of our Strix frontalis.
Latham received his Acadian Owl from General Davies, who had painted the species in Nova Scotia — no doubt with much greater skill than Latham himself, whose own Northern Saw-whet Owl isn’t terribly convincing.
Lichtenstein goes on to correct Wilson and Nuttall, both of whom he says, failed to recognize the distinctness of the Old World’s Pygmy Owl from Latham’s Acadian Owl, resulting in the false application of Linnaeus’s name passerina to the bird of the New World.
Lichtenstein, satisfied that he had solved the mystery with his identification of Latham’s acadica as simply the immature form of albifrons, proceeded to offer an intriguing theory:
Latham received his specimen of the Acadian Owl, as its name suggests, from Nova Scotia, and Nuttall says that it is found south to New Jersey. We are also in possession of several specimens in immature plumage from such eastern regions, but we have received adult birds only from California. Thus, the west seems to be this bird’s actual home, where it breeds, while only young birds fly beyond those boundaries, just as other birds exhibit a similar pattern in Europe.
All quite logical. All quite wrong.
It’s a good measure of how hard it was in the mid-nineteenth century to keep abreast of the ornithological literature — especially that published on another continent — that in 1852, fully fifteen years after Lichtenstein’s would-be solution to the whole problem, Philo Romayne Hoy could describe Shaw’s owl again, half a century after its first publication. Hoy writes
But two specimens of this bird have been taken to my knowledge; the first was captured Oct., 1821, and kept until winter when it made its escape; the second, and the one from which [Hoy’s] description was taken, flew into an open shop, July, 1852…. It is different from any other species yet known to inhabit North America, and appears to have some general resemblance in color to N. Harrisii, Cassin, but not sufficient to render it necessary to state their difference.
Hoy named his “new” species Nyctale Kirtlandii,
as a slight tribute of respect to that zealous Naturalist, Prof. Jared P. Kirtland, of Cleveland, Ohio,
It is given by Professor Lichtenstein … as identical with N. acadica…. This bird is about the size of Nyctale acadica, but is quite distinct, and in fact, bears but little resemblance to that species. We have no doubt that it is the true Strix albifrons, Shaw,
a species, they say, “lost sight of by naturalists for upwards of half a century, and until brought to light by the researches of Dr. Hoy.”
In the years following that so confident assertion, American ornithologists tended to recognize the Kirtland’s Owl as distinct, while Europeans were more likely to follow Lichtenstein in considering the bird the adult of the Northern Saw-whet Owl. Hermann Schlegel, for example, synonymized the two in his 1862 catalogue of the birds of the Leiden museum:
Baird, on the other hand, still maintained the specific status of albifrons in his 1870 edition of Cooper’s California Ornithology:
The very next year, however, Baird wrote to A.E. Verrill — Yale’s first professor of zoology — with his suspicion that albifrons might after all just be the young of the Northern Saw-whet Owl. Verrill wasn’t entirely convinced:
if so, it is singular that the young of the latter has not oftener been observed in localities where it is common, as in many parts of New England. This question is well worthy of thorough investigation.
And that’s just what it got, finally. The spark seems to have been provided by Daniel Giraud Elliot, who in 1872 published an article in the Ibisin which he definitively identified the owl of Shaw and Hoy as “the young of the true N. tengmalmi,” a determination reached on Elliot’s examining five specimens of that bird.
The response was prompt and vigorous. Robert Ridgway immediately took issue with Elliot’s “erroneous” opinion. The so-called American White-fronted Owl, he writes,
is scarcely more than half the size of the N. Tengmalmi, and cannot, by any means, be referred to the latter species.
Instead, Ridgway argues, there is a “direct analogy” to be drawn between the differences in the adult and immature plumages of the Boreal Owl and the differences between the White-fronted and the Northern Saw-whet Owls, such that he was satisfied that the latter two should be considered the “old and young of one species.” The specimens held in the collections of the Smithsonian Institution supported Ridgway’s conclusion: the texture of the plumage of all the specimens of albifrons / kirtlandii revealed them all to be “unmistakably” young birds, while all those of acadica were adults. Most tellingly, two of the specimens identified as albifrons / kirtlandii
have new feathers appearing upon the sides of the breast (beneath the brown patch), as well as upon the face; these new feathers are, in the most minute respects, like common (adult) dress of N. Acadica.
Given how notoriously easy these small owls are to capture and to keep, it should have been easy to resolve the issue years earlier with a simple experiment on live birds. The Canadian historian and naturalist James MacPherson Le Moine kept a live Kirtland’s Owl in the early 1860s, apparently for some time, but in the 1864 English translation of his Ornithologie, the bird is still listed as a species distinct from the Northern Saw-whet, even though Le Moine must have seen his strigid pet molt.
kept a fine specimen of “Nyctale albifrons” until it moulted and became a fine specimen of Nyctale acadica.
That should have settled things. Coues affirmed Ridgway’s identification in the first edition of the Key: “these are the young,” he writes of albifrons, of the Saw-whet Owl. The 1874 History of North AmericanBirds by Baird, Brewer, and Ridgway naturally simply reproduced the results of Ridgway’s investigations from two years before — and relabeled the drawing from Cooper’s Ornithology and placed it pointedly next to an adult Northern Saw-whet Owl.
With the true state of affairs now endorsed in the era’s two most important handbooks, the story of Kirtland’s Owl should have come to an end. And yet there were holdouts.
In 1876, Henry George Vennor acknowledged that most authorities thought the Kirtland’s to be merely the immature plumage of the Northern Saw-whet Owl — two rather frighteningly mounted specimens of which illustrated his volume Our Birds of Prey — but Vennor could “yet to come no satisfactory conclusion” himself about the identity of the “tawny” birds.
If this tawny form is in truth the young of the Acadian or Saw-whet Owl, it is another of those puzzling instances in which, while the mature birds are plentiful, the young and immature are but rarely met with…. the small proportion of tawny to the ordinary found plumage … may be given as but one in a thousand. Are we, then, really to believe that, while we have such numerous occurrences of typical Acadian Owls, or in other words, of undoubtedly mature birds, we have only occasional accidental occurrence of the young and immature form?
Maybe, Vennor hesitantly suggest, the Kirtland’s Owl is instead a melanistic variant, that pops up with great infrequency, entirely independent of age and sex.
The last serious mention of the Kirtland’s Owl I am aware of appeared 95 years ago in Bert Bailey’s Raptorial Birds of Iowa.
Bailey’s account of the Northern Saw-whet Owl notes, correctly, that “immature birds lack the streaks and spots of the adult,” suggesting that he was aware of the chocolate plumage of the young. And yet, in comparing his list with the 1870 catalogue of Iowa’s avifauna prepared by J.A. Allen, Bailey observes that some species of birds of prey listed by Allen
have not appeared [since], nor have they been authenticated by collected specimens. Among these are Richardson’s Owl and Kirtland’s Owl.
Hope springs, I guess, eternal.
Northern Saw-whet Owl. Or perhaps, just perhaps, an adult Kirtland’s Owl.
I’ve always thought it nicely appropriate that we should celebrate Edward Sabine‘s birthday just at the time of year when his most beautiful namesake is exciting so many birders on its southbound passage.
Sabine would be 225 years old today. In 1818, at the age of 30, he was recruited to serve as the astronomer on the Ross Expedition in search of the Northwest Passage. A scientist of wide-ranging interests — he would later be elected President of the Royal Society — Sabine made a point during his time in the Arctic of collecting birds, among them specimens of an unknown small gull. The circumstances were described by his brother, Joseph Sabine:
They were met with by [Edward Sabine] and killed on the 25th of July last on a group of three low rocky islands, each about a mile across, on the west coast of Greenland….
Joseph Sabine, “in conformity,” as he said, “with the custom of affixing the name of the original discoverer to a new species,” named the new gull Larus Sabini.
It was an understandable gesture, but the name has exposed the Sabine brothers over the years to occasional sniping by those who believe that Edward Sabine had named it for himself. He didn’t, and I leave it up to you to decide whether you think Joseph Sabine was looking for a bit of vicarious immortality in his choice of names.
Among the many other honors accruing to him over a very long lifetime, Edward Sabine would later be also commemorated in the name of those very islands off western Greenland where he shot the first gulls. As a result, the Sabine’s Gull is one of the most onomastically overdetermined birds around:
The answer, as often as not, is a rail. And here in northeastern North America, it’s often the Sora, that pudgy yellow-billed denizen of muddy cattail marshes.
Even with so many of its breeding sites gone — especially in the southern portion of the species’ range — this remains a fairly common bird. But numbers are nothing like they once were.
It’s mildly old-fashioned now, I think, but “Alice” was all the rage in the nineteenth century, a naming fad inspired in Britain, Germany, and the US by Alice Mary Maud, daughter of a British empress and mother of a Russian one. (I am married to one of her more recent namesakes, born of British and Hessian parents almost a hundred years after the Grand Duchess’s death.)
The popularity of the name coincided with a great boom in descriptive natural history, and today there are dozens, no, hundreds, of plants and animals named for one Alice or another. There’s the Alice sundew, the Alice wood-boring beetle, the Alice cream-spotted frog, and on and on. There are even a few birds.
A quick look at the Handbook of Birds of the World turns up something like twenty species named for an Alice, among them –unsurprisingly — four hummingbirds. One of them is the threatened Purple-backed Sunbeam, Aglaeactis aliciae.
This lusciously beautiful Marañón endemic was first met with by the German collector Oscar Theodor Baron, who in March 1894found several of the birds in Succha, Peru, “above an elevation of 10,000 feet … feeding from parasitic flowers which abound on alder and other trees.” Before returning to Europe himself, Baron divided the large collection he made in Peru into two lots, “containing many novelties” besides this hummingbird, and shipped one set of specimens to Walter Rothschild, the other, jointly, to Frederick DuCane Godman and Osbert Salvin, then some 35 years in to their collaboration on the vast Biologia centrali-americana.
When Salvin published the formal description of Baron’s new hummingbird in early 1896, he named it Aglaeactis aliciae. Alice’s Sunbeam, a pretty name. But he didn’t bother telling us who Alice was
James Jobling’s unbeatable Dictionary, our first and usually last resort in such questions, identifies the mysterious eponym as
So it’s back to the drawing board, which in this particular case is already covered by a messy sketch of a very large haystack and a very slender needle.
Baron, the collector of the first specimens of the sunbeam, remains a little known figure even in lepidoptery, his apparent specialization. It would be almost as nice for us as for him if he was happily married to a lovely Alice, but I can discover no mention of any matrimonial circumstance anywhere in any of the sparse documents available from his life. Arguments ex negativo are the most dangerous kind, but there is further, if equally circumstantial, support for the belief that this well-traveled naturalist was without an help meet to him. See what you think of this.
In 1893, Salvin had described another hummingbird taken by Baron as Metallura baroni, the Violet-throated Metaltail. Had there been a wife in the picture, I suspect that Salvin, gallant Victorian gentleman that he was, would have honored her rather than her husband, if by nothing more then at least naming the bird baronae.
That’s a slim straw to grasp at, but there’s more. Ernst Hartert, Rothschild’s curator at Tring, named two hummingbird species for Baron, a Eutoxeres sicklebill in 1894 and a Phaethornis hermit three years later. Both bear the epithet baroni, a potentially inexcusable slight — and one that would certainly have been avoided by Claudia Hartert, co-author with her husband of the description of Eutoxeres baroni.
The Baron’sSuperciliated Wren, described by Hellmayr,and theBaron’s Spinetail and Yellow-breasted Brush-Finch, both named by Salvin, all commemorate a masculine eponym, too. Either Mrs. Baron did not exist, or she had somehow made herself persona non grata with much of the ornithological establishment of her time.
What about Osbert Salvin? We know that he was married, but we also know that his wife’s name was Caroline Octavia Maitland, and that they had one daughter, Viola. No jesuitical squirming and wriggling required here: our Alice was clearly not a member of Salvin’s immediate family.
But we’re not out of possibilities yet.
Recall that though Salvin was the author of the formal description of Baron’s new sunbeam, the specimens were not his alone. In the Novitates Zoologicae for February 1895, Salvin wrote that
during the past summer Mr. Baron, who is now traveling in Peru, sent to Mr. Godman and myself his first collection of birds made during the first half of the year 1894 in Northern Peru.
Godman and Salvin were the powerhouse natural history team of the second half of the nineteenth century.
these two distinguished men of science were intimately associated in research and the results of their labors form an important part of the treasures of the Natural History Museum. The friendship between them dated from the fifties of the [nineteenth] century, when they were both undergraduates at Cambridge, and lasted until the death in 1898 of Salvin, who was survived twenty-one years by Godman, the latter dying in 1919, in his eighty-sixth year. In 1876 [probably much earlier] the two friends conceived the idea of the monumental work entitled Biologia central-americana, which has been described as without doubt the greatest work of the kind ever planned and carried out by private individuals.
In 1885, Godman and Salvin decided to donate the specimens and library gathered in the course of their work on the Biologia, which they owned in common,to the British Museum; Science reports that the combined collection comprised more than 520,000 — that’s more than half a million — bird skins.
The memorial to the two ornithologists had been paid for by subscription. So great was the respect for their work that more contributions had been received than needed:
Lord Rothschild, in presenting the tablet on behalf of the subscribers, explained that the committee had decided that any subscriptions left over after the memorial had been paid for should be devoted to a collecting fellowship…. Such names, such acts, such memories and such lives should not be forgotten by those who looked at the specimens and collections the museum contained.
The Godman family agreed:
a further sum of £5,000 [was donated] to the Godman Exploration Fund
by his two daughters, Edith and Eva, and by his widow.
I think it more than likely that Salvin named the sunbeam for this Alice, his friend and colleague’s wife, who had borne their first child in summer 1895 (and would have the second at the end of 1896). Anyone with access to the correspondence between Salvin and Godman should be able to prove that supposition with ease. Meanwhile, I think she deserves her hummingbird, Aglaeactis aliciae. Don’t you?