Birdwords – Page 17 – Birding New Jersey

August 31, 2013March 22, 2016

Cranes

Common Cranes

Research, I used to teach my students, is systematic, methodical, orderly. Learn where to look and how to look, and more often than not you’ll find what you’re after.

The spice of the scholarly life, though, is finding what you’re not after. I was startled this morning on leafing through Alfred Bouchard’s 1878 glossary of theatrical language to find this entry, s.v. “Grues”:

Scientists claim that this is a bird of the wading order; others say that it is a mechanical construction intended to raise loads.

We are in quite a muddle, since the characteristics of the bird “crane” are to have half-naked legs, to love travel, and to have the top of the head bare and red; and the machine “crane” is made up of gears, pins, and winches, and can be fixed or mobile, single or double.

Now our grue shares something of both: it is single, and it often has red hair, many machinations, and bare legs — not to mention the rest; it sometimes has a fixed place of business on the street, but it is also mobile and loves to travel. It lives pretty much everywhere and is at home especially in the small theaters of Paris.

Does it belong to the realm of ornithology or of machinery? We’re at a loss.

Whatever could Bouchard be talking about?

August 24, 2013July 4, 2016

A Man and His Phalarope

The first scientific description of the Wilson’s phalarope was written by French ornithologist Louis Jean Pierre Vieillot in 1819. The bird is named after ornithologist Alexander Wilson.

Well, kind of.

The alert reader of the News-Leader‘s news ( a bit of poésie trouvée there, hm?) will have noticed that in fact only the English name of this common sandpiper commemorates the Father of American Ornithology. Its scientific epithet, on the other hand, is tricolor, in clear reference to the lovely red, white, and blue plumage of breeding adults, especially female adults.

How did that happen?

This species has a relatively short history in western ornithology. It was first described not by Vieillot but by the Spanish explorer Félix Azara, who purchased a specimen in Paraguay. Collected in December, Azara’s skin was not in its bright breeding plumage, and so the name he gave it — “le chorlito à tarse comprimé” — signals instead the remarkable shape of the foot, four times, he says, as wide in one dimension as in the other.

“Chorlito with flattened shanks,” of course, is not an acceptable name by the standards of Linnaean taxonomy. It was Vieillot, ten years after the publication of Azara’s Voyages, who first assigned the species a proper binomial.

The genus Steganopus is established on the sole basis of the description that M. de Azara gives of a bird seen in Paraguay, which he considers a quite separate species and only distantly related to his chorlitos (shanks and tringas), distinctive not only in the shape of its bill but also in its tarsi, which are so extremely flattened on the sides….

This species Vieillot names Steganopus tricolor, and tricolor remains its epithet today, whether is assigned, as it has variously been, to the genus Phalaropus or to Vieillot’s Steganopus (“an excellent genus,” writes Coues).

The only problem is that — as so often — Vieillot’s work was little known to English-speaking ornithology. The year after he published his description in the Nouveau dicionnaire, Joseph Sabine (brother of Edward Sabine) announced an

exquisitely beautiful bird, it is believed … never before been described or come under observation. It was received in the collection despatched from Cumberland House, in the spring of the year 1820.

Writing in the Zoological Appendix to Franklin and Richardson‘s Narrative of a Journey to the Shores of the Polar Sea, Sabine named the “new” bird Phalaropus Wilsoni, expressing his hope that

the specific appellation will … be considered a proper compliment to the individual who has so often been quoted in [the Appendix]; in affixing his name to an American bird, it is proposed to record the renown amongst naturalists, which that quarter of the world has acquired by his labours in Ornithology.

Sabine was a great and outspoken fan of his late colleague:

Untaught, and without the aid of scientific books, he has produced a work which, for correctness of description, accuracy of observation, and acuteness of distinction, will compete with every publication of natural history yet extant: nor is it alone on these excellencies that the character of his book stands so high; the beauty of the style, and perspicuity of the narrative, add unrivalled charms to its scientific merits.

Though Sabine’s scientific name is invalid, of course, there is no such thing as “priority” in English names, and it has been Wilson’s Phalarope in the vernacular ever since.

But there is a great irony at work here.

American Ornithology 9, pl. 73 — *American Ornithology* 9, pl. 73

After Wilson’s untimely death 200 years ago yesterday, his friend, patron, and literary executor George Ord saw Volume 8 of the American Ornithology through the press, then undertook to assemble and publish Volume 9, relying on the drawings, paintings, notes, and texts Wilson had left behind. That volume appeared in 1814, and among the birds it treated was one identified by Ord as the Gray Phalarope, Phalaropus lobata. Ord writes:

Of this species only one specimen was ever seen by Mr. Wilson, and that was preserved in Trowbridge’s Museum, at Albany, in the state of Newyork. In referring to Mr. Wilson’s journal I found an account of the bird, there called a Tringa, written with a lead pencil, but so scrawled and obscured that parts of the writing were not legible…. From the drawing, which is imperfectly colored, and the description which I have been enabled to decipher, I have concluded that this species is the Gray Phalarope of Turton.

The only problem is that the bird in Wilson’s drawing, and in the plate, above, engraved from it, is not a Gray Phalarope (we call it the Red Phalarope in the Americas) at all — but a fine female Wilson’s Phalarope in bright breeding feather. Wilson’s description, as given by Ord, is also clearly that of the unrecognized tricolor:

The bill of this species is black, slender, straight, and one inch and three quarters in length; lores, front, crown, hind head and thence to the back very pale ash, nearly white; from the anterior angle of the eye a curving stripe of black descends along the neck for an inch or more; thence to the shoulders dark reddish brown, which also tinges the white on the side of the neck next to it; under parts white….

We can’t blame Ord — “I have not had an opportunity of seeing the bird,” he reminds the reader — but Alexander Wilson had in fact discovered, described, and painted the very bird that would be named for him by Sabine seven years after his death in 1813. Charles Lucian Bonaparte put it neatly 25 years later: Wilson,

had he lived to publish the species himself, would doubtless have fixed it on the same firm basis as in other instances of the kind.

But if Wilson had described the bird, he would certainly not have named it for himself. Things sometimes work out in spite of themselves.

August 2, 2013June 23, 2018

The Fifty-fourth Supplement to the AOU Check-list

Is anybody disappointed?

The AOU Committee on Classification and Nomenclature has declined to recognize the big maxima Canada Geese of the prairies and the corporate parks as a separate species, and it has declined to recognize Hanson’s proposed Branta lawrensis as a separate species, and it has declined to recognize the dark little minima Cackling Geese as a separate species, and it has declined to recognize the ring-necked little leucopareia Cackling Geese as a separate species.

From the birder’s perspective, I’m betting that most of you, just like me, are relieved.

There wasn’t ever really any chance: In placing those still startling proposals before the Committee pro forma, Richard C. Banks quite sensibly “urge[d] a vote of NO.” So now we can all breathe a big sigh of relief and get back to studying up on Taverner’s Cackling Goose and Lesser Canada Goose in anticipation of the winter to come.

Before we do that, though, there is a lot of exciting news in the Committee’s Fifty-fourth Supplement, which has just appeared in the latest issue of the Auk. It’s not the easiest reading, but take a little time and work your way through it; if you’re a lister, your numbers may jump, and if, like the rest of us, you’re just interested in the way that our understanding of birds and their relationships evolves, you’ll find lots of fascinating details to ponder.

The most eye-catching changes, of course, are the additions to the United States and Canada list — no less than seven of ’em this time around.

Two parrots have been added to the AOU list by introduction, the lovely little Rosy-faced Lovebird and the Nanday Parakeet. Largely following the ABA Checklist, the Committee considers the lovebirds of Phoenix established, as anyone who has ever visited Gilbert Water Ranch will agree; the parakeet is listed thanks to established populations in Florida, but the Committee finds the birds in California — which I think is the only place I’ve seen the species — not yet established. The lines are lighting up over at the ABA facebook page, I’m sure.

A startling Double-toothed Kite photographed in Texas in spring 2011 extends that lovely little raptor’s range into the US.

The Providence Petrel, once known as Solander’s Petrel, has been added on the strength of birds photographed off the Aleutians two falls ago; the new species account also notes possible individuals recorded from Washington and British Columbia in Septembers past.

Fea’s Petrel, a difficult gadfly from the Cape Verdes, has long been a hoped-for, even nearly expected, sight on North Carolina pelagic trips; it now takes its place on the list as a visitant from Nova Scotia to Florida, with a hurricane-borne bird having made it to the Virginia mainland. The smart money is on a further split from this species to come, the Desertas Petrel.

Two of this year’s newcomers come newly from Alaska: a Common Moorhen from Shemya in fall of 2010 (not, please, to be confused with the bird we once again are calling the Common Gallinule), and an equally amazing Asian Rosy-Finch from Adak. As the Committee did not lump the others as proposed, North America now has four species of Leucosticte on its list.

One of the most anxiously anticipated splits was that of the old Sage Sparrows. With the publication of the Supplement, we now, once again, have two species, the Sagebrush Sparrow Artemisiospiza nevadensis and the Bell’s Sparrow A. belli. The Committee notes that canescens, the subspecies of Bell’s Sparrow visually most similar to the Sagebrush Sparrow, may represent a third species; this is the population that moves in winter into western Arizona, where sage sparrow identification just got a lot more interesting.

Not a species-level split, but probably more significant in what it tells us about the higher-level relationships of North American birds, results in the elevation to generic status of Coues’s Psiloscops (named for the bird’s naked toes) for the Flammulated Owl; that tiny baritone ghost of the pines had most recently shared the genus Otus with the scops owls.

The other splits announced here will be a bit more abstract to most of us North American birders. “Our” Little Shearwater, accidental off New England and the Maritimes, is now recognized as a separate species, the Barolo Shearwater. The House Wren of much of continental America no longer includes Troglodytes cobbi, which means that those lucky enough to have birded the Falkland Islands get a new bird.

In the American tropics, the Zeledon’s Antbird is split from the Immaculate Antbird, and the genus Schiffornis gets more species-rich with the splits of the Northern Schiffornis and the Russet-winged Schiffornis from South America’s Brown-winged Schiffornis. The Rufous-rumped Antwren, until now in the genus Terenura, is given a new genus Euchrepomis.

And as if the manakins weren’t hard enough to keep track of already, the venerable genus Pipra is determined to consist of “multiple independent lineages,” resulting in a split into Dixiphia (White-crowned Manakin) and Ceratopipra (Golden-headed and Red-capped Manakins). The linear sequence of the Check-list’s eleven manakin species is also updated.

Naturally, there are also lumps. Here in the north, the Surfbird, the Spoon-billed Sandpiper, the Broad-billed Sandpiper, the Buff-breasted Sandpiper, and the Ruff all lose the distinction of their monotypic genera and join the other brown sandpipers in the genus Calidris; the sequence of species in that newly enlarged genus is also changed, as are the relative positions of the families in the entire order Charadriiformes. I’ll miss some of those old sandpiper names, but not as much, I suspect, as will the editorial staff of a certain German periodical.

Farther south, the Green-crowned Woodnymph fannyi, etc., is now treated as a subspecies group of the Crowned Woodnymph. The Green Manakin, formerly known as Chloropipo, is now merged into the genus Xenopipo.

The largest of the wholesale lumps is the dissolution of the subfamily Drepanidinae; the Hawaiian honeycreepers now occupy a position in the subfamily Carduelinae immediately after the Eurasian Bullfinch and before the “purple” finches — and those last, by the way, are now placed in the sequence House, Purple, and Cassin’s Finch. It can be confusing when you’re a bird towards the end of the Check-list.

Most of the remaining changes effected in this Supplement are housekeeping matters of nomenclatural propriety and orthography. Priority forces the alteration of the species name of the Common Bush-Tanager to flavopectus. The former genus of the Bare-legged Owl is replaced for similar reasons by the clunky Margarobyas; the subgenus of the American Woodcock is changed back to Nuttall’s Microptera.

Fans of the silky-flycatchers will have to relearn the spelling of that family’s scientific name; “corrected” once to Ptilogonatidae, it has now been corrected back to Ptiliogonatidae, adding yet another small challenge for those us who can’t spell “Phainopepla” anyway.

The bibliographic side of the Check-list may seem tedious to some readers, but it’s nice to see some historical justice done to scientists whose contributions have been underappreciated over the years. Emmanuel Le Maout gets full credit now for the Black Vulture‘s genus name Coragyps, and the name of Stephen Harriman Long, military commander of the Rocky Mountain Expedition of 1819-1820, is replaced in the citations for nine species by that of Edwin James, who actually edited the Account of the Expedition in which Thomas Say described those birds, ranging from the Dusky Grouse to the Orange-crowned Warbler.

It’s a lot for the non-scientific reader like me to take in, as it is every year at this time, and each succeeding Supplement increases my admiration for the members of the Committee, whose learning and labor give the rest of us so much to think about and so much to learn. I hope that if you’ve never delved into the Supplement before, my quick précis encourages you to read this Fifty-fourth, and that even if you’re an old hand and eye at such things, you’ll find it useful in identifying those sections you want to examine first.

July 28, 2013May 23, 2020

Ladies First? Nope.

On this date in 1872, Charles Bendire took the first skin of the long-tailed desert bird that has been known ever since as the Bendire thrasher.

Bendire sent the bird — a female, preserved by “mummification with carbolic acid” — to Elliott Coues, who, “not having then specially studied these birds,” submitted it to Robert Ridgway, who pronounced the specimen a Palmer curve-billed thrasher. Bendire

replied at once that the bird was an entirely distinct species, laying a very different egg [before shooting the adult, Bendire had collected at least six egg sets of the species in June 1872], and having somewhat dissimilar habits; and he finally settled the case by sending [Coues] a male skin, precisely like the original female specimen, together with several of both sexes of … Palmeri, all alike different from the new bird.

Coues doesn’t quite say “I told you so,” but poor Ridgway doesn’t come out looking any too good in this story. The Smithsonian ornithologist’s misidentification, Coues writes,

puzzled me … but presuming, of course, that he knew his own species better than I did, I felt obliged to rest on what he told me, though I was dissatisfied, and in … the Key, with the specimen before me, refrained from alluding to this (supposed) female of … Palmeri….

Ridgway having missed his chance, it was left to Coues to name the new species, a task he, no doubt gleefully, performed in the pages of The American Naturalist in June 1873, calling it Harporhynchus Bendirei, the Bendire’s Mocking-Thrush.

The skins Bendire sent Coues are now in the US National Museum’s collection, where they lie on their backs with red labels identifying them as the co-types of their species.

Coues treated the two specimens slightly, and tellingly, differently. His formal description is based entirely on the male skin, with just a note at the end that the female is “not distinguishable from the male.” And in incorporating the skins into his private collection, he catalogued the male first, before the female, which had been shot more than three months earlier. It’s an old story and often told, ornithology’s consistent treatment of the male bird as the unmarked category, but rarely do we come across such a glaring example as this one.

Male? Female? Yes.

July 18, 2013October 30, 2023

Huns and Their Beards, Huns and Their Birds

René Primevère Lesson, it seems, was given to bestowing the names of barbarian chieftains on his birds. In 1831, for example, he renamed Gmelin’s Muscicapa spadiceus—first described by Latham as the Yellow-rumped Fly-catcher—Atilla, identified rather sensationally by Jobling as the “ruler of the Hunnish tribes that ravaged Europe in the fifth century, who reve[l]ed in the appelation ‘Scourge of God’.”

Attila monument in Hungary’s Bükk Hills

As usual, Lesson doesn’t fill us in on his inspiration for this odd name, but if we are to trust the all-knowers of the all-knowing internet, it was simply an allusion to this big tyrannid’s aggressive nature.

There’s more to the joke, I think. Long discredited scientifically, one of the great naturalist’s lesser-known works, the Histoire naturelle de l’homme, may still offer a clue to this puzzle. In his discussion of the historical Huns and their putative descendants, the Magyars, Lesson quotes the fifth-century diplomat Priscus, who had served in a Roman delegation to the Hunnish court and who knew Attila personally:

Attila was short, with a broad chest, small eyes, a sparse beard, a flat nose, and a dark complexion.

In his authoritative description of the new avian genus, Lesson remarks on the bird’s bill, “broadened at the base,” its “bristly mouth,” and its “dusky olive-green” plumage. Is it just possible that he imagined a physical resemblance between the Hunnish king and his feathered namesake?

There is another hint in the name Charles Lucien Bonaparte assigned in 1857 to a genus of west African bulbuls. First described by Swainson thirty years before, the type specimen had been acquired from Sierra Leone by William Bullock, whose entire collection Swainson purchased and slowly worked through.

Swainson was excited by Bullock’s bulbul:

The very remarkable bird we are about to describe is, to the ornithologist, one of the most interesting contained in this volume…. To Dasycephala it is related by its lengthened, straight, and abruptly hooked bill; by a few incurved setaceous feathers and hairs over the nostrils, by the length of the tarsus and of the middle toe; and, by the great inequality between the lateral toes.

Of those characters, Swainson was most impressed by the “feathers and hairs” at the nares, and he gave his skin the English name African Bristle-bill, known today as the Red-tailed Bristlebill.

When Bonaparte came along, he rejected Swainson’s assignment of the species to Dasycephalus, deciding that it was sufficiently distinct to merit its own genus. He named it Bleda,

ainsi nommé du frère d’Attila,

“so called after the brother [and co-regent] of Attila.”

Maybe Lesson wasn’t joking, but Bonaparte most surely was.