Birdwords – Page 18 – Birding New Jersey

July 15, 2013May 23, 2018

The Prairie Bunting of Provence

Who could not love a face like that?

Gone from much of its northern range, the fist-sized Corn Bunting is still hearteningly common on the roadsides of Provence, where its sizzling buzz penetrates van windows and birders’ hearts alike.

This species’ English names are blander than bland. Long known as the Common Bunting (would that that were still the case in England!), the bird now bears a name reflecting its historical fondness for cropland. More than 2,000 years ago, the Roman name miliaria was given a similar explanation:

Miliariae have their name from their food, because they grow fat on millet.

In those days, not all bird lovers were content to wait for the “millet buntings” to plump up by their own efforts. Varro writes that he has seen them fed in captivity, along with thrushes and quails, and that thus fattened for the table, they “go for a good price” in the markets.

Perhaps surprisingly, Jean Crespon, writing in the middle of the nineteenth century in Nîmes, says nothing about eating these birds, probably because, as he notes,

it is difficult to keep them in cages; they break their heads against the bars, and if they survive, it is quite rare to hear them actually sing.

Crespon calls this species the “bruant proyer,” a venerable French name dating to at least the fourteenth century and obviously related to words like pré and prairie (and, ultimately, Latin pratum). Strangely, Buffon derives “proyer” from the bird’s song, and declares himself

surprised that this species was not named “bunting of the fields,” as it rarely leaves the meadows during the warmer time of the year.

Even Buffon dozes, I suppose. The various Provençal names for the species — “térido,” “terlin,” “teri-teri,” “chi-perdris,” “chinchourla” — probably are echoic, though none of them does justice to the hissing sibilance of the real thing, which (I will point out again) you can hear and enjoy this coming April on my Birds and Art tour. Hope to see you then.

July 10, 2013June 2, 2017

Pigeon Eighteen

Ted set a quiz the other day:

What widespread and common bird has the number EIGHTEEN in its name? And for a bonus: Without googling it, WHY is that bird thus named?

The first question isn’t that hard. Though it’s not widespread or common in New Jersey yet, the Eurasian Collared-Dove bears the remarkable species epithet decaocto, “eighteen,” assigned to it in 1838 by the Hungarian botanist and entomologist Imre Frivaldszky.

As James Fisher reminds us, Frivaldszky’s odd choice of name was inspired by a story about the bird and its voice, said to be current in the 1830s in what is now Bulgaria:

A poor girl was in service to a very hard-hearted lady, who gave her only eighteen para a year as salary. The girl implored the gods to make plain to the world how miserably her mistress rewarded her. Zeus thereupon created this dove, which still today cries its recognizable deca-octo to the entire world.

That’s the story I “knew.” I can’t hear those syllables myself, and the chain of transmission — from the collector Carl Hinke, to Frivaldszky, to Johann Friedrich Naumann, to Fisher, to posterity — is uncomfortably attenuated, but I’ll buy it.

There’s more, though. Though this is the story made canonical by its endless (and irresponsibly embellished and unattributed) repetition on the internet, Hinke, in Naumann’s summary of Frivaldszky’s letter to him (see what I mean?), goes on to report another circumstance:

They are shot in the autumn, but by only a few of the Turkish inhabitants; most of the Turks spare them, as do to an even greater extent the Christian inhabitants, who even think them holy birds and never do anything to harm them. Thus I attracted considerable annoyance when I shot these birds at Filibe, not so much from the Turks as from the Christians.

The significance of the dove in Christian iconography is obvious, but is there something else going on here? Maybe.

There is a different story making the e-rounds about how this bird got its scientific name:

The Greeks say that when Jesus Christ was in agony on the cross, a Roman soldier took pity on him and tried to buy a cup of milk to ease his thirst. The old woman selling the milk asked for eighteen coins, but the soldier had only seventeen. There was no way to bargain: she kept repeating eighteen, eighteen, eighteen. Jesus cursed her, changing her into the dove that can say nothing but eighteen, eighteen, eighteen in Greek. When she consents to take seventeen coins, she will be changed back into a human being. But if she ever raises the price to nineteen, that will mean that the end of the world is near.

I haven’t been able to find an authentic source for this “Greek” story, which seems to be out there only in Spanish. If it is not entirely contrived, and Hinke/Naumann/Frivaldszky’s allusion to the bird’s odor of sanctity makes me think it is not, this tale suggests that there is more than one strand of Balkan folk narrative behind the very strange scientific name of what will soon be, if it isn’t already, one of the most familiar birds in your neighborhood.

June 28, 2013September 22, 2015

Blackburnian

Uncommon now and uncommon then, the Red-shouldered Hawk was encountered only “occasionally” by Alexander Wilson on his trips to the Jersey shore; this fierce-looking male seems to have been shot near Egg Harbor and mounted for display in Peale’s Philadelphia museum.

By the time Wilson painted and published this bird, the species had been known to European ornithology for a generation. Gmelin had named it Falco lineatus on the basis of descriptions published in the 1780s by Latham and Pennant; it was Pennant, working with a Long Island specimen from Anna Blackburne‘s collection, who gave it the English name we still use today.

So far as I know, Anna Blackburne never set foot in the New World, but her brother, Ashton Blackburne, was, in Pennant’s words, a skilled and zealous “sportsman” in New York, Connecticut, and here in New Jersey.

Ashton Blackburne, who was also first cousin to the great museum man Ashton Lever, dispatched annual shipments of American curiosities to “his worthy and philosophical sister.” According to McAtee, Blackburne, by way of his sister, provided Pennant with specimen material for no fewer than 101 of the species accounts in the Arctic Zoology; seventeen of those birds, from the Vesper Sparrow to the Labrador Duck, were new to science.

It is one of the mild ironies of ornithological history that the only one of those 101 species to bear the English name “Blackburnian” — a name assigned by both Pennant and Latham, codified by Gmelin as blackburniae, and retained in its latinized form by systematic ornithology for more than a century — well, that species wasn’t really new, and it already had a correctly formed and properly published Linnaean label.

In 1776, the incomparably well named Philipp Ludwig Statius Müller took Buffon’s “figuier orangé,” named for the “belle couleur orangée” of its throat, and restyled it in Latin Motacilla fusca, a dull name that highlights instead the bird’s brownish upperparts. Regardless, we’re stuck with it, and we know the bird today as Setophaga fusca (and yes, my fingers very nearly typed a different genus name, starting with a D).

My modest proposal: Let’s make up for it. I doubt that we’ll readily abandon such nicely established names as Red-shouldered Hawk and Dickcissel, but there is one of Pennant’s nova that may soon be in search of a better English name.

The Willet was described by Pennant from a New York specimen in Mrs. Blackburn’s collection. Now that the birds of the coast and the birds of the prairies are widely considered specifically distinct, why not call our eastern bird the Blackburnian Willet? I like it.

A lot.

June 16, 2013November 8, 2015

The Politician

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In Louisiana, writes John James Audubon, in the early spring, the White-eyed Vireo

forms a nest of dry slender twigs, broken pieces of grasses, and portions of old hornets’ nests, which have so great a resemblance to paper, that the nest appears as if studded with bits of that substance.

It’s a pretty description, but it needs to be read as Audubon’s gentle correction of a passage in Alexander Wilson’s American Ornithology — a passage Wilson intended as humorous. The vireo “builds a very neat little nest,”

constructed of various light materials, bits of rotten wood, fibres of dry stalks of weeds, pieces of paper, commonly newspapers, an article almost always found about its nest, so that some of my friends have given it the name of the Politician.

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Audubon, as so often, just didn’t get the joke.

June 5, 2013April 21, 2020

The Immodest Wassher

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In the eighteenth century, if you wanted to claim universal application for a work of scholarship, there was no better way than to publish in French. Linnaeus knew that, and in the 1756 version of the Systema naturae, he abandoned the vernacular Swedish names of earlier editions in favor of their French equivalents.

The White Wagtail, for example, which had gone under the venerable label “sädesärla,” in reference to its appearance at the time of spring planting, was given a fancy new Gallic name, “la Cavandière.”

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Huh? Say what? Or as the Archiater’s French readers might have put it, Comment ça?

An unexpected source — the Oxford English Dictionary — helps resolve the ancient typo. The OED’s entry for “motacilla” includes a citation to John Withals’s Shorte Dictionary of 1553, where he defines the Latinizing term as a “wagtayle, wassher.”

Aha: Linnaeus’s careless printer simply misspelled “lavandière,” a perfectly normal French word for “washerwoman.” A little sniffing around finds that it was used even into the nineteenth century as a common name for the familiar and confiding, stiff-legged little birds of clear streams and countryside. Its English counterparts, “washtail,” “washerwoman,” “molly washer” and so on, are said by Swann to be widely attested “provincial names.” Lockwood tells us that

the constant up-and-down movement of the tail suggest[ed] the battledore once used to beat the washing.

I had to look up “battledore” myself. In any event, though, Lockwood’s explanation is too oblique: the bird isn’t called a “wash paddle,” it’s called a “washerwoman,” and as usual, a careful reading of earlier sources tells us why.

Aldrovandi's White Wagtail — Aldrovandi’s White Wagtail

Belon’s 1555 Histoire de la nature des oyseaux is much more straightforward, even earthier:

The Lavandière has its French name from the fact that it is very common along streams, where it constantly moves its tail by bobbing its rump, like a washerwoman who is beating the clothes.

Aldrovandi, quoting Belon, puts it even more pointedly:

Belon writes that in France these birds are called Lavandières, because they tarry at the water’s edge near the washerwomen, or because like them they assiduously shake their rear [podicem assidue agitent].

Two and a half centuries later, Buffon affirms that

the birds seem to imitate with the bobbing of their tail the bobbing that the washerwomen do in performing their work.

That immodest repetitive motion of the hips, so necessary to the laundress’s work, struck some observers as sexually provocative, and in the Middle Ages and the Early Modern, there was a tendency to associate washerwomen with a certain laxity of morals. Indeed, the Middle English word “lavender,” borrowed directly from the French “lavandière,” means both “laundress” and “whore,” and “wagtail” itself, as the OED tells us, was commonly used in the seventeenth century to denote “a profligate or inconstant woman… a harlot, courtesan.”

I’ve found nothing to suggest a direct, conscious transfer of such prurience onto our feathered wagtails, but there is one perhaps suggestive circumstance. Early modern ornithologists repeatedly cited the frequency with which wagtails served as foster parents: as Aldrovandi says,

Albertus Magnus writes that the Cuckoo sometimes lays its eggs in the nest of this little bird, and the author known as Ornithologus reports that birdcatchers in his area have seen cuckoo chicks raised by this same bird.

Makes you wonder, doesn’t it?