I’m guessing that ninety-nine out of a hundred readers of this ‘blog’ identified this Least Sandpiper at the merest of a glance. And I’m equally sure that not one out of that hundred (yes, someday we just might have fully one hundred people reading this blog) could give this familiar and abundant species’ scientific name without hesitating.
Me, I don’t just hesitate. I have to look it up. Every single time. For thirty-five years now.
It’s not that the name is difficult or vague or nonsensical. Calidris minutilla makes as much sense to us today as it did to Vieillot when he named the species (including it in the catch-all genus Tringa) in 1819.
The name of this bird was given it on account of its small size … it shows some affinity to the Tringa minuta of Leisler, which is found in Europe; I believe, however, that it is a separate species.
Minuta is the Little Stint, and in naming his new species, Vieillot simply gave it an even more diminutive diminutive.
So far so good. But the problem is that there are so many of these small sandpipers — and so few good names to go around.
Brisson started it all in 1763, when he described the Semipalmated Sandpiper from a specimen sent from Hispaniola by André Chervain. When Linnaeus gave the French ornithologist’s “petite alouette-de-mer” its Latin binomial, he, sensibly enough, called it Tringa pusilla, simply adopting and translating Brisson’s adjective “petite.”
By the time Middendorf came along in 1851 with the newly discovered Long-toed Stint, all the good names for the “little” sandpipers were used up.
This little bird of our is so similar to Tringa minuta that I have noticed the differences only now, after a closer examination. In its structure, size, and coloration, it cannot be distinguished at all from Tringa minuta in its summer plumage (cf. Naumann), except for its strikingly long toes and the dark-colored shafts of the flight feathers…. I would have classified this bird as a distinctive variant of Tringa minuta if the typical form of that species did not also occur in the Stanowoj Mountains without the least hint of intergradation with [the new bird].
But what to call it? Middendorf settled on subminuta, a name indicating both the bird’s apparent similarity to the sympatric Little Stint and its tiny size, “less than small.”
The long middle toe of Middendorf’s new stint.
What we have today is a bunch of rather similar little sandpipers with a bunch of incredibly similar names:
Who came up with the crazy idea — Kaufman rightly calls it “mostly imaginary” — of highways in the sky?
It turns out that the concept is significantly older than I had assumed. In 1876, sixty years before Lincoln’s Waterfowl Flyways of North America, the Finnish scientist Johan Axel Palmén published his Zugstrassen der Vögel, in which he described nine flyways — “migratory roads” — purportedly kept to by the birds of Eurasia as they moved each year between the breeding grounds and their winter homes.
The response came in 1881, in E.F. von Homeyer’s Wanderungen der Vögel.Homeyer pulled no punches, accusing his Finnish colleague of everything from harboring fixed ideas to plagiarizing his sources. He concludes that
obviously, Palmén’s conclusions are as false as his putative facts…. indulges in such vague theorizing, entirely without any basis in evidence, that we see no reason to follow him into the field of unmotivated speculation.
migratory birds merely [follow] a definite direction and … the members of a given species pass through Europe on a broad front…. the “flyways” of Palmén were the result of birds being forced together into narrow flight lines in mountain passes or other topographic features.
A hundred thirty-two years later, I think that’s how most birders think about migration — and how we think about migration hotspots. But as Kenn Kaufman points out, the idea of the flyway has enjoyed lasting popularity among non-birders and game managers, almost none of whom, I’d guess, know quite how old it is.
I think of that old joke every time I see a Cooper’s Hawk.
Admittedly, it’s a roundabout process: the Cooper’s Hawk is an accipiter, “accipiter” is a Latin word, and as we all know, that word is derived from the verb accipio, “I seize.” I know, they don’t eat much fruit; but who can resist the thrill of mentally juggling a birdhawk, Shakespeare, and Flip Wilson?
Uh-oh. I just wrote “as we all know.” A very, very bad sign.
The etymology from “accipio” is an ancient one. Here is Isidore of Seville, who died 1,337 years ago last week (my translation, as always):
The accipiter is a bird better armed in its spirit than in its claws, bearing great courage in rather a small body. It has taken its name from accipiendo, that is to say, from taking. And this is a bird very eager to seize other birds, and thus it is called “seizer,” that is to say, raptor.
Gregory the Great, who, incidentally, dedicated his Moralia in Jobto Isidore’s brother Leander, refers to the same notion:
We sometimes say “accipere” for “to take away,” whence we call “accipiters” those birds that seize others.
It’s hard to imagine more authoritative authorities than those, but that doesn’t mean they’re right. A noun formed on the Latin verb should have come out “acceptor,” a word that exists, of course, but apparently not ever in the meaning “a bird that seizes.”
Jacob Theodor Klein, writing in the mid-eighteenth century, tells a different story. The name
is usually derived from the Greek ‘Occypteros, that is to say, having long wings that come to a point.
Klein doesn’t especially like that etymology (he points out that there are lots of birds with long, pointed wings that are not called “accipitres”), but this seems to be the one that has carried the day. Coues, in the Century Dictionary, appears to suggest that the Greek word, attested as early as Homer’s Iliad, was, shall we say, informally altered to appear Latin — exactly the explanation given by the OED.
Neither Coues nor the Oxonians appear to have been aware of what is perhaps the strongest evidence for the Greek, and not Latin, origin of the name.
The gun smokes in the Kyranides, a fourth-century encyclopedia, three books of which make up a zoological treatise. According to Savigny, the Greek encyclopedist in his Book III describes the Sparrowhawk under the title “Ocypteros.” There we have it: the original Greek name applied to precisely the bird that the rest of us call “accipiter.” That fake-Latin name is the result of folk etymology, the assimilation of an incomprehensible term — here a Greek word — to a more comfortable, more familiar, more immediately understandable form — here a made-up “Latin” word that was then furnished with a reassuring, but equally fictitious, etymology.
It worked, for almost fifteen hundred years. Choate and Leahy and, well, everybody, including me, have swallowed the spurious explanation hawk, line, and sinker — until now.
The meeting appears not to have been an altogether happy one, and they parted none too amicably after a warm dispute as to who [had] discovered Falco harrisii.
Audubon had done it again. Eight years before the meeting with Cassin, he had received the skin of a female hawk from Louisiana unlike anything he had seen before. He gave it the English name “Louisiana Hawk,” and in its scientific name commemorated his generous patron, sometime traveling companion, and constant
friend Edward Harris, Esq., a gentleman who, independently of the aid which he has on many occasions afforded me, in prosecuting my examination of our birds, merits this compliment as an enthusiastic Ornithologist.
Harris, the sesquicentennial of whose early death we commemorate this year, was in the room that afternoon in Philadelphia, and it must have been uncomfortable for him when Cassin pointed out that “his” hawk had never been Audubon’s to name: Temminck had already published the species a dozen years earlier, based on an immature specimen from Brazil collected by the great explorer and botanist Auguste de St-Hilaire and donated to the Museum of Natural History in Paris.
Temminck called the bird Falco unicinctus, the “hawk with a single band,” not a bad name and not a bad description. In addition to a very full description of the species’ plumage, he noted, for the first time, that in its structure this raptor falls somehow “in between” what we now know as the buteos and the accipiters:
In its general aspect it rather resembles a buzzard or even a harrier. Its wings, though pointed, are not as long as those of the buzzards; the way in which the flight feathers are arranged is precisely the same as in the European bird hawks, but it creates a profile that is more elongated and pointed. The curved edges of the bill place it nearer our bird-hawks than our buzzards. This species serves to remind us of the numerous subtly intermediate features that link our European raptor groups.
Audubon must have known Temminck’s description and the accompanying plate (Cassin most certainly did). But to give the American Woodsman the benefit of a slight doubt, he probably assumed that a species found “au Brésil” could hardly be expected to occur in the swamps lying “between Bayou Sara and Natchez.”
Audubon’s proclamation of his sp. nov. in the Ornithological Biography is as terse as Temminck’s was detailed.
A label attached to one of its legs authorizes me to say that it was a female; but I have received no information respecting its habits; nor can I at present give you the name of the donor….
The only real “ornithological” information he can provide is an assignment
to the group of what may be called indolent or heavy-flying hawks.
Anyone who has spent any time around Harris’s Hawks will be surprised by Audubon’s terminology here. The birds are often tame, hanging out in desert backyards and perching on urban lampposts, but they are “impressive sprinters as well, accelerating quickly at the first sign of prey.”
It turns out that Audubon’s class of “heavy-flying hawks” is a category nearly congruent with the modern birder’s notion of the “buteo.” In addition to the Harris’s (since 1874 in the genus Parabuteo), Audubon’s group includes the Golden Eagle (in the great eagle genus Aquila), the Red-tailed Hawk, the Harlan’s Hawk, the Broad-winged Hawk, the Red-shouldered Hawk, the Common Buzzard, and the Rough-legged Hawk. This is a “natural” grouping based on wing shape and flight habit: all these birds
can, indeed, soar to a very great height, but this [they] accomplish by a circling or gyratory flight,
precisely the behavior that birders today use to narrow the possibilities when they see a large raptor.
But Audubon also had a moral judgment in mind. He calls the flight of these birds “slovenly,” and all of them, he says, are to be considered
more or less indolent; one might say that they are destitute of the power of distinguishing themselves in any remarkable manner, and none of them shew a propensity to remove any great distance from the place of their birth, unless, indeed, when very hard pressed either by want of food or by very intense cold.
A positivist reader might find here a description ex negativo of Audubon’s own career and accomplishments, which echo in his description a few pages on of the “True Falcons“:
they appear to delight in following the myriads of the feathered tribes from which they have derived their subsistence.
Absent any more information about the Harris’s Hawk‘s lifestyle, Audubon’s use of the word “indolent” to describe this species created a veritable topos in nineteenth-century American ornithology.
Henry Eeles Dresser, in Texas in 1865, described the present species as “heavy” and “sluggish”; that latter adjective would become the species’ signature in Elliott Coues’s great Key, first published in 1872 and running through five editions before 1903. James C. Merrill, working in Texas a dozen years after Dresser, compared the birds’ behavior unfavorably to that of Crested Caracaras, calling them “not so active” as even those leisurely scavengers. Even Charles Bendire, whose extensive ornithologizing in Arizona should have taught him dramatically otherwise, found this species “a lazy sluggish bird, their flight slow, and not graceful.”
Ironically, it was John Cassin himself who in 1858 added another layer to the Audubonian cliché of the “indolent” raptor. In the ornithological volume summarizing the results of the 1853-56 Pacific Railroad surveys, Cassin and Baird moved Temminck’s Falco unicinctus into John Gould’s (“gratingly” and “inelegantly” named) genus Craxirex, which the British ornithologist had erected in 1841 to accommodate a new hawk discovered during the Beagle‘s explorations of the Galapagos.
In fact, Cassin and his co-authors went so far as to suggest that Temminck’s (and Audubon’s) hawk might even be conspecific with Gould’s, which he had described as
a most interesting link in the chain of affinities, by which the true buzzards pass into the great American sub-family of carrion-feeding hawks,
a characterization closely recalling Temminck’s mention of the “nombreuses nuances intermédiaires.” And unlike Temminck and Audubon, Gould was also able to communicate something of the Galapagos hawk’s habits:
These birds will eat all kinds of offal thrown from the houses.
That was all it took. On no other basis, it seems, than Gould’s description of a bird that might or might not be the same as the one found in the US, Baird and Cassin simply transfered the account of the Galapagos bird’s prandial preferences onto the Harris’s Hawk, which, they write, is not only “dull and heavy,” but “subsists for the greater part on dead animals.” Audubons’ picture of indolence was complete, and the notion of the lazy scavenger was entrenched. In the first edition of the Key, Coues said that the Harris’s Hawk “approached” the caracaras in its habits, an observation expanded on explicitly in the final, posthumous edition of the work, where it is described as “a sluggish, carrion-feeding bird” — and where the genus Parabuteo is called “Carrion Buzzards.”
The notion that the Harris’s Hawk was identical to Gould’s Galapagos bird would be definitively rejected by Robert Ridgway in 1874, but the damage was done. Dresser described the birds he encountered in Texas as “heavy” and “sluggish… subsisting, so far as I could see, entirely on carrion… regaling themselves on some offensive carrion.” Charles C. Nutting reported from Costa Rica in 1882 that this “abundant” species
“associates with the Carrion Crow [=Black Vulture], and eats offal.” A.K. Fisher, the patron saint of economic ornithology, reassured the American farmer in 1893 that this species “does very little damage to poultry or beneficial birds,” as its food “consists largely of offal, the smaller reptiles and mammals, and occasionally birds.” (Refreshingly, Fisher also defended the Harris’s Hawk against the usual charge of lethargy, noting that many observers had mistaken its habitual fearlessness for stolidity.) Even Salvin and Godman‘s Biologia centrali-americana, published at the very turn of the twentieth century, still reported that it was “frequently described as sluggish… eating offal.”
The only early dissenting voice seems to have been George Sennett‘s, who in the late 1870s found the crops of the birds he shot in the Rio Grande Valley full of such speedy little prey items as mice, lizards, birds, and ground squirrels, “proving them active hunters, and not the sluggish birds they appeared.” But it was not until the twentieth century that our swashbuckling Harris’s Hawk finally shook off its reputation for indolence. Bent, writing in 1937, acknowledges the traditional view of this species as “sluggish, heavy… slow of flight and not graceful,” but objects rightly that “no very slow or sluggish hawk could catch the lively creatures recorded in its food,” and quotes Allan Brooks on his experience of “this bird in action”:
a flutter of wings as a flock of teal rise in confusion with a dark shape striking right and left among them with all the dash of a goshawk…. the next attack may be on a group of small herons, one of which may be singled out and followed until killed.
Such noble prey is as unlike “offal” as can be, and “indolent” is the last word one would apply to “the dash of a goshawk.” Honest observation was finally, a hundred years later, casting off the weight of Audubonian authority.
From The Crossley ID Guide: Raptors
Nowadays, we think of this species as able to “accelerate like lightning, turn on a dime, and anticipate a rabbit’s movements.” We admire the species’ extremely complex social structures, and few are the hearts that don’t quicken when we’re lucky enough to see a “pack” of these hawks on the hunt.
These and many other appealing aspects of the Harris’s Hawk’s biology and behavior went “essentially unrecognized” until the 1970s. It wasn’t that the birds were rare or elusive, but that we had already been told what they were like: lazy, sluggish, indolent, and dull, with an immoderate fondness for decaying flesh. Audubon, Cassin, and Baird had told us all we thought we needed to know.
To read more about raptors, raptor watching, and books about raptors, visit The Birder’s Library.
In his 1918 Game Birds of California, Joseph Grinnell writes that the American Avocet and the Black-necked Stilt are each “sometimes known as the ‘lawyer bird’ because of its long bill….”
That’s way too funny to be original, but I had no idea how venerable the pun was until I happened across this glancing reference to the joke: the stilt is known under a variety of “popular names,” including Lawyer:
The origin of this last popular name (which is most in use), I have not been able to discover: there appears to be nothing unusual in the length of its bill.
So writes James E. De Kay in 1844, in the Natural History of New-York. Even then, to judge by the way that he merely alludes to it in the negative, the witticism was not new.
How far back can we move this? Surely its origins are oral, anonymous, and irrecoverable, but I’d be surprised to find that De Kay was the first to quote it. Ideas?
