Hooded Merganser and Red-breasted Merganser

The scientific names of the saw-billed ducks lead in all sorts of interesting directions. Take the Hooded Merganser, possibly the loveliest of a very lovely group of birds; its current genus name, Lophodytes, is as pleasant to say as it is meaningful.

“Lophos” is from the Greek word for crest, and “dytes” means “digger, diver.” So our cute little hoodie is a crested diver, a point only reinforced by the specific epithet cucullatus, meaning, well, hooded, or cowled.

There are somewhere between many and gazillions of birds with loph- in their name somewhere, and cucullatus/a/um is nearly as frequent. The “dytes” part is more interesting. Two penguin species–the consummate divers–share the genus Aptenodytes, meaning “wingless diver,” and the name “troglodytes,” familiar even to many non-birders as the genus name of the mouse-like wrens, has also been applied to species and subspecies of nightjars, swifts, waxbills, and cisticolas, each of which typically (and sometimes maddeningly) disappears from the birder’s view by diving into the darkness.

The other bird in the photo above is a drake Red-breasted Merganser, Mergus serrator. “Serrator” is easy enough to figure out: like the English word “serrated,” it has to do with “serra” or “secra,” a toothed saw, in reference to the pointed projections on mergansers’ bills, which help them hold on their slippery prey. Oddly enough, “serrator” is rumored to also be an obsolete English name for the Ivory Gull–I don’t believe it, or even understand it, but such are the things one can run across on the internet.

Mergus, the genus to which all other mergansers but the Smew are assigned (and that’s simply Mergellus, a little teeny tiny Mergus) is a bit more mysterious. The word is obviously related to the Latin  ”mergo,” “I dive,” on the same impulse as “dytes” (and the old genus name for the loons, Urinator).

But it is only recently that the noun “mergus” has been restricted in meaning to the mergansers. In Antiquity, the word referred to a number of ill-defined, perhaps unidentifiable waterbirds; Arnott notes that Pliny used “mergus” to translate Aristotle’s Aithyia, which is used nowadays (in a slightly different spelling) as the genus name for the pochards. To heap confusion onto mix-up, Arnott concludes (quite cogently) that Pliny and a few later Latin writers used “mergus” to denote the Great Cormorant, while in many other cases the name means simply “diving piscivore,” perhaps including Great Black-backed and Yellow-legged Gulls.

The name “merganser” (which doubles as the specific epithet of the Common Merganser or Goosander) is easily analyzed as a combination of Latin “mergus” and “anser,” meaning goose; it apparently first appeared in the neo-Latin of Conrad Gesner’s Historia animalium.

Gesner’s cut is plainly of a Common Merganser, but in its earliest English usage, the word “merganser” was explicitly restricted to the Red-breasted Merganser. Sir Thomas Browne wrote in 1668 that the “gossander… is a large well colored and marked diving fowle most answering [closely corresponding to] the Merganser.” It seems to have taken nearly two centuries for the name to be applied more generally to all the saw-bills–first, apparently, by MacGillivray in his History of British Birds. Charmingly and sensibly and perhaps slyly, MacGillivray suggested that the larger species be called “merganser” and the smaller “merganas,” “diving duck.”

The species names of most of the remaining Mergus mergansers are fairly straightforward. The extinct Auckland Merganser went by the name australis, “southern,” a reference to its range. Miocene miscellus, described from a Virginia specimen, shows a mixture–a miscellany, as it were–of primitive and derived characters, while the European Mergus connectens, a Pleistocene species, “links” other species. The Chinese, or Scaly-sided Merganser is named simply squamatus, “scaly.”

The critically endangered Brazilian Merganser has the most descriptive name of all its relatives. Mergus octosetaceus was named by Vieillot in 1817; the French name he gives it, harle à huit brins, reveals the meaning of the scientific epithet: this species, writes Vieillot, has a crest comprising eight narrow vaneless feathers.

Great name, that one; but eight years later, Vieillot, having discovered that the crest in other specimens was made of more than eight feathers, changed both the vernacular and the scientific name, this time giving it the equally logical but inestimably more colorless name brasilianus.

The change created a confusion that persisted for nearly a century, with various authorities going back and forth over the years between some form (often enough mangled) of octosetaceus and brasilianus/brasiliensis. In 1850, Pucheran proposed a new, or rather an old, epithet, lophotes, which he had discovered on the label prepared by Cuvier and attached to Vieillot’s type specimen in Paris; Pucheran also took the opportunity to propose for the first time the synonymization of Latham’s Mergus fuscus. But Pucheran’s new name was pushing the idea of priority too far, and Vieillot’s (inaccurate!) octosetaceus has prevailed.

Pucheran’s–or Cuvier’s–specific name for this rare bird takes us back to the beginning: “lophotes” means simply “crested,” from the same word that gave us Lophodytes. Next time you’re standing around balancing a drink and a horse doover, try some of this stuff out on the other guests: you may never have to worry about being asked out again.

By the way, who doesn’t love the Biodiversity Heritage Library? It’s impossible not to while away an entire day following even the most whimsical thread.

The high point of a pleasant day on the shore with Alison was, of course, getting to spend a day on the shore with Alison. A close second was finally running into our first Ipswich Sparrows of the winter, two birds in the dunes at Stone Harbor.

Quite apart from its frosty beauty and its worldwide scarcity, the Ipswich Sparrow has a fascinating human history, too. Known to old-time Sable Islanders simply and aptly as “the Gray Bird,” this rare emberizid was formally described to science (as the Large Barren Ground Sparrow) just 140 years ago, on the basis of specimens collected by the famous taxidermist C.J. Maynard in Essex County, Massachusetts, in the winters of 1868 and 1870.

Maynard’s description and name did not appear until 1872. For once, the delay was caused not by the vagaries of publication schedules, but rather by a case of mistaken identity. Confronted with his puzzling novum in the sand-hills of Ipswich, Maynard naturally sought an identification among the known birds of North America. The collector apparently sent his specimen to Baird, who compared it with the type–and only–skin of the sparrow Audubon had named for him in 1843.

Baird, in a rare lapse, pronounced Maynard’s bird “in all essential points” identical, and suggested in a letter that the differences between the Massachusetts specimen and Audubon’s type were due to the fact that Maynard’s bird was in fresher, basic plumage.

Maynard was so delighted with his find–even in the 1860s, recording a new species for heavily birded Massachusetts was a major accomplishment–that he commissioned a woodcut by his frequent collaborator E.L. Weeks to serve as the frontispiece to the 1870 edition of The Naturalist’s Guide. Maynard provides a full description of his Massachusetts specimen and a comparative table of the measurements of that bird and Audubon’s, which was taken in present-day North Dakota.

Not until Maynard visited the Smithsonian himself in spring 1872 with his 1868 specimen and two others collected in 1870 did he recognize that his birds were in fact not Baird’s Sparrows but representatives of an undescribed sparrow taxon (a suspicion apparently communicated to Coues before the publication of the 1872 Key).

While in the 1870 Naturalist’s Guide Maynard had insisted on the clear distinctness of his bird from the Savannah Sparrow, in the 1872 article he considered them “closely allied,” and thus assigned his sp.nov. to the genus Passerculus, giving it the specific epithet princeps. Baird, the eminent second Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, ratified Maynard’s diagnosis in his 1874 History of North American Birds, agreeing that the Massachusetts specimens were after all clearly distinct from Baird’s Sparrow.

In the 1877 revised edition of his Naturalist’s Guide, Maynard shows himself decidedly less than gracious in claiming that he was not to blame for the earlier misidentification of what he now calls the Pallid Sparrow, but had been “misled by others”–meaning, we must assume, Baird–before he had the chance to examine the true Baird’s Sparrow himself.

Weeks’s original woodcut frontispiece was colored for the new edition–Dwight in his 1895 study calls it a “wretched color plate”–and moved proudly to the beginning of the catalogue of New England birds that makes up the second half of Maynard’s Guide.

All this is interesting enough. But there’s a fine twist to this story: it turns out that there is a very real possibility that Maynard’s discovery of the Ipswich Sparrow is pre-dated some sixty years by a bird collected by Alexander Wilson at Great Egg Harbor, New Jersey. Wilson (like Maynard and like Baird) misidentified his specimen, this time as the male of the “typical” Savannah Sparrow, and labeled his painting of the bird as such.

What Wilson illustrates, however, as was pointed out 120 years ago by Norris De Haven, is a lovely pale Ipswich Sparrow avant la lettre–collected just a few miles from where Alison and I enjoyed our sightings yesterday.