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Other People’s Bird Books: Samuel Rhoads

Of all the great names from the generation of the DVOC‘s founders, that of Samuel N. Rhoads may be heard the least.

Even in this year of the sesquicentennial of his birth, Rhoads remains for most of us a dimly remembered name, encountered once or twice, perhaps, in Witmer Stone’s Old Cape May and then forgotten. A leading light a century ago in North and Central American ornithology, Rhoads now seems to be little more than a subject for local historians and eccentric “bloggers” who really should be working on something else.

Ironically, Rhoads may be better known today in the west than here in his native mid-Atlantic. His collecting tours of Texas and Arizona in the 1890s resulted in a number of records still cited today, and his pioneering trip to Washington and British Columbia was, until recently, commemorated each year by the late-summer “Rhoads Count” conducted by the Kootenay Naturalists.

In addition to his attainments as a naturalist, Rhoads was a devoted historian of his field. Writes William Evans Bacon in the Cassinia obituary illustrated by the photograph above

Except for his labors, numerous records of great interest, particularly those pertaining to pioneer days, would have been irretrievably lost …. Rhoads amassed his information by extensive search through the literature, by the examination of museum specimens, … and by personal interviews with naturalists, trappers, trappers, old pioneers, and frontiersmen.

That historical interest was accompanied, inevitably, by the usual bibliophily, and in the first two decades of the last century, Rhoads owned a small Philadelphia bookshop and publishing house, its most notable productions facsimiles and reprints of such regionally important titles as the botanist William Young’s Catalogue and Ord’s American Zoology. In 1903, Rhoads printed his own most important work, The Mammals of Pennsylvania and New Jersey.

Given these predilections and pre-occupations, it’s no surprise to find that Rhoads’s own library was carefully assembled and, more remarkably, apparently curated with an eye to posterity. I don’t know where the collection ended up after his death, but one of the most interesting volumes, his copy of Witmer Stone’s Birds of Eastern Pennsylvania and New Jersey, is now in Firestone Library.

Rhoads was a member of the DVOC committee charged with overseeing the production of this work, and, as he wrote on the second flyleaf in September 1924, he saw his copy as a repository of documents bearing on the history of the Club and its most ambitious publication to date:

Samuel N. Rhoads: / His private copy, / with insertions appropriate / to the history and make-up / of the book. / Bound up Sept. 1924.

Among the documents inserted into Rhoads’s scrapbook are appeals for phenological information about the birds of the region, directed to the general public

and, no doubt more profitably, to “gunners and sportsmen” who might be able to furnish unusual records.

There are also more personal bits of history, including Rhoads’s collecting permit — “license to kill or take said song or wild birds and game mammals” —

and a delightful letter in pale purple ink from his step-cousin George Morris, full of news of egg collecting and boating mishaps:

The general history of the DVOC is represented by a fine photo of this January 1898 meeting — taken exactly 85 years before the first women were admitted to membership:

Rhoads is number 23, his cousin Morris number 24; Stone, number 28, is seated at the table with the open book. In his handwritten key, Rhoads tells us that this self-same photo was used as “proof” for his 1902 Bird-Lore article and afterwards returned to him by Frank Chapman.

There are postcards and field lists, too, but the most wondrous of the ephemera preserved here is an invitation to a party for Witmer Stone on the occasion of his having “committed Matrimony”:

Two years after Rhoads had his little archive bound, there was an explosion and fire in his Haddonfield house. The books, obviously, survived, but Rhoads’s spirit did not: “conflicting currents of emotion” overwhelmed him, in Evans’s discreet phrase, and he spent the last quarter century of his life in seclusion, sometimes in confinement, until he died, sixty years ago today, leaving us this unique record of the early days of a venerable institution.

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Birds That Glow in the Dark

Did you know — I did not — that the American Bittern glows in the dark?

At least that’s what we’re told by “several gentlemen of undoubted veracity, and especially by Mr. Franklin Peale, the proprietor of the Philadelphia Museum”:

I was much interested with an account I heard the other day of a bird, a species of heron. I believe it is called by Wilson, in his Ornithology, the Great American Bittern; but, what is very extraordinary, he omits to mention a most interesting and remarkable circumstance attending it, which is, that it has the power of emitting a light from its breast, equal to the light of a common torch, which illuminates the water, so as to enable it to discover its prey. As this circumstance is not mentioned by any of the naturalists that I have ever read, I had a difficulty in believing the fact, and took some trouble to ascertain the truth, which has been confirmed to me by several gentlemen….

This account, received by Mrs. C. Hackney from a Philadelphia correspondent in 1828, was deemed sufficiently noteworthy to be published in the Magazine of Natural History, and drew comment the following March from R.A. Bridgewater, who suggested that the light was generated “possibly by some electrical operation.” Lesson, on the other hand, wondered whether it might be produced “de son estomac.”

Not sure why, if that’s true, my photo of the bird above, from Reifel Refuge a couple of years ago, should be so dark and blurry.

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Why I Still Say “Re-introduction”

Yesterday morning, as I was writing about the return of the Wild Turkey to New Jersey (and our feeders), I recalled Stacia Novy’s recent rant in Winging It. I smiled when I first read it, but it’s started to rankle, this odd notion that “re-introduction”

literally means “to introduce something again.” The Peregrine Falcon [for example, or the Wild Turkey] was never introduced to North America at any time in history, nor was the species foreign or alien. Therefore, by definition, the species cannot be reintroduced to that region….

Huh?

Stacia relies for her etymological argument — always dangerous — on the mistaken idea that the prefix “re-” means only “again” or “again and again,” citing an actual dictionary — always dangerous — in support of her case.

Every elementary school teacher and every elementary school pupil knows better. The prefix is polysemic, as reading a little farther on in the dictionary would tell us. “Respond” doesn’t mean “to answer again and again”; it means to answer back. “Rescind” doesn’t mean to “take again and again”; it means to take back. “Reverse” doesn’t mean to “turn again and again”; it means to turn back.

And “re-introduce” doesn’t mean “to introduce again”; it means to introduce back, which is precisely what we have done with condors and falcons and turkeys and otters and elk and on and on. We have “led” them “back” “in” to their original range, if we want to be pedantic and etymological (and right) about it.

Stacia’s recommended alternative, “repatriation,” is silly enough that there’s no danger of its ever catching on. But I still find the arch pedantry of her argument (“It’s hard to expect the general public to use proper terminology on such topics when the experts fail to do so”) troubling, and there is a small risk, I suppose, that less confident souls could be led to worry that they’re not using the term “re-introduction” properly — even though all of us members of “the general public” really are.

I’ve taken a firm resolve to use the word “re-introduction,” in its current and correct meaning, at least once a day for the next week. Says the OED:

To return (a species of animal or plant) to a locality where it was formerly native, with the intention of re-establishing it in the wild.

My dictionary’s better than hers.

And what about that hyphen? Well, I once sat next to someone on a plane who was reading a book titled “Reengineering,” and it took me most of the flight to figure out that it wasn’t Dutch.

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Plagues, Birds, and Plague Birds

Have a look at the alerts posted by Dutch Birding, and there among the scattered reports of Red-breasted Geese and Rosy Starlings you’ll find a solid daily mass of Pestvogels.

British Columbia, February 2010

This species — known to English-speaking birders as the Bohemian Waxwing — is having a good winter in western Europe, and so are the Dutch pestvogelspotters, “to the great dismay of local residents,” who find themselves overcome, “terrorized,” by the masses of birders who have descended like a plague onto their neighborhoods:

I’m a big animal lover myself, perhaps even more than that. I understand your interest in the waxwing and that you want to document these numbers with all your gigantic telephoto lenses. But you aren’t entirely seeing the other side. Meanwhile an average of about twenty people are standing here in front of my door from sunrise to sunset. You’re going up and down past all our new cars, with scratches as a result, you’re taking up parking spaces, parking bikes right up against the cars, and so on. All in all you’re creating a big nuisance for the neighbors…. You’ve had a whole week to document the birds and I sincerely hope that both the waxwings and the neighborhood will get some peace now.  [my translation]

And you can imagine how the discussion continues: it’s photographers, not birders; it’s just a few bad apples; it’s a public right of way; your car isn’t all that new, and it isn’t scratched, and it was already scratched when I got there. And on and on in tones familiar from every e-brouhaha to have ever erupted in any birding community.

The situation is even more resonant, though, given the Dutch name of these beautiful birds. “Pestvogel” means “plague bird,” and the association of these winter nomads with the equally unpredictable visitations of pestilence seems to have been historically widespread in western Europe. Suolahti writes of the species’ former German name:

Furthermore, the unexpected occurrence of certain birds in the vicinity of houses or their sudden appearance in a given region inspires uncanny notions. In particular, the occurrence of northern species that travel in great flocks, such as waxwings, bramblings, and redwings, is considered a bad omen, and so they are called “death birds,” “plague birds,” or “war birds.” [my translation]

Suolahti finds the German name “Pestvogel” — plague bird — attested from Austria, Swabia, Switzerland, and Westfalia; he quotes Aitinger‘s 1631 tract on bird catching to the effect that these birds are seen in some areas no oftener than every fourteen years, and that many people are of the “remarkable opinion” that when they do appear, they bring with them “war, pestilence, hunger, and inflation” (watch out, Euro Zone).

The always interesting Philippe Glardon points out that

it was not until the very end of the sixteenth century that Ulisse Aldrovandi first drew the connection between the waxwing’s appearance in unexpected localities and a biological cause for such displacement, even though the concept of certain species’ migrations during the harsher season was already beginning to be perceived, thanks largely to wintertime trips to the southern Mediterranean, on which observers recognized some of the birds present in Europe during the summer. But the mental horizon in which that discovery is rooted means that several different interpretations can still co-exist for one single fact. And for a long time the occurrences of waxwings were related to other exceptional phenomena, among them meteorological or cosmic phenomena, still interpreted as signs or warnings of divine origin. [my translation]

Myself, I would observe that for many of us l’horizon intellectuel hasn’t lifted that much: Who doesn’t shiver when suddenly the feeders are aswarm with a tightly packed, ferociously gobbling flock of Dark-eyed Juncos — or should I say snowbirds?

Many thanks to Kenn for suggesting this topic —

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Other People’s Bird Books: Mise en abîme

Autographs don’t thrill me the way I think they’re supposed to.

This copy of Stiles and Skutch was a gift from our friend Ruth, who on a visit to Costa Rica in February 1994 had the title page signed by the 90-year-old author and — a neat touch — his wife. I cherish the book for that simple association, of course, but even more for the photos Ruth pasted in.

Here Ruth and Skutch examine plate 46. Her handwritten annotations on the facing key indicate that on that day, she and the ornithologist had seen the Shining Honeycreeper, the Green Honeycreeper, and the Speckled Tanager, among many other species.

And here:

Alexander Skutch autographs the very book into which Ruth, just visible, I think, in the background, inserted this photo.

I saw these pictures when Ruth gave me the book, and asked whether she didn’t want to keep them. No, she said, they belong to the book. She was right, and I’m glad.

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