The 53rd Supplement to the AOU Check-list

Nobody I know could fail to be dazzled by the discovery of a new barbet in Peru–or by the painting of the bird, the Sira Barbet Capito fitzpatricki, on the cover of this month’s number of The Auk. At the same time, though, I bet nearly everybody e-leafs right past Seeholzer et al.’s description to get to the birderly meat of the new issue: the 2012 Supplement to the AOU Check-list.

My own thoughts of late are aswarm even more than usual with sparrows, so naturally I went to the emberizids first.

The proposal to split the beautiful pastel Baird’s Junco from the other Yellow-eyed Juncos, was not accepted; neither was the split, first formally proposed three or four years ago, of the Savannah Sparrow into two or three or four species.

The linear sequence of the Spizella sparrows, subject of an oddly half-hearted proposal this time around, also remains unchanged (that proposal summarizes research that purports to show, interestingly, that the closest relative of Worthen’s Sparrow is not the look-alike Field Sparrow but rather Brewer’s Sparrow).

But there are still some sparrow changes. The tropical “cardinals” of the genus Paroaria are kicked out of Emberizidae and moved to the tanager family Thraupidae, a taxon well on its way to becoming the next catch-all.

US birders will sit up and take note at the new and slightly ungainly genus name coined for the Sage Sparrow(s); it–or they—are henceforth members of the (provisionally) monotypic genus Artemisiospiza, while the Black-throated Sparrow now shares Amphispiza with only the Five-striped Sparrow. The only “splits” among the emberizids are the recognition of two new Arremon brush-finches, both formerly considered conspecific with South America’s Stripe-headed Brush-Finch; the North American committee agrees with the decision of its South American counterpart in recognizing as distinct the “new” Costa Rican and Black-headed Brush-Finches (and in retaining the hyphen).

The other species-level splits affect two seabirds and a raptor. Galapagos Shearwater, formally described 125 years ago by Robert Ridgway, is once again recognized as a species separate from Audubon’s Shearwater. A much-bruited change is the split of the old Xantus’s Murrelet into a northern and a southern species, Guadalupe Murrelet and Scripps’s Murrelet; these two have been well illustrated in the field guides for decades now, and birders fortunate enough to be out in places where they’re possible already routinely distinguish the two.

Equally anticipated is the recognition that the former Gray Hawk in fact represents two species, a reasonable view that has been taken at regular intervals over the past two centuries. Unfortunately, and in sad contrast to the sensible naming practice adopted for the “new” murrelets, the Committee muffed it in assigning English names to these two tropical raptors. Priority requires that the scientific name nitidus go with the southern species, the Gray-lined Hawk, but the AOU retained the English name Gray Hawk for the northern birds (now Buteo plagiatus). The historical record for Mexico and the southwest United States is full of mentions of Gray Hawk Buteo nitidus, a name combination that with the publication of this supplement no longer makes sense and is likely to be a source of perennial confusion. Notably, regrettably, the Committee rejected a proposal to assign the northern species the English name “Ashy Hawk,” which would have been a good step towards avoiding at least future confusion.

The Supplement makes another nine changes to English names. Most are simple and straightforward–easy enough to learn to say Indian Peafowl or Island Canary. Trudeau’s mysterious tern is now officially Snowy-crowned Tern, and Solander has lost his petrel, now named Providence Petrel. Like most history-minded birders, I was happy to see that this apparent hostility to the English patronym was not extended to the newly described Puffinus bryani, Bryan’s Shearwater.

Taking a broader view, name changes and splits are perhaps the least interesting of the Supplement’s determinations. If we really want to understand more about the relationships between avian taxa, we need to look at the higher levels of classification; there are some real eye-openers this time around. Birders from the Great Plains west will be especially interested this time of year in the move of the Calliope Hummingbird out of its prettily named genus Stellula and and into Selasphorus; as the proposal noted, this is no surprise to “anyone who knows Calliope Hummingbird.”

A change in the opposite direction takes place among the wrens: Carolina Wren is now all alone in Thryothorus, its former fellows there now spread among three resurrected genera that the linear sequence places closer to the cactus wrens than to Carolina.

Two other venerable and familiar genera have also been revised in ways that will take some getting used to. The nightjar genus Caprimulgus, a name reaching all the way back to the authoritative 1758 edition of Linnaeus, has been divvied up such that it is now entirely unrepresented in North America. “Our” old Caprimulgus species are now members of the genus Antrostomus, erected by Bonaparte in 1838 with reference to the Chuck-will’s widow and the Eastern Whip-poor-will. I’ll miss being able to initiate new birders into the meanings and the (partly contrived) mythology of the old name, but Bonaparte’s coinage isn’t half bad, either: if you’ve ever handled one, you know how like a gaping cavern the mouths of our goatsuckers are.

It’s a red-letter day for most of us when we actually see an Antrostomus nightjar, but the revision of the genus Carpodacus will affect most North American birders every time they look out the window. Cassin’s, Purple, and House Finches are apparently not closely enough related to the classic rosefinches to be considered congeneric with them any longer; Swainson’s 1837 Haemorhous has been revived to accommodate the North American breeders. I have to admit that I don’t know what the Swainsonian name means etymologically; the closest I can come is “blood-red like the sumac,” but corrections and conjectures welcome.

Perhaps the most revealing–and for birders perhaps the most jarring–of all the changes put forth in this Supplement is the move of the falconids and the parrots to a new position between the woodpeckers and the passeriform birds, a change made last year by the South American committee. No longer will the woodpeckers occupy the center of the field guides, and no longer will the falcons and caracaras follow immediately on the similar, but only rather distantly related, hawks and kites. The research cited in justification of this move suggests that the branch now believed to include the falcons, the parrots, and the songbirds may aso be shared by the seriemas, of all things. I’ll certainly be looking at all these birds differently now.

And that’s the fun of the annual Supplement, isn’t it? New names shift our thinking, new classifications jar our settled impressions. A very good thing.

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Divers; Or Why I Don’t Get Invited to More Cocktail Parties

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.

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Hoover’s Warbler

The Yellow-rumped Warbler deluge shows no sign of receding, and Jericho Park is pretty much crawling with chipping, singing, flycatching Audubon’s and Myrtle Warblers again today.

It’s important–well, I think it’s important–to remember that both Audubon’s and Myrtle are polytypic; thus, it’s incorrect to speak of “the Audubon’s subspecies” or “the Myrtle subspecies” of Yellow-rumped Warbler, unless, of course, you’re using the word in the plural. The Myrtle Warblers we see here in Vancouver, the breeding race of northern British Columbia, are Dendroica coronata hooveri, differing in measurements and in some plumage characters from their eastern, nominate-race cousins.

This subspecies was described in 1899 by Richard C. McGregor, an adoptive Californian who would later become famous as the doyen of Philippine ornithology. He named his subsp. nov. after his college friend Theodore J. Hoover, collector of the type specimen and the older brother of Herbert.

In preparing his original description, McGregor also used specimens taken by Henry Ward Carriger, an early California oologist. I don’t know much about Carriger–fill me in if you do–but I was greatly impressed to read that as early as 1898, he had recognized the differences in the call notes of Audubon’s and Myrtle Warblers, a distinction that even today not all birders are aware of.

The Californians were out in front even then.

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Golden Crowns and Black Tresses

Names are really just extreme words. And if the link between “ordinary” words and things is arbitrary, then that between names and the denoted can be downright capricious. Bird names are no exception, as generations of the literal-minded have moaned.

But a few birds enjoy names that are, wonder of wonders, straightforwardly descriptive.

Golden-crowned Sparrow? I’ll buy that. Hard to imagine what else you might call this bird with its, well, golden crown.

Unless, that it is, you happened to be Johann Friedrich Gmelin, who gave the species its scientific name in 1789. Gmelin was working from a not very good painting by John Latham, who labeled the bird “Black-crowned Bunting,” notwithstanding his description and depiction of the “fine yellow” of the crown.

Biodiversity Heritage Library

Gmelin followed Latham’s slightly misleading lead in assigning the species the epithet atricapilla, meaning “black hair.”

That too makes sense from some views, I suppose, though I can’t help wondering why Latham and then Gmelin would have zeroed in on those midnight locks rather than the aureate crown. No accounting for taste!

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The Eagle Goose

Snow Geese are taken pretty much for granted across most of the continent nowadays, but the dark morph of Lesser Snow Goose remains a Midwestern specialty.

It’s only relatively recently that these handsome white-headed birds were recognized as conspecific with their snowy brethren; my first field guide still listed them as a separate species (which betrays not my age so much as the vintage of my first bird book).

The “lump” came in 1973, and with it one of those delightful onomastic mixups that bird taxonomy is so prone too. Priority required that the scientific name of the newly enlarged species be Chen caerulescens. Thus, all Snow Geese, including those populations that do not have a dark morph, now bear the name originally assigned the dusky birds, a name that means, well, “blue goose.”

It would be no more nonsensical, and even more amusing, had we adopted another of the old common names of the dark morph, “Eagle Goose,” which describes the adult’s bright white head. Maybe I’ll propose it to the AOU….

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