Eurasian Wigeon, Bergen Co., NJ, November 21, 2011

For East Coast birders coming of age in the 1920s, Ludlow Griscom was “the patron saint,” “the high priest,” even their “God,” as his acolyte Roger Tory Peterson would write in the six-years-delayed obituary of his great mentor.

Most of us today know Griscom, or know of Griscom, only through the writings of Peterson and later biographers and historians. With each passing year, ever fewer of us have ever read anything that Griscom himself published over the thirty years of his active ornithological career.

The reason is obvious: most of Griscom’s publications were highly technical systematic investigations or distributional studies whose very nature it is to become out of date. His few more popular works, such as the 1923 Birds of the New York City Region, have been replaced over the years by revised editions, while the rest of his oeuvre has essentially passed into oblivion.

And that’s a shame.

The year 2012 is the centenary of Griscom’s matriculation as Cornell’s first graduate student in ornithology. His master’s thesis, submitted in 1915, was a study of waterfowl identification–hardly the sort of grist the academic mills are interested in nowadays, but cutting-edge stuff a hundred years ago.

In 1922, Griscom published a “somewhat revised and greatly enlarged” version of his paper in the pages of the Auk. Reading it today, we have the chance to gauge how far we’ve come in the birderly world–and perhaps how many things we’ve left behind.

Like many others, I’ve often used a visit to the local duck pond to as the  first introduction of beginners to birding. This would have surprised Griscom, who dwells at length on the scarcity and unapproachability of many waterfowl. “By nature shy and wary,” he writes, “and subjected to constant persecution,” the waterfowl “constitute one of the last groups of birds with which the student of birds in life becomes familiar.”

Just how much things have changed is apparent when Griscom calls the Northern Shoveler and the Gadwall “very rare north of Maryland” or the Ring-necked Duck “so rare in the northeastern States as to be considered almost accidental.” All three of those species, of course, are now among the most abundant wintering ducks on the New Jersey shore.

Gadwall and friends, Bergen Co., NJ

Griscom cites only four records of the Common Eider from Long Island–and admits that at this point he has never seen a living Blue Goose. And while he had some experience of the Wood Duck (now the most common breeding duck in much of the Lower 48), he apparently did not recognize that the sexes had radically different calls.

We can account it a conservation success that so many of those species have “recovered.” And we can call it an intellectual advance that so many of the birds Griscom considered “indistinguishable for all practical purposes in life” are now regularly identified even by beginners with nary a pause. Immature Greater White-fronted Geese, female Gadwalls, female Ring-necked Ducks, and female Harlequin Ducks would make very few birders’ lists of difficult identifications nowadays, and female European and American Wigeon, Lesser and Greater Scaup, or King and Common Eiders are generally thought of as merely subtle.

Greater and Lesser Scaup

Thanks in large part to Griscom’s influence, we’ve come a long ways. But for the better part of this century past, North American birding has also been strangely remiss in following up on the revolutionary innovations set forth in Griscom’s thesis.

The study of color, Griscom admits, is the only method beginners are likely to find profitable. But once that stage is passed and the birder is ready to join the ranks of what he calls “experienced ornithologists, sportsmen, and the better class of baymen,” then we should move on to using characteristics of shape and flight habit. Griscom sounds like a disciple of the Cape May School when he reminds us to use color and pattern last, and neatly anticipates the flight images in the big Sibley guide when he urges birders to attend to “the arc described by the wings in a single beat.”

Long-tailed Duck, Arizona.

Read what he has to say about the Long-tailed Duck, a bird many of us like to think of as familiar:

It  is, however, when the birds are on the wing that they are most easily identified.  Close by, the absence of white in  the wing and the striped black and white back of the male are good color characters. The Old Squaw’s body is stocky just as in other members of its subfamily but the neck is long and thin  with  the  head of  the normal type.  This combination gives the bird a unique shape.  The flight is also peculiar but difficult  of  description.  The  wings are  held  more  curved than  in other species and this, at a distance, produces the following effect: the wing tips instead of moving up and down at right angles to the body seem to  be directed backwards towards the tail  during the downstroke.  The wing arc would consequently  be twisted.  Secondly  the wing is brought less above the body during the upstroke and much lower during the downstroke than in any other sea duck.  Thirdly the bird has a trick of keeling over a little to one side–usually that nearest the shore.  This might be explained by saying that a line connecting the two wings at the shoulder joints would not be parallel to  the water’s surface…. A few birds fly in Indian file, but a greater number group themselves  in various ways.  In  the spring after March 15 the birds are nearly all paired and the male almost invariably flies behind the female.  This rule holds good for pairs at other seasons…. As a rule this species flies low over the water but is much given to erratic changes of course,  turning almost as rapidly as a Teal.  The males, especially in the spring, are fond of dashing straight up in  the air  and descending with equal swiftness. The Sea Ducks all alight in the water with a splash, but this species  is particularly awkward, flopping in  most ungracefully, its momentum at times carrying it  for some 25  feet over the  water.  As a  result it  has a habit of flying beyond  its intended alighting place and then turning sharply, thus reducing its  speed.

North American birding would have taken a decidedly more sophisticated tone much, much earlier if Roger Peterson had not had to reduce the master’s wise oracles to this:

They bunch in irregular flocks rather than in long, stringy lines like the Scoters, their dark, pointed wings dipping low with each beat.

But as Griscom himself notes, “passing this knowledge on to others in a way to be readily understood and, therefore, useful” is a far more difficult proposition than simply listing field marks of color and pattern. Only in the last decade or so have we begun to catch up.