Category: Birdwords

A century and a half ago today, on July 2, 1864, Elliott Coues was on his way to Fort Whipple, Arizona. “On the summit of Whipple’s Pass of the Rocky Mountains, not far from the old site of Fort Wingate,” New Mexico, he “secured the first specimen” of what would turn out to be a new wood warbler.

Coues found his pretty novum to be

a bird of particular and not unpardonable interest, being the only species of this beautiful genus that it has fallen to my lot to discover….

And he named it Grace’s warbler, after

one for whom my affection and respect keep pace with my appreciation of true loveliness of character.

Grace Darling Coues, five years younger almost to the day than her brother, would appear to have been one of the very few figures in the strong-minded ornithologist’s life with whom he never fell out.

The almost effusively fond words quoted above from Coues’s Colorado Valley would be followed in 1882 by the more subtle but still telling note in the second edition of his Check List, explaining the dedication of his Dendroeca graciae to

Mrs. Charles A. Page, née Grace Darling Coues, the author’s sister. Would more strictly be written gratiae (Lat. gratia, grace, favor, thanks).

Among those gracious favors for which Coues was thankful was the opportunity to move in with his sister in 1881, as Coues’s second marriage was dissolving.

Three years later, in November 1884, Grace Coues Page herself would remarry, this time to the Boston publisher Dana Estes; Coues’s most recent biographer quotes a letter to Baird in which he rather crassly alludes to the new relationship,

telling Baird that he had “not the slightest difficulty in getting published anything I write now.”

One suspects that that would have been true even without a helpful brother-in-law, but in fact, Estes and Lauriat — with whom Coues had already worked — went on to publish a number of his books in the 1880s and ’90s, both ornithologic and theosophic.

One thing often left unmentioned when this warbler’s story is told is that Coues was very nearly not the first ornithologist to collect specimens of the species. Dendroica graciae was given its formal name in Baird’s 1865 Review, and Coues followed up the next year with his own more extensive account in the Proceedings of the Philadelphia Academy. Just as that article was about to hit the press, Coues discovered

several examples of this species in a collection made by Mr. C[ristopher] Wood, at Belize, Honduras, where it is said to be quite common…. It is somewhat remarkable that the species has never been detected in the regions lying between these two countries [namely, Arizona and Honduras].

Fortunately for Grace Coues, Wood and Berendt had not bothered to describe those birds as new. Robert Ridgway would perform the task in 1873, naming that Central American population decora, the beautiful Grace’s warbler.

I can only assume that her brother approved.

Well, if it isn’t, it should be.

On June 22, 1805, Meriwether Lewis wrote in his journal that

 there is a kind of larke here that much resembles the bird called the oldfield lark with a yellow brest and a black spot on the croop.

Lewis and the expedition’s crew knew the eastern meadowlark, “the oldfield lark,” and he observed that these western birds uttered a “note [that] differs considerably” from that familiar bird from back home. But

in size, action, and colours there is no perceptable difference; or at least none that strikes my eye.

And that was that. Lewis and Clark had in fact discovered a new species, the western meadowlark, but apparently thinking it just a variant of the well-known eastern bird, they preserved no specimens and prepared no formal description.

What happened next is well known. In May 1843, John G. Bell, the taxidermist on Audubon’s Missouri River journey, became aware of some

curious notes, without which [the meadowlarks above Fort Croghan, Dakota] in all probability … would have been mistaken for our common species.

On collecting a series of these “quite abundant” birds and comparing them to New York skins of the eastern meadowlark, Audubon — in contrast to Lewis, four decades earlier — determined that

the differences are quite sufficient to warrant me to describe the [western birds] as a new and hitherto undescribed species,

which he named the Missouri meadow-lark, Sturnella neglecta.

That epithet, neglecta, is sometimes taken as another in Audubon’s collection of snide sideswipes at his colleagues and predecessors, but in this case, it is simply a statement of fact. And Audubon frankly includes himself among those naturalists who had overlooked the difference.

When I first saw them, they were among a number of Yellow-headed Troupials [yellow-headed blackbirds], and their notes so much resembled the cries of these birds, that I took them for the notes of the Troupial, and paid no farther attention to them.

Today is the day to be grateful that he and his colleagues eventually did pay attention.

Wikimedia

Cumbria memorializes a famous native son in a limestone tower, designed to recall a lighthouse but more closely resembling, to some eyes at least, a pepper grinder.

I’d like to believe that Sir John Barrow, who was born near Ulverston 250 years ago today, would appreciate more the feathered monuments to his long and richly varied life.

As most Northern Hemisphere birders know, Barrow is the English-language eponym of one of the handsomest of the mergine ducks. Richardson named the bird Anas Barrovii in the Fauna boreali-americana

as a tribute to Mr. Barrow’s varied talents, and his unwearied exertions for the promotion of science.

A high functionary in the British Admiralty, Barrow was a great promoter of Arctic exploration. Though he never saw the American high latitudes himself, his contributions are commemorated in a couple of famous place names, and thus, indirectly, in another bird of Alaska’s Arctic, the glaucous gull named barrovianus by Robert Ridgway in 1886.

Barrow’s career took him to China and South Africa, destinations every bit as exotic as the far north. After returning from Africa, Barrow wrote a memoir of his time there,

in which are described the character and the condition of the Dutch colonists of the Cape of Good Hope, and of the several tribes beyond its limits: the natural history of such subjects as occurred in the animal, mineral, and vegetable kingdoms; and the geography of the southern extremity of Africa,

among other topics. Of greatest interest to birders is the account of a kind of bustard,

much the finest bird we had hitherto met with in Southern Africa, and which, though sufficiently common, is not described in the Systema Naturae. It is called here the wilde pauwe, or wild peacock…. The bird in question is a species of otis, and it is nearly as large as the Norfolk bustard…. the spread of the wings seen feet, and the whole length of the bird three feet and an [sic] half.

It’s clear that Barrow was intimately familiar with this bird:

the flesh is exceedingly good, with a high flavor of game.

Sometime before 1823, John Latham discovered two “most beautifully executed drawings” of a hitherto unknown bustard in the collections of John Dent. Latham suspected that the bird depicted might be “the Wild Pauw, or Wild Peacock, of Barrow’s Travels.” He named it the blue-necked bustard, an English name taken over by John Edward Gray in the species accounts he prepared for Whittaker’s Animal Kingdom in 1829.

Gray, too, was uncertain whether Barrow’s description was of the bird seen in Dent’s drawings. Whether it was the same species or not, Gray named it after its (possible) discoverer, Otis Barrowii.

Barrow’s Korhaan (not “knorhaan” — that sounds like a soup mix) is now generally considered a subspecies of the white-bellied bustard. The trinomial, though — Eupodotis senegalensis barrowii — still recalls the life and the interests of a man who earned the respect of the natural historians and explorers of his day, and merits a mention even in ours, if not all the time, at least on his birthday.