Archive for Famous Birders
History Everywhere You Look
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After two exciting days at a couple of the hottest spots around, I decided to duck the binocular-brandishing crowd today and try someplace new. I didn’t exactly close my eyes and point at the map, but I did settle on a green blotch in the atlas I’d never heard of, and so set off for Nutley’s Memorial Parkway.
It turned out to be exactly what I’d hoped for: a nice strip of trees and bushes along an urban watercourse, and I had it all to myself until the earliest of the dog walkers and the promptest of the morning joggers showed up. And there were birds: half a dozen species of warblers, both eastern orioles, and my first Swainson’s Thrush of the spring. I was impressed to see a pair of Northern Rough-winged Swallows investigating a mossy cavern in the bank of the creek.
Of all the new things I saw, this is the one that brought me up short.
Look at that last name listed among the Trustees. I was birding hallowed ground.
Jon Dunn on the Ivory-billed Woodpecker
Posted by: | CommentsIt’s very sad, but the latest report of the ABA Checklist Committee probably sums it up: there’s no evidence whatsoever that the Ivory-billed Woodpecker survives.
And here’s what the new, sixth edition of the National Geographic Field Guide has to say:
…intense searching subsequently [after the April 2005 announcement] has yet to produce more documentation, [a circumstance] seemingly not possible in an age when most rarities discovered are photographed and those images are posted on the Internet the same day…. sightings that lack provable evidence more likely represent wishful thinking.
The seventh edition will see that fine bird relegated to the appendix shared by Eskimo Curlew, Bachman’s Warbler, and Labrador Duck.
Oh, to have been born 150 years earlier! No, never mind.
Over at the ABA Blog Today
Posted by: | CommentsA brief, informal review of the new NatGeo.
My advice: buy it!
Cooper, Wilson, and Trudeau Walk Onto a Bar…
Posted by: | Comments… a sandbar, that is, on the coast of New Jersey. What could they possibly find to talk about?
What Alexander Wilson, William Cooper, and James Trudeau have in common is that each provides the eponym for a bird first described from a New Jersey specimen.
Wilson gets a plover and a warbler. Cooper gets a hawk. And Trudeau, said by Audubon to have come from Louisiana (the sources make no mention of any banjo on his knee), is memorialized in the English and scientific names of a tern.
Trudeau’s Tern, now also known as Snowy-crowned Tern, presents a unique case in the history of North American ornithology. Audubon, in his description of the species in the Ornithological Biography, says that his “much esteemed and talented friend” had collected the bird he painted from a group of a few birds found at Great Egg Harbor, now in Atlantic County. Thus, the type locality for the species is Great Egg Harbor, New Jersey.
But here’s where it gets strange. The AOU Check-list Committee, after the species had been included for well over a century in the authentic avifauna of North America, removed it in the Seventh Edition to the appendix of “Species reported from the A.O.U. check-list area with insufficient evidence for placement on the main list.” As a result, Sterna trudeaui is cited from a type locality in North America–but not admitted to the North American list, thanks to doubts about the bird’s provenance.
I don’t know that there is a parallel case anywhere in the history of ornithological nomenclature. Can you think of one?
Thanks to Ted and to Jennifer.
